Emilia Romagna

Abstract

Emilia Romagna is one of the Italian regions where agriculture reached high levels of productive efficiency and has kept them up to this day. Farmland still accounts for a significant portion of the region’s total land area (50 %). Woodland and pastures (respectively 27.5 and 0.5 %) mainly occupy the Apennine mountain range. Industrialization and specialization of the agricultural sector in the last century, however, has deeply transformed the rural landscape. The plain countryside of Emilia and Romagna used to elicit much admiration from foreign travelers for the perfect geometric pattern of its fields alternating with rows of trees and grapevine, which made them look like a vast garden arranged around solid houses of bricks and tiles. Today, however, that landscape only survives in the memory of the elderly. The geometry of the fields is still there, especially in the recently reclaimed lower plain, but the physical characteristics that used to distinguish the lower plain from the high and middle plain zones extending on either side of the Via Emilia from Rimini to Piacenza are irremediably lost. Herbaceous monocultures now extend over all land left free of construction. Pits, paths, tree groves, hemp retting-pits, even threshing floors, all have been converted into arable land. Farm animals live in large closed sheds resembling the small factory buildings that have sprung up everywhere. Part of the hill and mountain landscape is being transformed by the gradual encroaching of trees and shrubs onto abandoned fields. Another part is cultivated by mechanical means that rarely take account of the difficult orography of the Apennines and the risk of erosion. Should we bemoan the loss of this world and the immense human effort that shaped it? Certainly not. Emilia Romagna is nevertheless a region blessed with an agriculture with record yields and quality. However, it is the historian’s task to seek the weight of the past in present landscapes, not only because earlier landscapes were more harmonic and aesthetically pleasing, but also because they sometimes reflected a more rational use of land and its ecosystems. Since today the plain is dominated by annual herbaceous crops (wheat, maize, sorghum, rice, beet, soy, potatoes, etc.) or specialized fruit orchards, the search for landscape elements worthy of attention should begin from features that are more persistent over time such as farm tracks, drainage works, and buildings. Thus, our decision to mostly pick out areas in the grain-growing lower plain should not seem out of place, although farming there today is highly mechanized and industrialized. It is in the plain that we find the few truly rural areas in the region, although they lie next to the now prevailing urban, industrial and tertiary landscapes. One such area is the vast Diamantina estate, only a short distance from the town of Ferrara. It is the result of a reclamation and reorganization of the agricultural space that began in the late fifteenth century and was carried on between 1510 and 1520 by Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara, who financed the digging of a large drainage channel known as the Canal Bianco. Another remarkable historical landscape lies in the area of the Centopievese commons. Here a land redistribution system has survived down to this day, whereby land is parceled out every 10 years among male descendants of an original group of holders of collective emphyteutic leases. This periodic land redistribution has informed the layout of this area, which is covered with so many small plots of identical size separated by tracks. Hemp was grown intensively here for centuries. A third low-plain landscape is found between Modena and Mirandola. It lies in a marshy district, the Valli di Burana, where horses were raised for centuries. Action has been taken recently to restore this area’s environment and landscape, as well as two of its large horse stables, the barchessoni. We have included in our selection of agro-forestal areas the vast San Vitale Pinewoods, which today is included in the Po Delta Regional Park and placed under landscape restrictions. These woods, originally planted with Pinus pinea by the Roman to provide lumber for shipbuilding, have survived through the centuries and expanded seawards, thanks to their systematic exploitation and pine-nut harvesting by the abbey of San Vitale in Ravenna. Today, however, maintenance for economic purposes has come to an end and the pinewoods run the risk of turning into mixed woods; a situation that shows the inadequacy of the several forms of protection the area is placed under as far as the preservation of its historical characteristics is concerned. For the reasons mentioned at the beginning, the issue of hill and mountain areas is more complicated. Here, abandonment and depopulation seem to produce apparently less serious consequences than in the plain, but pose some problems of definition. We have selected a mountain-ridge area still occupied by chestnut groves in the valley of the Lavino river, a testimony of the historical importance of chestnuts in the landscape and economy of the Apennines. While chestnuts are still grown here today, the area is under the constant threat of abandonment, with the consequent loss of the historical characteristics of the woods, which require constant maintenance.