Abruzzo

Abstract

Abruzzo is the most mountainous region in peninsular Italy. 71 % of its surface consists of mountains rising almost as high as 3,000 m, 29 % of hills, and there are no plains. This has forced its inhabitants to develop special forms of adaptation of agricultural techniques to a difficult environment, and this accounts for the local landscape’s distinctive features. Among the regions of the Italian South, Abruzzo is the one that has achieved the most satisfactory forms of economic modernization over the last half century, thanks to the spread of small and middle industry, the modernization of agriculture, and a more judicious land management than elsewhere in Italy. It is for this reason, as well as because of its prevalently mountainous character, that it is one of the southern regions that has best preserved its traditional landscapes, which are organized by altitude and include cultivated areas, woods and pastures, and historical testimonies dating as far back as the Roman period. Even today, in spite of the spread of small and middle manufacturing businesses, pastoralism and related agricultural activities are still the prevalent feature of the Abruzzan countryside. Seventy percent of the overall agricultural surface is given over to this agropastoral economy, with 38 % of permanent fields and pastures, 22 % of cereal fields, and 12 % of relay-cropped fodder fields. Forty percent of the region’s surface is covered with woods. We have picked six areas as especially representative of the historical reality of this specific, traditional agricultural and landscape reality. The Sant’Antonio woods is one of the most significant example of woods called difesa, “defense”; areas reserved as wooded pastureland, all other forms of use being banned. In the Sant’Antonio woods are vestiges of a lucus, a sacred woods of Roman times. The employing of a form of pruning for fodder called pollarding resulted in peculiar shapes for the local beech trees. Today, unfortunately, this mixed pasture and woodland landscape is threatened by abandonment and the expansion of compact and homogeneous woods. Another representative area is that of the terraced fields of the higher hill slopes of the Macella. Terracing is a widely employed technique on the steep slopes of the traditional landscape of Abruzzo. The Macella terraces lie in the agropastoral area of Roccamorice, Lettomanoppello and Abbateggio. They mainly consist of artificial meadows grading down to the valley below, alternating with crops such as spelt, olive trees, grapevine, and fruit trees. The most remarkable features of this agrarian landscape are the terraces themselves, and the dry-stone masonry used for enclosures and for the typical “tholos” stone huts of Abruzzo shepherds. Natural meadows and fodder fields characterize the landscape of Piani di Aielli. Here one can still see the so-called “ribbon-shaped” layout of the open common fields where cereals are grown; an ancient form of cultivation coexisting with the grazing of livestock on mown-grass fields (campi da sfalcio). Like other Abruzzan mountains, including the Gran Sasso itself, the Aielli landscape bears witness to the “cooperative” dimension of the Abruzzan countryside, where over the centuries farmers and shepherds have struggled to extract sustenance from sterile soils in a harsh climate. The fields of the Baronia in the Majella mountain range, instead, are an unusual example of an integrated, silvopastoral conception of the function of two different areas. Here the fields are divided in two “shifts” (veci). A “full shift” of barley is alternated with an “empty shift” of potatoes. The crops are rotated from one plot to the other according to a regular schedule including a long grazing period on fields where renewal crops are to be sown. The fields are thus economically interdependent one from the other. A significant example of the landscapes of the region are the olive orchards of Loreto Aprutino in the province of Pescara. Located in an inland hilly area, they are one of the most representative features of the Abruzzan agricultural landscape. Here the growing of often very large centenary olive trees, and hence the preservation of agricultural and habitat biodiversity, manages to coexist with high yields. The Loreto Aprutino area produces an excellent olive oil on an industrial scale. The choice of Ortucchio, in the Fucino Plain, reflects a precise documentary intention. We chose the agricultural landscape of this small commune as a testimony of a “reclaimed” landscape, a result of the draining of the Fucino lake around the turn of the nineteenth century. This, as the historian Costantino Felice defined it, is the “pulp” of the Abruzzan Apennines: a vast plain once occupied by the third largest lake in Italy, and now making plain agriculture possible in the midst of the mountains. Since the agrarian reform started in 1950, an archipelago of small and middle sized farming businesses have sprung up here. Irrigation—now undermined by increasing water scarcity– has shaped the landscape, which is dominated by rectangular vegetable gardens intersected by roads and canals often flanked by high poplar trees. The draining of the lake had already been attempted by Claudius in Roman times. This dramatic and in some ways controversial transformation has generated a very special agricultural landscape.