Walker - 1967 - A geography of Italy

THE SOUTH
At Lecce itself impure Miocene limestones include the famous honey-coloured
pietra leccese which was used in the extraordinary baroque architecture o f the
town. Unfortunately almost all these sediments are permeable and there are no
streams and very few springs. As elsewhere in ‘rocky’ Apuha the colonizing
energy o f the peasantry has converted a niggardly steppe into expanses o f vines,
ohves and figs, but some o f the limestone ridges are beyond redemption. Since
1900 tobacco, which is suited to the deeper, moister soils, has become important;
it demands much labour and is grown mainly by sharecroppers.
The Quaternary sediments which only partially hide the limestones o f the
Taranto amphitheatre cover a wide area in the west o f Taranto province. Traditionally
this is latifondo zone and large tracts are still used mainly for extensive
cereals, but much o f the immediate hinterland o f Taranto is now devoted to dry
tree crops. Further west the formerly marshy strip behind the coastal dunes has
been closely settled in poderi created under the land reform. The provision o f
irrigation facihties makes possible a wide range o f crops including citrus,
tobacco and early vegetables (artichokes, fennel, caulifiowers, etc.).
The transformation o f Apulian agriculture over the last hundred years in
terms o f the enthusiastic expansion o f a small range o f crops has been marked by
a succession o f booms and slumps which recall the vicissitudes o f the Brazihan
economy. The expansion o f viticulture stimulated by the French phylloxera
epidemic and the French commercial treaty o f 1863 received a rude check when
that treaty was abrogated in 1886. An agreement with Austria-Hungary did
something to retrieve the situation but not enough to prevent widespread bankruptcy
and a mass emigration overseas. A worse disaster befell Apuha with the
arrival of phylloxera in 1899 which obhged still more Apuhans to emigrate and
incidentally stimulated the expansion o f tobacco and almonds as alternatives to
vines. Since the restoration o f the vineyards with the aid o f American stocks the
vinegrowers’ main problem has been overproduction; hence the growing interest
in dessert grapes. The olive, which is notoriously erratic in yield from year to
year and from area to area,^ and demands some fifteen years before giving a
worthwhile return, has made the steadiest progress but it has not been without
its misfortunes; in particular the oUve fly epidemic before and after the First
World War caused havoc and encouraged a switch to almonds and tobacco.
These crises in Apulian agriculture have been all the more serious because the
pecuhar geography o f the area restricts the range o f alternative crops to which the
farmer can turn.
The rise in living standards which might have been expected to follow from the
conversion o f agriculture from a cereal-pastoral economy to one based on specialized
arboriculture has been frustrated by a relentless rise in population.
Between 1861 and 1961 the birth rate fell from 43-8%q to 23'9%o but the death
rate dropped from 30-5%o to 8-4%o so that, despite massive emigration, the
population rose from 1,352,000 to 3,309,000 over the century. T he other main
^In the Taranto area the yield is six times the Apuhan average.
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