A popular recollection of Naples today is of its restaurants on the seafront and its people merrily eating frutti di mare. Yet Italians have never been great fish-eaters, especially in the north, where they have usually preferred freshwater fish to the saltwater varieties. In classical times Roman plutocrats enjoyed the luxury of personal fishponds, while in the Middle Ages the people of Ferrara disdained the nearby Adriatic in favour of rivers and lakes where they could catch pike, tench and carp; the famous ‘merchant of Prato’, Francesco di Marco Datini, imported eels from the lagoons of Comacchio, near the sea north of Ravenna, bringing them over the Apennines to Tuscany.5 After the economic boom of the 1960s, when the poor were able to afford food other than bread, polenta, pasta and home-made soup, they preferred to buy meat rather than fish. Between 1960 and 1975 they multiplied their carnivorous intake by a factor of three, a trend encouraged by the Vatican’s relaxation of its rule forbidding meat to be eaten on Fridays. By the end of the century Italians were eating more meat than the British and less fish than the European average.
Fishing off the Italian coast has always been a seasonal and unpredictable occupation. Large numbers of tuna were traditionally slaughtered each year off Sardinia (as well as Sicily), but the ‘fishing’ (that is, channelling the victims into vast curtain nets) and the subsequent slaughter could only begin after the fish had swum into Sardinian waters in May, and could last for only a few weeks. A more general problem – though difficult to appreciate if you visit the thriving fish market in even a small port like Trani – is the scarcity of fish to catch: the only abundant species apart from tuna have been anchovies and sardines. In the mid-twentieth century – before the days of quotas – Italy had the largest fishing industry of those countries with a purely Mediterranean coastline, catching twenty times the tonnage of its nearest rival, Greece. Yet its total catch was only a sixth of that brought home by Britain’s fishing fleet.
Fernand Braudel, the great French historian, has been criticized for the allegedly ‘meaningless evolutionist terms’ he used in describing the Mediterranean water as ‘geologically too old’ and ‘biologically exhausted’. Yet he was right to stress the poverty of the Mediterranean compared to the Atlantic and to observe that ‘the much-vaunted frutti di mare are only moderately abundant’.6 The Mediterranean’s narrow coastal shelf and its lack of real tides restrict the growth of nutrients for fish. By contrast, warm Atlantic currents from the Gulf of Mexico reaching the waters and continental shelf of western Europe provide a dense mass of plankton for vast shoals to feed on around Britain, Iceland and Newfoundland. One historical consequence of Italy’s shortage of fish and fishermen was a shortage also of sailors. Venice had long been finding its crews in Dalmatia, and at the end of the sixteenth century Mediterranean states were recruiting sailors from northern Europe: following the failure of his Spanish Armada in 1588, Philip II apparently even tried to entice sailors from England.7
While Italy’s frontier geography has done little to impede people trying to enter the peninsula, its interior has hindered invaders as well as inhabitants from moving around very easily. The Alps have several advantages over the Apennines, Italy’s backbone which stretches in an arc for 870 miles down the peninsula and across to Sicily and the Egadi Islands. The northern mountains have rich summer pastures above the tree-line for sheep and cattle, their vegetation flourishes at a much higher altitude, and they have rivers and lakes that assist transport and commerce. They also contain the passes through which Italians can claim to have exported banking and capitalism to northern Europe in the Middle Ages. A mass of villages existed to supply their trade with guides and carts throughout the year: even in midwinter people and goods could come over the passes in sledges. While Milanese merchants of the thirteenth century built a route through the St Gotthard, from which they could penetrate Germany and the Low Countries via the Rhine, the Venetians preferred the Brenner, the lowest of the passes, which took them up to Innsbruck and thence to Nuremberg and Frankfurt. The size of the Transalpine trade – chiefly in fabrics, wine and spices – can be appreciated today by viewing the dimensions of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the vast square building by the Rialto on the Grand Canal (until recently the central post office), where the German merchants had to live and work when they were in Venice.
The Apennines, by contrast, are a multi-layered barrier of mountains, torrents and ravines that are difficult to traverse; neighbouring villages in the Calabrian Sila traditionally knew little about each other because they were separated by deep chasms. There were numerous paths across the northern mountains in the Middle Ages, but these were mostly suitable only for mules: you could not transport wagonloads of wine over them as you could up the Brenner; as late as 1750 there were only two tracts adequate for carts across the whole of the Tuscan-Emilian range. The Apennines have thus created an east–west divide in Italy that has been historically almost as significant as that between north and south. Communications across them were so bad before railways and tunnels that travellers between Rome and Ancona found it easier and cheaper to go all the way by boat – across the Tyrrhenian, Ionian and Adriatic Seas – rather than go straight across the interior.
These mountains do have a few advantages for their inhabitants. Their height – the Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi reaches 9,554 feet – enables them to preserve ice and snow even in summer, a prerequisite for developing local skills in making ice creams and sorbets. This accounts for the otherwise surprising fact that in the middle of August 1860, just after they had conquered Sicily, Garibaldi’s soldiers were seen climbing Aspromonte in the Calabrian toe to fetch snow for their refreshments.
A further advantage is the obstacles the mountainous interior has created for invading armies, which during the Second World War so benefited the Germans that British and American forces, despite their command of the air, took twenty-one months to fight their way from one end of Italy to the other. Mountains helped people retain their autonomy, as anyone who tried to rule the rugged interior of the Abruzzi soon learned. They also helped to preserve – and even create – cultural identities and variations for societies living only a couple of valleys apart. This again may seem a blessing to many of us: how fortunate we are to be able to contrast the Pisan-Lucchese Romanesque, dense and exquisite though internally sombre, with the sense of space and light in the Romanesque cathedrals of Bari and Trani. Yet a landscape which encourages cultural diversity is almost bound to promote political disunity. In the case of Italy it has done so since before Romulus founded Rome.
Few blessings, cultural or otherwise, come from the country’s two great volcanoes, Etna in Sicily – the largest active volcano in Europe – and Vesuvius looming over Naples. Yet lethal though volcanic eruptions have often been, earthquakes are a more frequent danger. There is scarcely a town in eastern Sicily or in the south-west of the peninsula that has not been devastated by them at least once. Since 1976 about 4,000 Italians have been killed in earthquakes in Friuli, Campania and Basilicata, Umbria and the Marches, Molise and Apulia, and in 2009 in the Abruzzi. In earlier periods the death toll was even higher. Three of the greatest southern writers of the twentieth century lost their closest relations in earthquakes: the novelist Ignazio Silone lost his mother in the Abruzzi in 1915, the philosopher Benedetto Croce lost his parents and only sister on Ischia in 1883, and the historian Gaetano Salvemini lost his wife, his sister and all five of his children at Messina in 1908, when an earthquake and the tsunami that followed it killed 70,000 people.
Rivers may be less destructive but, in the catalogue of geographical disadvantages that Italians must endure, they rank near the top. As classical writers attest, navigability in antiquity was better than it is now but it was never very good. In the first century BC the geographer Strabo wrote of the ‘harmonious arrangement’ of the rivers in France, which are today navigable for 4,000 miles. The navigable mileage of rivers in Italy is in the mid-hundreds: none of them has contributed to the growth in trade, industry and human moveme
nt comparable to that of the great rivers of northern Europe such as the Seine, the Rhône, the Rhine and the Elbe.
What benefits rivers bring to Italy are predictably in the north, which also enjoys summer rain, abundant springs and snow-fed Alpine streams. The Po is the only river in the country that is navigable for more than a fraction of its length; the waters of its delta contain high levels of plankton which support substantial numbers of fish; and together with its tributaries the river has created its great alluvial plain, Italy’s largest and most fertile expanse of arable land. Human ingenuity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also rearranged the area’s waters for economic use. By building one canal from the Ticino to Milan and another to Milan from the River Adda, the wealthy capital of Lombardy was linked to the waters of Lakes Como and Maggiore as well as to the tributaries of the Po.
Even so, the river is only relatively useful. It does not serve the north of Italy as the Marne, the Seine and the Oise serve northern France. Only one of its fourteen mouths on the Adriatic, the Po della Pila, can be used by boats. Although the Po itself is navigable for 300 miles, at least for small craft, seasonal fluctuations disrupt its flow; so does the enormous quantity of silt it carries to the sea. Some of its tributaries provide hydroelectricity and water for irrigation, as do the Piave and Adige rivers in the north-east. Yet none of them is navigable for more than a few miles – and even then only sporadically. The lower Adige is hampered by sandbanks at its mouth and in summer and early autumn it becomes, like the lower Piave, a small stream trickling between islands of dry pebbles.
The most hallowed river is Virgil’s ‘gentle Tiber’, the second-longest in the country, whose relationship with Rome is as famous as that of the Seine flowing through Paris or the Thames progressing through London. The founders of the Eternal City chose their site well: it had defensible hills, the salt plains of Ostia and a water supply adequate for its needs until it became a great city requiring aqueducts. Yet perhaps they over-estimated the value of its river. Until the late nineteenth century the Tiber was anything but gentle and so prone to flooding that no other city had been built on it in antiquity. As late as 1875, in the last quixotic venture of his life, Giuseppe Garibaldi tried to have the river diverted to prevent it from flooding the capital.
Another problem, inevitably, was navigability. In classical times boats could ply between the port of Ostia and Rome and continue upstream for about 20 miles further. Now the Tiber is navigable only within the city itself. By contrast boats can go up the Thames to Lechlade – barely a dozen miles from its source – while the Seine, which flows slowly and majestically for nearly 500 miles, is so welcoming to vessels that it boasts a great port (Rouen) 75 miles from the sea.
The other rivers of the Apennines are no more useful than the Tiber. Even in the Middle Ages the Arno was either a torrent or a trickle, and transporting Carrara marble from Pisa to Florence sometimes required winching boats to trees along the river bank. Many rivers are virtually useless: while they cascade in winter, in summer they are too dry for irrigation; in Apulia some of them even fail to reach the sea. Torrents are the main agent of erosion in the Apennines, rushing down the mountain sides and bringing large quantities of silt and stones with them; on reaching the plain, some rivers merely replenish the coastal marshes. Deforestation has made the situation worse, hastening soil erosion and leading to floods, silting and the formation of malarial marshland. In the south this tree-clearing dates from classical times, even before the Romans reached the area, and has continued ever since, a process accelerated by the requirements of goats, dockyards, railway sleepers and telegraph poles. Sicily was once a land of forests, of hardwoods as well as pines, but by the late twentieth century less than 5 per cent of the island was covered by trees.
Garibaldi’s campaign to divert the Tiber was motivated by the desire to prevent not only floods but also malaria. Rivers from the Volscian and Alban hills, to the east of Rome, poured so much water on to the coastal plain that they formed the Pontine Marshes, a long, stagnant expanse producing perfect conditions for the diffusion of malaria. Further north the Tuscan Maremma was a similar hazard; few people lived there until it was successfully drained in the 1950s. Only after Garibaldi’s death were mosquitoes identified as the cause of malaria, which each year killed 15,000 people and debilitated many times that number. It was not until 1962 that Italy was officially declared a malaria-free country.
Stressing Italy’s physical disadvantages helps explain the difficulties they have created for the cause of national unity. It is also useful to clarify why the country is not as rich as foreigners have often supposed it to be. There are many fertile parts of Italy, not just the Po Valley with its fields of maize and wheat but areas such as the lower Arno, the high Valtellina, the Capuan Plain (now controlled by the Camorra), the lemon groves of Palermo (recently destroyed by the Mafia) and the vineyards and olive groves of the Salentine Peninsula. Wine is grown in most areas except northern Veneto, western Piedmont, central Sicily and the Po Valley. Yet much of the peninsula is covered by mountains, which many Italians detest, seeing them as a cause of poverty and a waste of space. They are also an impediment to access and construction and in consequence encourage the building of endless periferìa over easier terrain. It sometimes seems there is barely a plain or a valley that has not been deemed a suitable site for development. Between 1950 and 2005 the Italian countryside lost to asphalt and concrete a total of 3.66 million hectares, a figure larger than the combined size of Tuscany and Umbria.8
Many foreigners, like me, have had the good fortune to sit watching the fireflies under a Tuscan pergola, drinking Chianti wine, pouring Lucchese olive oil over our rocket salads and feeling that the material life does not have much more to offer. There seems to be an abundance of good things, of funghi porcini and bistecca fiorentina, of figs and pulses and roasted vegetables, of hams hanging in the cantina awaiting the next visit. Tuscany enjoys a better climate, more fertile land and richer minerals than other parts of Italy; its share-cropping peasants, the ballad-singing contadini, were historically better off than agricultural workers elsewhere, and their traditional soup, ribollita, was a good deal more nutritious than polenta, the dismal and unhealthy staple of the north.
Yet even here, in one of the happiest and most civilized regions of the world, the land is not very productive. Even when Florence was the artistic and banking centre of the world, it was unable to survive on produce from its countryside for more than five months a year: in the four centuries after 1375 it experienced on average a famine in every fourth year, and in the sixteenth century the Medici grand duke had to import grain from as far away as England, Poland and Flanders. When Vernon Bartlett, a distinguished English journalist, settled in Tuscany after the Second World War, some of his neighbours, who had been prisoners in Britain, talked ‘with envious affection of the rich English soil’.9 Postcards and prosciutto, Capri and Chianti, gondolas and gorgonzola – such associations tell us and remind us of the Italy we want to remember.
ITALIAN PEOPLES
If you look through the telephone directory of Bari in Apulia you will be struck by the quantity of Italian surnames that indicate a foreign ancestry. There are some people named Greco, a good number called Spagnolo or Spagnuolo, and a great many with the name Albano or Albanese – not recent immigrants from Albania but people whose ancestors fled before the Turkish advances to the Adriatic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The names testify to what Italy has been for most of its history since the fall of Rome: a land of desire for settlers, immigrants and foreign conquerors. Its accessibility and wealth – in parts – still make it a goal for migrants, though these now come from somewhat further away. By 2009 Italy contained more than 600,000 migrants from a single country, Romania, as well as substantial numbers of Moroccans, Albanians, Chinese, South Americans and sub-Saharan Africans. The Tuscan town of Prato officially has 10,000 Chinese residents and unofficially double that number.10 Perhaps it is their presence
that has encouraged the arrival of a new type of immigrant, Manchurian prostitutes, who have annoyed their predecessors in the trade, mainly Brazilians and Africans, by charging less, working harder and doing their job in car-parks, alleyways and public conveniences. Many immigrants enter Italy illegally not because they have relations or good prospects there but because it is easier to reach than other countries.
If we agree with the French historian Lucien Febvre that the concept of prehistory is absurd, we should first acknowledge the Mesolithic people who were living in the Italian peninsula around 10,000 BC at the end of the Ice Age’s last freezing spell. They were nomads who hunted and gathered fruit and moved north as the earth warmed up.
Around 7000 BC, before Britain became an island, another people, now known as Neolithic, began to arrive in Europe from south-west Asia. They penetrated Italy by sea and by land through the Balkans, absorbing their more primitive predecessors as they moved west. By 6000 BC they were in Apulia; soon afterwards they reached Calabria and Sicily; and from there they sent fresh expeditions to Corsica and Sardinia. They seem to have had a compulsion to go west, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, ‘to sail beyond the sunset and … may be … touch the Happy Isles’. Reflecting on their pioneering spirit, the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe suggests they had ‘a desire to see what lies beyond, drawn on westwards, perhaps, by the fascination of the setting sun’.11
The Pursuit of Italy Page 3