Geography and history

The natural background

In his commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy, the fourteenth-century humanist, Benvenuto da Imola, describes Italy as ‘a house of many mansions’. Starting from Rome, the arx sive caput, he proceeds to show how each region has been assigned its place in a naturally ordered household. Thus Tuscany is the bedchamber ‘because it is the fairest province’, and Lombardy is the banqueting hall, ‘because Lombards are given to feasting and large appetites’; Romagna is the fruit garden because it is ‘fertile in every part’ and the March of Ancona is the cellarium, ‘because it has the sweetest wines, oil, and figs’; Apulia finally is the stable, ‘because there are found the noblest horses, copious forage and wide, level fields’ and the March of Treviso is the pleasure garden ‘because of its lofty woods’. Composed barely twenty years after the Black Death, the purpose of this pedestrian rhetoric, as of most past writing on Italy, was to praise not to instruct. Instructive it is, nevertheless, that of all things in Italy Benvenuto should have chosen to emphasize the regional diversity; for in the history of Italy, and especially rural Italy, the first and most conspicuous fact is the inexhaustible variety of local development. Even today past and present are found incongruously mixed, while whole centuries divide the North, where the Agricultural Revolution made some of its earliest conquests, from the South and islands, which have yet to be subdued. In Sicily land continues to be tilled with a 'pre-Adamite' Hakenpjlug (aratro chiodo) , in Sardinia ox-carts of Roman name and design are still in common use, and in parts of the mainland archeologists may study 'Vergilian' ploughs and Roman types of oil press still at work. In Central Italy medieval forms of tenancy have been uneasily adapted to the needs of mechanized farming, while in Southern Italy the problem of latifundia has defied solution from the Roman to the Italian Republic.