Walker - 1967 - A geography of Italy

FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
chanted, ‘for as Italy is the garden o f Europe, so is Lombardy the garden of
Italy. . . . It is wholly plaine, and beautified with such an abundance o f goodly
rivers, pleasant meadowes, fruitfull vineyards, fat pastures, delectable gardens,
orchards, woodes, and what not, that the first view thereof did even refollicate
my spirits, and tickle my senses with inward joy.’ The plain o f Piedmont he
describes as ‘wonderfully replenished with come, vineyards, orchards, and a
singular exuberancy o f all manner o f fruits’. Nearly two centuries after, Arthur
Young from a vantage point overlooking the same plain described it as ‘the finest
farmer’s prospect in Europe’. The improvements in the Po Valley during the
Middle Ages had been continued by the men o f the Renaissance to whose
energies and talents the control o f water presented a lively challenge. The
brothers Domenico o f Viterbo developed the double-gate lock and Leonardo
himself was engaged in controlling the waters o f the Ticino and Adda in the
interests o f Milan. Apart from the absence o f maize and large-scale rice-growing,^
the countryside o f Piedmont and Lombardy must have looked much the same as
today with its rows o f elms, mulberries and fruit trees lining the fields. Great
intensity was achieved and double cropping for wheat was practised in some
areas. The manure problem was less difficult in the Lombardy Plain because o f
the large numbers o f cattle which had long ago given Piacenza, Lodi and Parma
a reputation for cheeses. Furthermore as the Scottish traveller Fynes Morison
(1594) noted, ‘neither do they give the ground rest by laying it fallow, as we do,
but each second year they sow part o f it with Beans and Pulse, yielding plentifull
increase, and then burying the stubble to rot in the ground, make it thereby fat
to beare wheate againe’.
Tuscany too aroused the enthusiasm o f the northern traveller. Montaigne
(c. 1580), the motive for whose journey was to visit the famous ItaUan spas,
approached Florence from Urbino. ‘I was bound to admit,’ he writes, ‘that
neither Orleans, nor Tours, nor even Paris, can boast o f environs so richly set
with villages and houses as Florence; which with regard to fine houses and
palaces, comes first without a doubt.’ Around Lucca, whose baths he visited, ‘all
about the cornfields are rows o f trees, each tree being attached to its neighbour
by vines, wherefore these fields have all the appearance o f gardens’. Certainly
Tuscany was forttmate in being ruled for centuries by a dynasty which rose to
power through commerce and which included many agricultural improvers.^
Montaigne notes that the alluvial lands round Pisa had an evil reputation for
‘unhealthy air, but this is vastly improved since Duke Cosimo has drained the
marshes by which it is surroimded’. Seventy years later, about 1625, Sir Robert
Dudley was commissioned by Ferdinand II to drain the marshes between Pisa
and Leghorn. Unfortunately not all the good works in the Arno Basin were
successful. Near Lucca a system designed by a Fleming named Raet ‘to drain and
' This crop seems to have been grown first in the Amo basin in the sixteenth century.
’ John Evelyn (1644) was surprised to find the Duke of Tuscany himself engaging in the
wine trade.
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