Italy and the Potato: A History, 1550–2000 9781441140388, 9781472526311, 9781350047662, 9781441176264

Citation preview

ITALY AND THE POTATO: A HISTORY, 1550–2000

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Cover of Achille Mango’s La coltivazione delle patate, 1931.

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Italy and the Potato: A History, 1550–2000

David Gentilcore

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Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © David Gentilcore, 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978-1-4411-7626-4

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

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This one’s for Rita (as long as they’re chips)

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Contents

List of Figures

ix

Preface and Acknowledgements

x

1 The ‘Perverse Strangeness of the Seasons’: 1816–17

1

2 An Exotic American in Italy: 1573

23

3 The Potato Apostles: 1764–67

36

4 ‘Substituting Potatoes for Wheat’: The Late Nineteenth Century

64

5 ‘Up Here it Makes More Sense to Plant Potatoes’: Potatoes, Population and Emigration in Italy’s Mountain Regions

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6 ‘New and Broader Horizons’: The Twentieth Century

123

7 Epilogue: The Post-Modern Italian

154

Notes

167

Bibliography

204

Index

227

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List of Figures

Frontispiece Cover of Achille Mango’s La coltivazione delle patate, 1931 1.1 Title page of Francesco Chiarenti’s Riflessioni 1.2 Leaves and ‘fruit’ of the potato 1.3 Handbill describing the ‘easy and tested method of cultivating potatoes’ 2.1 Potato plant as painted for Charles de l’Écluse 3.1 Giuseppe Morina’s design for a cooking furnace 4.1 Francesco Garnier Valletti’s resin models 4.2 Quantity of potatoes purchased with a day’s labour in the Province of Genoa 4.3 Map of Italian potato production by province, 1874 6.1 Detail from the cover of Cento maniere di preparare le patate 6.2 Italian potato cultivation and production, 1860–2007 6.3 Potatoes on display at the First National Conference on Increased Potato Production 6.4 Province of Como’s display of ‘Biancona’ variety 6.5 A producer from the countryside with potatoes to sell at a fair price

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Preface and Acknowledgements

As described in 1981 the mountain hamlet of Bertassi had 15 residents, average age 65, as well as nine cows and 34 houses still standing. There were some fields planted for hay, and some wheat; the impression was one of abandonment and decay, as nature slowly reclaimed what were once the terraced mountainsides.1 Agriculture, in this part of the northern Apennines between Liguria and Emilia-Romagna, laborious and marginal at the best of times, no longer paid. Some signs of life were evident for a few weeks each summer, as former residents return for their holidays and as hikers pass through. Otherwise, the hamlet’s main attraction seems to be its cemetery, which offers burial plots to Bertassini who now live elsewhere, mainly in Genoa, where spaces are hard to come by and cost an arm and a leg, as it were.Today the mountain hamlet has just six permanent residents. Bertassi was not always more dead than alive. At its peak, in 1861, the hamlet counted 328 people, its population having doubled since the 1780s. Bertassi’s economy was always a fragile one, based on cereals like barley, legumes and chestnut cultivation, for food and timber. Many inhabitants relied on seasonal migration to towns in the valley. What broke the stagnation in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and allowed the population to increase were the new uses for woodland. Instead of burning bits into charcoal, the woodland was cleared. The new land was turned into meadows for livestock or planted with maize and then potatoes. The result was an end to seasonal migration – people stayed put and the birth rate increased. Moreover, there was enough to eat: a local variety of potato, the ‘Quarantina’, saw to that. Resources remained limited and the economy one of subsistence, however. Bertassi was not a part of the monetary economy. Paradoxically, as the population grew, and was able to feed itself, thanks to potatoes, it became poorer. The solution was a familiar one: people left. This was not the seasonal migration of earlier decades, but the emigration of whole families, to places like New York and Buenos Aires. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Bertassi’s population fell by half. Even the few better-off households were affected. Remittances from Bertassini in the Americas kept the hamlet alive, but by the 1920s increasing international restrictions on the movement of people meant that there were no more returnees. The hamlet seemed destined to disappear

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slowly. During the 1930s Fascist government policy in support of mountain areas breathed new life into Bertassi. Proposals were made to introduce a new breed of cow that produced more milk, roads were built and new agricultural implements supplied. World War II undid all of that. The animals were requisitioned and there was a return to barter. Inhabitants were once again thankful for their potatoes (and their maize and meat), as hungry Italians waited out the War. Women were left to do most of the work – sowing, ploughing, scything and maintaining the mountain terraces. After the War, through the 1950s and 1960s, new works were undertaken: running water and a new electrical supply. Pastures were expanded and intensive livestock rearing was undertaken, resulting in higher milk production, but at the expense of other forms of agriculture. Better roads were built. But the roads only made it easier for people to leave, mostly for Genoa. Only the elderly remained, thankful for their newly introduced government pensions. The Genovesi, as these ex-residents are called, and now their children, return for their holidays – and as corpses. A few of the larger towns in the area have been able to reinvent themselves as tourist destinations. Rovegno has its sagra (potato festival), in honour of the recently revived ‘Quarantina’ potato, held each year on the first Sunday in October. But not Bertassi. ~~~ Why devote several pages to a sleepy, moribund hamlet like Bertassi, high in the Apennines? First of all, because its historical ups and downs are typical of uplands throughout Italy. And second, to demonstrate how the population and the potato are intimately linked. For this is both a social and cultural history of the potato in Italy and a history of agriculture in marginal areas. Italy, like the rest of Europe, owes a lot to what has been called the ‘Columbian exchange’. As a result of this process, in addition to potatoes, Europe acquired maize, tomatoes and most types of beans. All are basic elements of European diet and cookery today: try thinking of Italian food without the tomato and you can appreciate the importance of the exchange. For their part, the Americas acquired wheat, rice, bananas, citrus fruits, coffee and cane sugar. Asia got bananas, papayas and potatoes; while Africa acquired maize, manioc and potatoes. The international importance of the potato today as the world’s most cultivated vegetable, and the fourth most important crop (after maize, rice and wheat), highlights its place in the Columbian exchange. Italian potato consumption today is around 38 kg per capita. This is well behind the consumption of the potato-loving countries of eastern Europe, such as Belarus (180 kg per capita) and Ukraine (136 kg per capita), or even more historical consumers like Ireland (120 kg per capita) and Britain (102 kg

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per capita). Peruvians, who gave potatoes to the world, not surprisingly, also eat more (80 kg per capita). Italians eat fewer potatoes per head than North Americans (Canada 65 kg per capita; United States 54 kg per capita). Italy’s potato production of almost two million tonnes a year (1,837,844 tonnes) is dwarfed by the production of countries like the relative newcomer, China (72 million tonnes) and Russia (37 million tonnes); Italy still has to import over one million tonnes of raw and processed potatoes to meet internal demand.2 Indeed it is often cheaper to import potatoes from other EU countries, like Poland (production 12 million tonnes), at one-fifth the cost of Italian ones.3 What is surprising is that a Mediterranean country like Italy should be consuming (and producing) potatoes at all. This is, after all, the country of pasta, polenta, legumes and so on. Indeed the Italian region which produces the most potatoes, Campania, is located in southern Italy, whose capital city, Naples, gave us pizza and pasta al pomodoro. And other southern regions like Sicily, Calabria, Abruzzo and Puglia are not far behind. High, too, in production terms, is Emilia-Romagna, more famous for its Parma ham (prosciutto) and Parmigiano cheese.4 In fact, when it comes to vegetable cultivation in Italy, potatoes are second only to tomatoes. Why Italians adopted the potato, and why some areas of the country more than others, are two of the central questions of this book. The third question, related to the first two, is why it took them so long to do so. The potato was known to Europeans from the 1550s, and eventually became important in areas of Northern Europe; it took some three hundred years before it entered the Italian diet. Then, for hundred years or so it remained a staple, eaten at all levels of society, in town and country alike, and giving rise to an immense variety of local dishes – before it experienced a decline in consumption and production levels in more recent decades. Finally, this is also a history of Italy’s mountains. While potatoes flourished in lowland areas as early crops, often grown for export, it was in the uplands that they became most closely linked with local culture. They found an important place in mountain ecosystems. Rather than focus exclusively on the regional perspective standard in studies of Italy (of north, centre, south), this book stresses the importance of altitude as a factor in the country’s agricultural, environmental and dietary history. In a 1991 article, the Italian social historian Maria Antonietta Visceglia referred to the potato’s Italian history as ‘obscure’; despite some important local studies since then, which will be discussed in due course, this is still largely the case.5 More recently, the anthropologist Alessandra Guigoni, in the context of her own work on Sardinia, remarked that the social history of the potato in Italy was still in search of its author.6 While the history of the potato in England, Ireland and other parts of Northern Europe is quite well known,

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relatively little is known about the slow rise of the potato to the status of staple in Italy. Italy and the Potato attempts to fill this gap. This book derives from a research project on the impact of New World plants in Italy, made possible by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, which I held during the period 2007–2010. It would not have been possible without the resources of the Biblioteca Internazionale ‘La Vigna’, Vicenza; the Library and Archives of the Accademia dei Georgofili, Florence; the Biblioteca Centrale Nazionale, Florence;and the Biblioteca Città di Arezzo. I am grateful to the suggestions, comments and contributions of a wide range of scholars along the way: Ken Albala (University of the Pacific, Stockton); Pasqualino Battista (www.meteomolise.org); Rita Caforio (Director, Biblioteca comunale di Latiano); Marika Galli (Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon); Allen Grieco (Villa I Tatti, Harvard Center for the Study of the Italian Renaissance); Alessandra Guigoni (Università di Cagliari); Richard Hoyle (University of Reading); John McNeill (Georgetown University); Cormac Ó Gráda (University College Dublin); Giovanni Panjek (Università di Trieste); Rengenier Rittersma (University of Rotterdam); James Scott (Yale University); Vito Teti (Università della Calabria) and Jean-Pierre Williot (Université François Rabelais, Tours). I would also like to thank Daniele Jalla and Paola Costanzo (Director and Responsibile collezioni, respectively, at the Museo della Frutta ‘Francesco Garnier Valletti’, Turin), and Matteo Sanfilippo (Università della Tuscia, Viterbo) and Alessandro Pastore (Università di Verona) who kindly read and commented on Chapter 5. Two final words regarding the sources. All translations are my own, unless indicated otherwise. And all references to websites were accurate at the time of writing.

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The ‘Perverse Strangeness of the Seasons’: 1816–17

The crisis of 1816–17 is sometimes given as the time when Italians began to eat (and grow) the potato.1 If that is the case, then potato-eating (and growing) in Italy is in large part due to a volcano. Let us take a closer look. A series of eruptions during the years 1811–18, culminating in the explosion of the Tambora volcano in 1815, on the island of Sumbawa (Indonesia), sent up enough dust into the atmosphere to alter the climate around the world. In Europe, contemporaries noticed a ‘smoking vapour’ in the air and the weakness of the sun. They recorded strange phenomena like a reddish sun and moon and richly coloured twilights. In May of 1816 a red and yellow snowfall terrorized the inhabitants of Taranto (Puglia), where snow was itself a freak occurrence.2 The spring and summer of that year were amongst the coldest in the meteorological history of the Western world, accompanied by excessive precipitation. Indeed most of the decade had been characterized by cold, wet summers. Crop failures occurred repeatedly. With words that have a strange ring of familiarity to us today, a contemporary wrote of ‘the calamities to which the perverse strangeness of the seasons has condemned us for some time now’.3 Suffering reached a peak in 1816–17, the West’s ‘last great subsistence crisis’, in the words of John Post.4

ITALIAN REACTIONS TO THE 1816 FAMINE In the Austrian state of Lombardy-Venetia snow was still on the ground in April and May of 1816. There was extensive flooding throughout the peninsula; storms damaged dikes, rivers burst their banks and roads and bridges were interrupted. The grain had to be cut at the beginning of September because of early frosts. It was inedible anyway, suitable only for animal fodder. In areas of the southern Apennines where wheat cultivation had greatly expanded following the famines of 1764 and 1803, tenants – ‘impoverished as a result of the meagre harvest and a multiplicity of debts’ – demanded an exemption from tithes.5 The olives and grapes failed to ripen, lacking ‘the usual heat of the summer’, according to the United States consul at Livorno.6 Livestock mortality increased. The cold, damp weather reduced the supply of firewood. Both hemp and silk production

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suffered. Honey was scarce, the bad weather having interfered with the normal activities of bees. There was a total failure of the chestnut crop, a staple in mountainous parts of Italy. Only Sicily and Sardinia were left unscathed – but Sardinia had already suffered its own dearth five years earlier. Climate change was exacerbated by social and economic factors. With the Napoleonic wars just over, dislocation, unemployment and brigandage were rife. Trade had been disrupted. Military requisitions and taxation levied a heavy burden, especially on landowners, now keener than ever to safeguard (or reclaim) their privileges and resist change. The newly restored states of Italy enacted harsh measures to re-establish order and increase revenue. Conditions for many peasants were wretched. Those in the mountains of LombardyVenetia lived ‘in a pitiful state of hunger, misery and, it can almost be said, of desperation’.7 Peasants everywhere were absolutely dependent on the outcome of the harvest; agriculture, however, was in a parlous state. A contemporary, with reference to his own province of Padua, blamed the absenteeism of landlords, the excessive size of tenancies, the disproportion between meadowlands and cereal culture, insufficient manuring and a shortage of forage crops.8 Repeated harvest failures brought falling price levels – in all but foodstuffs, of course – while declining production further increased unemployment levels. Artisans and farmers were forced to pawn their tools, furniture and clothes. Sometimes this was to pay taxes and dues, which the Austrian authorities in northern Italy continued to levy throughout the crisis.9 The prolonged severe weather conditions affected all cereal crops. The price of wheat, rye, barley and oats increased, and by similar magnitudes. Since the four grains were substitutes for one another, the across-the-board price rise limited the potential to shift demand from higher- to lower-priced grains, as usually happened in periods of crisis. Most worrying to the Austrian overlords of Lombardy-Venetia was that the price of maize also soared – maize polenta was by now a staple food there. Famine conditions resulted virtually everywhere on the peninsula. Most European states, and all peninsular Italian ones, responded to the harvest failure of 1816 by restricting the export of cereals. This limited the supply throughout Italy still further. Even after the successful harvest of 1817, the export of cereals from the Papal States remained strictly prohibited. Beginning in September 1816 port cities like Trieste, Venice, Genoa and Livorno were the sites of large-scale cereal imports, Italian governments having temporarily eased duties on imported wheat. The only supplies came from far away: Odessa, Constantinople, Alexandria and the United States. Buyers had to compete. In any case, this was of little benefit to the large numbers of poor in the rural and mountain areas outside the cities, who lacked the means to buy food at almost any price.

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There was some government response in the states of Italy. Public soup kitchens were set up, along the lines implemented by count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson of Massachusetts) in Munich late in the previous century. The meagre ‘Rumford soup’ was mostly potatoes, barley and water, with the odd meat bone, but it was certainly better than nothing. Charitable institutions throughout Europe prepared their own variants of the soup, making use of ingredients available locally. The version prepared in the Veneto during the 1816 crisis was made from beans and animal bones.10 Udine’s had no potatoes, making use of maize flour instead, since the latter crop was already a staple there.11 That served at Naples’s Albergo dei Poveri, the city’s main orphanage, and subsequently throughout the Kingdom of Naples, even had chilli peppers in it.

COMPOSITION OF THE ECONOMIC SOUPS, ACCORDING TO THE METHOD ADOPTED IN NAPLES An economic soup should combine savings, flavour, and healthfulness, making use of healthy ingredients and of the best quality. . . . Potatoes are a staple whose use is highly important and commendable in economic soups. . . . They are accompanied by one or different kinds of vegetables like cardoons, cabbage, water-cress, fennel, parsnips, onions, carrots, turnip greens, celery, tomatoes, parsley, and chervil. For the seasoning one can use lard, tallow or olive oil, but the soup is tastiest when seasoned with casseroled veal or lamb kidneys, where available, crushed with garlic. For a cantaro* of soup: Water, when reduced down – 68 rotoli Potatoes – 15 rotoli Dried beans – 4 rotoli 16½ oncie Husked barley – 4 rotoli 16½ oncie Vegetables – 2 rotoli Casseroled kidneys or other seasoning as above – 31 oncie Salt – 1 rotolo 8 oncie Dried red chilli pepper – 2 oncie Toasted bread and baker’s leavings – 3 rotoli 25 oncie The evening before the soup is to be made one puts the husked barley and dried beans into two-thirds of the water in a kettle. The following morning four hours before midday one lights the fire, adds the red chilli pepper to the kettle, and brings it all to a gentle simmer, avoiding a rapid boiling, for a duration of two hours, adding the other third of hot water from time to time, and frequently stirring the soup with a wooden spoon so that it does not acquire a burnt taste. And after two hours, one adds the fat and the salt, and simmers the soup for

Ö

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another half-hour, after which time one adds the potatoes, previously boiled, peeled and well mashed, and continues simmering for another half-hour. Then one removes the soup from the fire and leaves it another hour in the kettle with its own heat, then one pours it into pots and proceeds to distribute it. . . . Each ordinary portion of soup given consists of three-quarters a rotolo. Source: Collezione di quanto si è scritto di più importante e di più adatto intorno alla coltivazione ed uso delle patate (Naples: Stamperia Simoniana, 1803), pp. 26–30. * In Naples, there were 33 1/3 oncie in a rotolo (=0.89 kg) and 100 rotoli in a cantaro (=89.1 kg). Each portion corresponded to 0.67 kg, meaning that the recipe was intended to feed over 130 people.

In addition, workhouses were opened, infrastructure projects such as roadbuilding enacted and seed corn distributed. Local officials were to identify the poor in their jurisdictions. Private charity distributed food, clothing and small sums of money. But it was not enough. People furthest from the capital cities suffered most. In November 1816 the charity commission of the province of Padua worriedly reported that ‘two-thirds of the province is at death’s door and it’s not even December yet; what will happen between March and June?’12 Mountain-dwellers in Lombardy were forced to subsist largely on roots and leaves. Inhabitants around Brescia and Bergamo were eating grass and roots. In Tramonti (Treviso) most inhabitants were walking corpses, reduced to eating hay.13 In Andreos (Udine), maize husks provided the poor with their only sustenance. In Gorizia ‘the population was reduced to a diet of lettuce and soup made from herbs, and on very many days had nothing to eat at all’.14 In Rome, according to a contemporary, the poor made do with impure, poorly risen bread, lupins, potatoes (horror!) and uncooked plants.15 This was paradise compared to Friuli, where deaths from starvation were reported in December 1816. Peasants unearthed maize and legume seeds in order to eat them. Fearing public violence, Austrian officials requested parish priests to preach a message of hope, forbearance and trust (in the government) in their sermons. Inevitably, granaries and bakeries were looted. There were assaults on people suspected of speculating in grain. A crowd in Verona threw stones at grain merchants and made off with some sacks of grain.16 However, these remained isolated acts rather than organized demonstrations – nothing like the widespread rioting that took place in other parts of Europe, like France or the Netherlands.17 One incident did occur. In May, ‘in the vicinity of Bologna’, ‘thousands of peasants’ there assembled on ‘the ringing of the tocsin’ and ‘laid waste all the

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fields of rice, under the pretence that they infected the air’, The Times (London) reported. The brief item went on to explain that rice cultivation had been introduced into the region some 15 years earlier and was not popular. The newspaper decried such ‘disturbances’, ‘at a period when so great a dearth prevails in Italy’.18 But the incident is clearly indicative of the widespread fear of diseases associated with famine, particularly typhus, still linked to foul miasmas in the air, here believed to emanate from stagnant water. In autumn of 1816, two doctors in the Tuscan town of Arezzo warned of the ‘contagious fevers’ that would surely result that coming winter when large numbers of desperate, famished people descended from the surrounding mountains in search of food and relief.19 And death rates did indeed rise sharply during the crisis. Contemporaries frequently reported cases of death from hunger; but disease took an ever worse toll. As far as modern medical opinion is concerned, starvation is rarely a direct cause of death. Instead, malnutrition alters a person’s resistance to infection – while infectious disease aggravates a person’s malnutrition. Famine and epidemics are linked because the standards of hygiene are lowered, resistance is reduced and contagion is promoted by the migration of people in search of food. The symptoms of starvation and infection become so interwoven that it is difficult to untangle them. During the subsistence crisis of 1816, typhus – called ‘spotted fever’ in the English of the time and tifo petecchiale in Italian – was the most widespread epidemic disease. Typhus is spread through the faeces of the human body louse; virtually everyone had lice, of course, but malnutrition rendered people more susceptible to the disease. Both the louse and the infection thrived in the crisis conditions of 1816, as exhausted, malnourished people huddled together to keep warm, pawned their louse-ridden clothes, wandered about in crowds in search of food, and paid scant regard to hygiene. Typhus broke out on both sides of the Adriatic in 1816 and then ravaged all of Italy. The effects were devastating. In Naples, births plummeted and deaths peaked – the latter at a level which would only be repeated by the cholera epidemics later in the century.20 In the province of Molise, also in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, births usually outnumbered deaths by a ratio of three to two, but in 1816 the numbers of births was level with the number of deaths, and in 1817 there were only 10,103 births to 19,733 deaths. Amongst other things, famine reduces conception rates.21 In the Tuscan Grand-Duchy, the victims of famine and disease, principally typhus, were estimated at twenty-five thousand.22 In the province of Padua, deaths increased from 11,079 in 1815 to 12,330 in 1816, and to 19,374 in 1817.23 In Lombardy, typhus was preceded by scurvy and pellagra, diseases of nutritional deficiency. Pellagra was already regarded as a barometer of poverty, although its exact causes were still open to debate. A British physician, Henry Holland, wrote that pellagra cases had increased there ‘in a

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tenfold ratio during the last two years; the effect of bad harvests added to the preceding wars’.24 Added to this was the spectre of bubonic plague. In November 1815 plague was reported in Noja (Puglia; today’s Noicottaro).25 The town was promptly sealed off. The epidemic spread first though the poorest parts of the town, eventually killing 721 people, or one in seven of the Noja’s population, before declining by May of the following year. The epidemic was attributed by contemporaries to the prevailing hunger, the result of three harvest failures in succession. With plague there is no direct link between nutrition and infection. In fact, the worst harvest failure, that of 1816, was still to come. Moreover in Italy only Noja was affected. The epidemic was probably due to the sea traffic with the plague-ridden Dalmation islands across the Adriatic.26

THE POTATO SOLUTION One possible solution to the repeated harvest failures and the resulting famine conditions was to plant potatoes. And this brings us to Francesco Chiarenti. What’s a reform-minded doctor to do? Having received his medical doctorate in Pisa (1785), having practised at Florence’s hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, having matriculated into the city’s College of Physicians (1787) and having written several medical studies (on the nerves, the gastric juices and the digestive process), Francesco Chiarenti turned to the French philosophies. Like many Tuscan intellectuals of his generation, Chiarenti was inspired by the reforms taking place in France. He even served as a member of the ‘triumvirate’ charged with governing the state of Tuscany in November 1800.27 But with the creation of the Kingdom of Etruria by Napoleon, entrusted to Lodovico di Borbone (prince of Parma), Chiarenti was left with nothing to do. In 1801, at the ripe old age of 35, Chiarenti returned to his native Montaione, a town of around a thousand souls in the hills between San Miniato and Volterra. He may have continued to practise medicine there. For four years he served as the town’s mayor. However during this time Chiarenti dedicated most of his energies to his extensive estates in the area. His efforts led to a study on the conditions of agriculture in the Tuscan Grand-Duchy, published in 1819 (Figure 1.1). The book earned Chiarenti a fellowship in Florence’s reform-minded Accademia dei Georgofili the same year, where he later presented a couple of papers on the free trade in grain and viticulture. And yet, Chiarenti’s passing, in 1828, merited only this comment from Raffaello Lambruschini: ‘Poor Dr Chiarenti. His loss truly saddens me, because, despite some bizarre ideas, he must have been a valued and well-intentioned person’.28

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Figure 1.1 Title page of Francesco Chiarenti’s Riflessioni e osservazioni sull’agricoltura toscana (Pistoia, 1819).

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What ‘bizarre ideas’ was Lambruschini referring to? Chiarenti’s labours to educate and involve his tenant-farmers in the running of his estates? Or was it, perhaps, Chiarenti’s advocacy of the potato? In retrospect, there was much to object to in Chiarenti’s 1819 Riflessioni e osservazioni sull’agricoltura toscana (Reflections and observations on Tuscan agriculture). First of all, there was his negative view of the state of agriculture in the Tuscan Grand-Duchy. ‘While all the arts and sciences have more or less advanced’, Chiarenti complains, ‘only agriculture, considered in all its breadth, has remained a child and has not known how to benefit from the progress in the arts related and auxiliary to it’.29 This criticism came at a time when numerous reform-minded landowners were already at work in Tuscany improving their lands. Mountain areas, like the Pistoiese, were being developed, mountainsides terraced. In 1800 the agronomist Pellegrino Antonini purchased a large estate there, woodland considered good only for the production of charcoal, and proceeded to turn it into an experimental farm.30 Agricultural and economic societies had sprung up all over the grand duchy, to provide a forum for the dissemination of these new ideas. The most prominent was Florence’s Accademia dei Georgofili. The agronomist Filippo Re recognized the Georgofili as ‘an establishment which more than any other has promoted agriculture’, leading to ‘the emulation of the most able agronomists’ throughout Tuscany ‘which resulted in printed works eminently suited to improving it’.31 Still, there was obviously much left to do, as far as Chiarenti was concerned. Then there was Chiarenti’s explanation for this decline. Chiarenti puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of estate factors, for not implementing agricultural reforms, rather than on the peasants who worked the fields. Finally, there was Chiarenti’s solution. Landowners should take a direct interest in their lands. The investment required is minimal. ‘If the landowner offers the peasant the miserable recompense of a flask of wine, not only can he introduce some innovations but, if he wants, he can overturn all their ancient practices’. Chiarenti gives the example of his ten resident tenant-farmers (coloni). They did not know how to build dikes or embankments on hilly terrain, in order to make it arable and regulate the water supply, much less consider this a worthwhile activity. Now, most of them do – to the point of carrying out the work on their own initiative, without needing to be overseen.32 Chiarenti has even taught them to plant potatoes! If his approach sounds a bit patronizing, that’s because it was. In common with most of Europe’s agricultural reformers, Chiarenti’s motives were more ‘physiocratic’ than ‘philanthropic’: that’s to say, more concerned with the bigger agronomical picture than with individual peasants. Using potatoes to feed his peasants and his livestock was one of a series of concerns. Chiarenti reviews his efforts in chapter seven, entirely dedicated to the potato. Not only

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was the potato largely ignored in Tuscany, Chiarenti notes; the lack of interest was most pronounced amongst the uneducated, with their suspicion of change and innovation.33 But then came famine. ‘Poverty and hunger, the only forces strong enough to re-awaken even the laziest and coarsest men, induced some of the most wretched populations in Tuscany to devote themselves to the cultivation [of potatoes] on a large scale’.34 The harvest failure of 1816 persuaded the inhabitants of the Pistoiese, the Romagna, the Casentino and the Chianti areas of the Tuscan Grand-Duchy to plant potatoes. And the Pistoiese, Chiarenti boasts, ‘distinguished itself above every other [province], because hunger struck more than in the others, [affecting] a larger number of people’.35 Chiarenti himself increased potato cultivation on his lands eight-fold during the famine, to 800 pounds, half of which he distributed amongst his peasants for planting.36 The Georgofili, while admitting Chiarenti to their Academy, did not share his negative view of Tuscan agriculture. They also objected to his criticism of landowners, as absentee and neglectful, and his proposals to educate estate factors. Evidently, they felt things had moved on since similar ideas had been voiced sixty years earlier by the Georgofili’s founder, the abbé Ubaldo Montelatici. They did, however, approve of Chiarenti’s technical proposals and solutions, which they acknowledged were the fruit of first-hand experience and careful study.37 And they must have been thrilled to the passages about the potato, a subject much discussed in papers read before the Georgofili during this period.

‘ONE OF PROVIDENCE’S MOST PRECIOUS GIFTS’ Why turn to the potato as a possible solution, as practised by the ‘wellintentioned’ Chiarenti? The proposal was not new of course. Potato cultivation had been tried before in Italy – twice in fact. In the words of the Tuscan agronomist Marco Lastri, writing in 1787, potatoes ‘originate from America, and we became familiar with them in the middle of the previous century (i.e. the seventeenth century); but having been neglected, they were re-proposed in the last few years as something new’.38 Lastri’s work was printed again in the wake of the crisis of 1816, when potatoes were ‘introduced’ for a third time. It seems Italians were content with giving the potato a go once a century. Would this be third time lucky? As we know, and as eighteenth-century reformers knew, the potato has a lot going for it (Figure 1.2). It makes an unrivalled famine food, either in the wake of harvest failure or intercropped with cereals. This is because the potato is extremely adaptable to climate and other environmental extremes, able to

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Figure 1.2 The leaves and ‘fruit’ of the potato. In Giovanni Battista Occhiolini, Memorie sopra il meraviglioso frutto americano chiamato volgarmente patata ossia pomo di terra con la descrizione della maniera di piantarlo, coltivarlo, del di lui vantaggio, del modo di ridurlo a farina, ed a pane, di cavarne amido, cipria, di farne salde, bosima &c. (Rome: Giunchi, 1784).

grow at anything up to 4,000 metres above sea level. It also provides quick yields, with some varieties setting tubers after only 60 days, so it can be planted (say) after the grain crop has failed. The potato can be left underground, virtually hidden, and retrieved as needed, even meal by meal, keeping it safe from roving armies, bandits, wanderers or, indeed, tax-collectors searching for food to plunder or appropriate. This makes it attractive in times of strife or when

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local populations want to hold on to what they have: an ideal ‘escape crop’ (as generations of Irish peasants, ever wary of their English overlords, already knew by this time).39 In labour terms, it produces more calories and protein per unit area than any other major grain or root crop. In nutritional terms, when eaten in quantity, the potato provides the body with adequate calories, good quality protein and protective quantities of vitamin C. When properly stored and completely cooked, it is non-toxic, tasty and filling. And, of course, you can drink it (in its potent distilled form), as Saxon peasants were already starting to do, preferring cheaper potato schnapps to other spirits, much to the dismay of local doctors.40 The potato’s only limitation: it cannot be stored over multiple years (in contrast to cereals) or shipped easily. An obvious disadvantage for trade and in times of famine.41 The potato was not unknown in Italy. Agronomists in mountain areas of the south of Italy had had some limited success is establishing it in the wake of the 1803 famine (we shall return to this in Chapter 3). In Tuscany, landowners like Chiarenti had been planting potatoes on their lands ‘for many years’ – but not eating them. As Chiarenti notes in his Riflessioni, they grew potatoes to sell in the markets of the main towns of the Grand-Duchy, where they satisfied ‘the demands of travellers from over the Alps rather than the general taste of Tuscans’.42 Likewise, Ranieri Barbacciani, from the town of Barga (in the mountains north of Lucca), commented on the presence of large quantities of potatoes of the white round type in Pisa and Livorno, both home to established British communities.43 Indeed the British in Livorno – which of course they called Leghorn – had been eating potatoes from as early as the 1760s. It was from them that the geologist and superintendant of mines Giovanni Arduini learned ‘what an agreeable food they were [. . .] and I got used to eating them and I like them very much’.44 This was an internal border between Italy and northern Europe; but the exchange was limited. In the Venetian Republic, the English consul ‘cultivates them with good success in his fine garden not far from Mestre, a place about five miles from Venice’. But, Giuseppe Baretti went on, ‘few of his Italian guests will touch them’.45 The English in Italy had to supply their own. For most, this meant buying from local markets, where sold, or from English ships in harbour, or growing them. But for Henry Swinburne, travelling in the south of Italy in the late 1770s, it meant carrying his own – a prized possession. As he boarded ship for the crossing from Sicily to Calabria, one cold February day, he and his two servants ‘had only a few changes of linen, a mattress I had bought for the occasion, a sack of potatoes, and a keg of porter [. . .] our great coats, and the cloaths [sic] we then wore’.46 For those travelling on foot, like the German author Johann Gottfried Seume in 1802, there was nothing to do but bemoan the absence of potatoes when offered yet another dish of ‘the eternal macaroni’.47

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Local growers would respond if the demand was high enough. The main factor here was ‘the inundation of so many foreign armies that have flooded Italy for the past twenty years’, wrote Filippo Re in 1817.48 For a few years in the early 1800s the presence of English troops in Sicily led to the cultivation of potatoes around Palermo. Once the troops left, however, growers went back to cultivating other foodstuffs.49 The same thing happened at the other end of the peninsula, at around the same time. During the Austrian occupation of Venice large quantities of potatoes were brought in from the department of Panaro (formerly part of the duchy of Modena), to feed the troops stationed there.50 Potatoes were being sold at the market in Udine from 1815, which had come under Austrian rule the year before.51 But for more discriminating Austrian palates, only home-grown potatoes would do. One such was Maria Luigia, wife of Napoleon and duchess of Parma from 1814. The Parma region today may be one of Italy’s great food producing areas; but the fare of the ducal household was strictly Austrian. Barley, sauerkraut, peas and dried prunes were all imported. Potatoes make a frequent appearance on household menus dating from 1815: à la crème, fried and as potato salad. The potatoes, like Maria Luigia herself, were Austrian – though she came from Vienna, the potatoes were from Linz.52 The palace’s cuisine was hardly influenced by its Italian surroundings; just as it had little impact on the cookery of the Parma region. The potato must have seemed a strange exotic to most Italians. A source of ridicule even. During the Austrian blockade of Venice in 1814 the magistrate count Sanfermo was granted permission by the French general Seras to cultivate potatoes in the Piazza d’Armi on the lagoon island of Giudecca. Perhaps he saw it as a means of feeding the beleaguered city. But Sanfermo ill-advisedly remarked that he hoped the blockade of city would last at least until he could harvest his potatoes. He was forever after known as ‘Count Potato’.53 Despite the example of foreign residents dining on the potato, and the market demand this created, and ‘despite all the works written in support of largescale potato cultivation, Tuscans had rather ignored it’, in Chiarenti’s words.54 The years 1815–17 were just the kind of subsistence crisis that prompted the ruling and cultural elites to introduce the potato – again. Authors and printers alike dirtied their hands with ink, if not with soil. In December 1816 the Florentine printer Leonardo Ciardetti approached Giuseppe Sarchiani, secretary of the Accademia dei Georgofili, for advice on the feasibility of reprinting two separate works on the potato as a single volume. Sarchiani’s response was so enthusiastic that Ciardetti published it as a preface to the volume.55 In truth, Ciardetti could have had little doubt about the feasibility of printing a volume on the potato at such a time. There was a surge in titles dedicated to the tuber: publications about potatoes, like the potatoes themselves, appear in clusters. Literate landowners were hungry for information on something to plant which

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might withstand the rigours of the changed climate, which gave them a return and fed their tenant-farmers. Printers rushed out to satisfy the demand. Vincenzi in Modena quickly published a paper read before the local agrarian society ten years earlier (on the uses and keeping qualities of the potato).56 In Florence alone, Ciardetti himself printed a second work, Guglielmo Piatti printed a further four titles, and the archiepiscopal printer, one. Within the space of a year, Verdiano Rimbotti’s potato paper, first read to the Accademia dei Georgofili on 8 January 1817, had appeared as a short book printed by Piatti in Florence, then by F. Baroni in Lucca, then in a compilation of studies printed by Piatti and, finally, in a second, expanded edition printed by Ciardetti. Twelve potato titles were published in the maize-growing heartlands: five in Udine, four in Milan and three in Venice. In Pistoia, hardly a centre of the publishing world, the Manfredini brothers printed three other short works specifically dedicated to the potato, in addition to Chiarenti’s treatise. (It is symptomatic of Chiarenti’s practical approach to potato cultivation that, although all three works preceded his, he makes no reference to any of them.57) Potato publications were not confined to the centre-north: seven works were printed in the Kingdom of Naples, often under the auspices of provincial agricultural societies. In all, during the years 1815–19, at least 40 pamphlets or books on the potato were published in Italy. This included original works, re-editions and compilations; interestingly, there were no translations.58 Interest in the potato was a significant factor in the general rise in the number of Italian publications devoted to agricultural topics. The number of such titles published in Italy went from an average of 50 per year in the period 1812–15 to double that (98) in the 20 years from 1816.59 The fact that, between them, seven printers were responsible for 20 of the potato titles, suggests that there was a market for such works. At least some of the print demand came from the civilian authorities who actively campaigned for the introduction of the potato. To make their entreaties more effective, they would enclose a potato pamphlet or handbill. Such was the case in the Tuscan Grand-Duchy, where handbills dedicated to the potato were already in circulation – like the one an Aretine patrician pasted to the inside cover of his handwritten ‘book of secrets’ in 1809 (Figure 1.3). At the height of the crisis, on 15 January 1817, Girolamo Bartolomei, of the Uffizio Generale della Comunità, wrote to all the towns in the Mugello (in the Apennines north of Florence) affected by famine. With each letter he enclosed a short book on potato cultivation. Bartolomei hoped it would serve: to promote and encourage, with all possible zeal, the cultivation of the plant which, instead of being subject to the misfortunes deriving from the inclemency of the seasons, serves as a great resource for the sustenance of the indigent class, especially in the calamitous times of scarcity in cereal harvests.60

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Figure 1.3 A handbill describing the ‘easy and tested method of cultivating potatoes’, with advice how to grow and cook them, for human and animal use. Florence: Stamperia Albizziana, 1801. (Pasted to the inside back cover of ‘Collezione di buoni ed eruditi sentimenti, indovinelli e memorie, con più diversi segreti, ricette e ricordi. Ad uso dell’Ill.mo Sig.r Cav.r Giov. Battista Albergotti patrizio aretino, an. MDCCCIX’, Archivio di Stato, Arezzo, Archivio Albergotti, MS. 42.)

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The book concerned was the very one that Ciardetti had just published, containing works by Carlo Amoretti and Vincenzo Dandolo. The pamphlet by the Venetian chemist and agronomist Vincenzo Dandolo, praising the potato as ‘one of Providence’s most precious gifts’, had benefited from support from the Austrian authorities of Lombardy-Venetia earlier that same year, as would several of Dandolo’s other agricultural works. Government sponsorship permitted print runs of up to 5,500 copies for Dandolo’s books, quite high for the period.61 The Austrian authorities, well acquainted with the virtues of the potato, supported its cultivation in Lombardy-Venetia, as early as 1815. Potato cultivation became government policy. In October 1816 the Austrians decreed that henceforth those renting public lands, whether municipal or state, would have to set aside a portion for potato cultivation. This was to be stipulated in all new rental agreements.62 In 1816 the Venetian lagoon island of Giudecca once again became the site of potato planting. This time Pietro Zorzi carried out a potato trial, with the support of the Austrian government. By trying out a ‘new and tastier type’ and by supplying seed potatoes to farmers at a modest price the government hoped to encourage cultivation and consumption.63 A variety called ‘Ox Noble’ was obtained from an English ship and planted in April; it yielded an amazing 36 times the seed planted. In his own trials of six different English varieties, Zorzi judged the ‘Ox Noble’ the most productive, but the best tasting was the ‘Real Cumberland’.64 For a physiocrat like Zorzi the potato was perfect: it improved the condition of the poor without threatening the livelihood of the rich (since in good years the potato crop could be fed to the animals and so would not affect the price of cereals). Social order was maintained. Zorzi was put in charge of the distribution of seed potatoes, obtained from English merchants. Local authorities were to compile lists of landowners interested in planting them, each of whom was eligible for up to 500 pounds. The authorities would have to come and collect them in Venice, from Zorzi, ‘at the current price of 7 ½ cents a pound’.65 Zorzi makes it sound so orderly; it was not. Local authorities replied that they lacked sufficient funds to buy the seed potatoes. They made requests to the central government for funds to purchase them. Five thousand tonnes were imported from Fiume (today’s Rijeka) in 1816. However, peasants were reluctant to grow them in place of their staple, maize. Moreover, hunger forced them to lift the potatoes before they were ready – in the process harming both themselves and the crop.66 To the south, in the Kingdom of Naples, the Interior minister, Donato Tommasi, sent a circular to all the provincial intendents. In it, he invited ‘all the administrative and municipal authorities . . . to encourage and facilitate the said cultivation [of the potato] with all the means in their power’.67 Moreover, he called on large landowners to set the example and on parish priests to preach the message. Tommasi’s motivation was paternalistic; his biggest fear the possibility

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of public unrest and disorder. Nowhere was the subsistence crisis even mentioned. And his circular placed all the onus on the local areas. None the less, the response was, if not overwhelming, at least enthusiastic. Prizes and medals were issued, ‘Instructions’ published, free seed potatoes distributed, with the sponsorship of the provinces, the towns and the economic societies.68

RESISTANCE But even with official support the potato’s adoption was a tug of war between opposing opinions. A delegation from towns around Padua desperately petitioned the podestà to supply them with 11,535 paduan pounds (or 5,606 kg) of seed potatoes. The petitioners – landowners from the towns of Este, Montagnana, Piove and Battaglia – had carefully calculated the amount required, based on the crop they would need to feed their poor, which amounted to one-fifth of the local population, for a period of three months. This was allowing for one pound of potatoes (just under 500 g) per person, per day. The Paduan podestà responded to the delegation that potato cultivation was little practised, since the peasants were devoted to maize. Only a slow and patient campaign would convince them to plant potatoes, he added; and then only in light soils and if the price of seed potatoes remained low.69 In other words: no. Maybe the supply of seed potatoes was no longer available from the Austrian authorities. Or maybe the podestà was just being realistic. After all, even a contemporary potato pamphlet sought to account for peasant resistance. In his successful 1817 treatise, Dandolo suggested three reasons why a tenant-farmer might oppose his landowner’s requests to cultivate potatoes: (i) he is convinced that anyone who lives away from the land cannot possibly know much about farming; (ii) he trusts only his own experience and that of his father; and (iii) he distrusts the landowner’s advice, believing he must have his own interests at heart and not those of his tenant.70 Another potato pamphlet published in the same year suggested peasants might be right to be wary of their landowners’ eager exhortations, since the advice they gave might be misguided or just plain wrong. Along the lines of ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’, Antonio Romano warned of the distractions of armchair horticulturalists, or in his words, ‘those people who toil hard at their writing desks’.71 Just to take one example: there was no clear agreement on how, when and where to plant the potatoes, and no advice on how to fit their cultivation into established practices of crop rotation. A pamphlet printed in L’ Aquila in 1817 suggests planting them near boundaries, hedges, piles of stones and in town gardens.72 Clearly, they were intended as little more than a stop-gap measure. There are other reasons not mentioned by Dandolo which can help explain peasant resistance. The potato did not fit into accepted categories of foodstuffs.

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It was as unusual, odd and improper, in the eyes of Italian peasants, as the lichens Swedish peasants were advised to consume 50 years later (a campaign that met with similarly negative results).73 Most Italian treatises suggested potatoes be consumed in the form of bread. Taste and quality aside, this was no simple procedure, as it meant reducing them into starch (fecola), which required specialized equipment. It was beyond the means of most peasants. The lack of such equipment was enough to put off people; indeed it constituted ‘the greatest obstacle among the people with regard to this branch of agriculture’, in the words of another pamphlet.74 For example, numerous pamphlets extolled the merits of the ‘American pot’ (marmitta americana) – a double-bottomed, sealing pot that steamed the vegetables rather than submersing them in water.75 This method was first advocated by Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, although it was actually based on Native American cooking techniques.76 It had the advantage of cooking the potatoes thoroughly and uniformly, so they could easily be reduced into paste or starch, for use in breadmaking. But Parmentier’s version was an expensive piece of kit at a time when most cooking was done by the fireside, directly in the embers or in clay pots. Second, tenant-farmers feared that their landlords would adopt potatoes as a substitute for their traditional staples, whether wheat, maize or chestnuts. This was more than just attachment to tradition, for even the possibility of substitutions called into question the peasants’ very notions of subsistence. Theirs was a diet with little room for flexibility. Prevailing landholding systems gave peasants little choice in what they grew. Landlords were ‘the owners of our houses, our fields and our immediate futures’, in the words of the protagonist of Raffaele Crovi’s ‘anthropological peasant memoir’ set in the Apennines between Reggio and Parma.77 The agricultural system resulted in a peasant food culture that was highly regulated. One that made a virtue of necessity, praising basic foodstuffs, and making them go as far as possible. This combined food and agricultural system was quite resistant to change and – quite understandably – adverse to risk. Elite cookery, by contrast, could afford to be more flexible, as well as more abundant and varied. At times, as in the baroque, it made a virtue of the novel and the curious; but, in its own way, it could be just as conservative as peasant cookery. Third, the peasants must have noted that there was something of a double standard in operation. As Vito Teti has noted, potato cultivation was encouraged by the same landowners who continued to consume white bread (and not potatoes) and by the same priests who preached fasting and resignation to the peasantry.78 Even such an avid and experienced campaigner as Zorzi had to resort to forcing his tenant-farmers to plant potatoes on their plots, under pain of expulsion.79 Chiarenti’s ‘flask of wine’ might have done the trick better. In any case, we must not lose sight of the fact that it was often the landowners themselves who were amongst the staunchest opponents to large-scale potato cultivation, if it lowered demand (and the price) for their wheat. From a strictly economic point of view, they had little to gain from persuading their tenant farmers to grow potatoes.

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And speaking of landowners, it is curious that the pro-potato agronomists rarely mentioned these figures as elements of resistance. Rather than single out members of their own class, they preferred to put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the peasants. What was in it for the landowners? After all, there was still little market for potatoes compared to other crops. The same reluctance of landowners to grow something new and of low market value, combined with the uncertainty of the peasants, has been used to explain the slow take-up of maize in Piedmont two centuries earlier.80 It is curious fact that agricultural change happened far quicker in the potato’s land of orgin in the Andes. And there is one main reason for this: in the Andes region, conquering Spaniards acted as agents of change.81 This is the other end of the Columbian exchange of plants and animals. In a process of syncretism surveyed by the historical geographer Daniel Gade, Spaniards in the Andes region acted as the initial agents for the spread of European crops, at first to meet their own needs and desires. By the middle of the sixteenth century – some 50 years after first ‘contact’ (to use a euphemism) – they were reproducing their own plants, animals and farming implements. The indigenous peoples of today’s Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador rapidly learned to use the tools, grow the crops and eat the foods thus introduced. Embracing them was another matter; like peasants in Italy (and in most other places), they were distrustful of change. And yet, as we shall see in Chapter 5, agricultural land use in the Andes was highly developed, varied and adaptible, such that European crops like wheat and barley eventually found places alongside native ones like maize (and sheep alongside llamas). Indigenous peoples were highly selective in what they adopted, much as Europeans were when it came to New World plants. In the Andes such introductions occurred selectively, when they were considered useful: when they spread the risks imposed by nature and when they enriched people’s livelihoods and diets (even if they did not bring about an escape from poverty). The calamity of sharp population decline after the Spanish conquest – a population reduced by an estimated 90 per cent in the hundred years after 1520 – and the disruption that resulted, may have sped up this process of adoption and accommodation. European influence was most prevalent in the temperate valleys of this highland environment. Here, the two cultures, Spanish and native, had largely converged by the late-eighteenth century to form a mestizo population. Higher up, above around 3,500 metres, where the climate made European crops undependable, indigenous land use, settlement patterns, and culture persisted more tenaciously. Since then, much of the Central Andes has changed relatively little. In Italy there were no external agents acting for change in local practices, to the extent exercized by the Spanish conquerors and settlers in South America. When it came to the potato, the Austrian overlords of Lombardy-Venetia did try, but without much success. Whatever the reasons for his refusal, the podestà

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of Padua was not the only Italian official to resist requests to trial the potato. On 14 June 1815 the Austrian prefect of the Este district, Johann Burger, issued an ordinance instructing the district’s mayors to oversee potato trials in their jurisdictions, as a means of encouraging cultivation. As an agronomist, Burger knew something about the potato. On 25 September, with summer over, Burger sent a circular to all the mayors of the district, ‘it now being necessary to know in detail the results of your efforts’. Evidently, the mayors had been negligent in relaying the details. In his reply of one week later, the podestà of Montagnana (Padua) was evasive. He wrote that he would do his best to encourage the introduction of the potato, as requested by the prefect. He feared, however, that the ‘centuries-old’ attachment of ‘our peasants’ to maize would render the initiative ineffective.82 Note how both mayors passed the blame squarely on to the shoulders of local peasants; the officials themselves may have been just as resistant to change. Come the harvest failures, a group of ‘industrious and philanthropic landowners’ in the mountains of Pistoia’s Vicariato got together during 1816 and resolved to do something about the famine. This was in a region where the main resource came from trees: a quarter of the land was woodland (Turkey and holm oak, beech, fir) and a further third was planted with chestnuts.83 According to Chiarenti, the landowners decided to plant considerably more potatoes than the previous year, in order to provide ‘succour to their indigent fellow inhabitants’, rather than profit from it. Together they planted over 90,000 pounds of potatoes, rather than the several thousand planted the previous year, and harvested over two million pounds.84 It might sound impressive, but it did little to counter the harvest failure of that year, including the near total absence of chestnuts, the inhabitants’ usual sustenance. Two million pounds, divided by the nine thousand inhabitants of the Vicariato, did not go very far. The result, Chiarenti admits, was that ‘many inhabitants of that mountain region had to suffer hunger and misery’.85 The next year, 1817, the same landowners planted twice as many potatoes. Of the 150,000 pounds they planted, they harvested 3.2 million pounds. Churchmen were also involved in the push for the potato, as they had been at other times and places. In the middle of February 1817 the archbishop of Bologna, Carlo Opizzoni, circulated a letter to his vicari foranei recommending them to push for potato cultivation in their parishes, ‘the only way to keep the terrible menace of famine away’.86 Attached was a potato pamphlet written by local professor of agronomy Giovanni Contri.87 Luigi Rondanini, cathedral canon in Conversano (Puglia), preached the potato’s benefits to the town’s peasants in November 1816. Rondanini’s preaching came at the behest of a local landowner, Donato de Jatta, who had been cultivating potatoes on his lands for a few years.88 Clerical activity elsewhere was prompted by more forceful secular coercion. In July 1816 a printed Istruzione on potato cultivation was sent to all the parish priests in the province of Friuli by the Austrian authorities. The covering circular

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recognized the priests as ‘the recipients of the peasants’ trust’ and, as such, ‘one of the most effective means of instilling and disseminating amongst the people those useful truths and practices most advantageous to society and the state’.89 One wonders how willingly the ‘beneficiaries’ responded. Were churchmen as resistant to change as their parishioners? When the physicist Alessandro Volta campaigned for the intoduction of potatoes in the countryside of Brianza (outside Milan) in the 1770s, the most vociferous opposition came from a local curate who produced a pamphlet denouncing the potato as the ‘Hecate’s apple’ for its infernal, mandrake-like appearance.90 (The fact that Volta was a freemason only made things worse.) Or did they, like the ‘potato priests’ of Norway, cultivate potatoes on their own lands, distributing seed-potatoes to their farmer-parishioners?91 Much of the Italian evidence is one-sided, coming as it does from the pens of the reformers. One priest took an active role. The parish priest of Pieve di Arbizzano (Verona), Luigi Dalla Bella, wrote his own potato pamphlet, which he distributed to other priests in the area.92 Back in Tuscany, Chiarenti gives the example of the parish priest of Santa Maria Novella, near Radda, Revd Montanti. In 1816 Montanti extended the amount of land he dedicated to potato cultivation to 18 staiate, from 3 the year before. He made the potatoes into bread, in the proportion of one-third potatoes to two-thirds flour (made from various cereals). With this bread Montanti fed not only his own tenant-farmers but other needy people in the area.93 What the peasants thought of the bread is not recorded. Chiarenti himself planted 800 pounds of potatoes, eight times the usual amount. His return was only 3,000 pounds – but then ‘given the widespread misery, many [potatoes] were stolen’.94 Presumably, his desperate peasants dug the potatoes up while they were still in the ground. Chiarenti went about his task methodically, consulting Dandolo’s treatise and interrogating both himself, and other landowners, how to get the best return. Chiarenti got the best crop in recently deforested land, up in the mountains. His conclusion was that potatoes did well where the chestnut prospered, provided they received plenty of light, making it ideal for ‘the least accessible, mountainous parts’ of the Grand Duchy.95 Growing potatoes in regularly cultivated land markedly reduces their productivity, Chiarenti notes. This may be the reason why, in potato-growing parts of Europe, ‘they have still suffered terrible famines’ in recent years, worse than in Tuscany, ‘which did not have potatoes and which even now has very few compared to them’.96

AFTER THE FAMINE Something like normality returned with the successful harvests of 1817 and 1818. The weather was perfect, even a little on the dry side. In the Florentine

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countryside livestock fairs, accompanied by horse racing, were permitted again. In the summer of 1817 the price of wheat fell to almost half, and maize to a third, of what it had been just six months earlier.97 The rapid fall in prices, however, led to a widespread economic recession and agricultural stagnation. Landowners lacked the capital to give work to tenants and tradesmen. But at least no one was starving. The price of potatoes fell to just one-quarter of what it had been previously, as demand plummeted. The problem was that, as far as the potato was concerned, as soon as people had the choice, they reverted back to their previous dietary habits and preferences. Once the crisis passed the potato’s contribution was quickly forgotten. According to Chiarenti, the fine weather of 1817 brought with it a reduction in the potato crop, which in turn discouraged many Tuscan landowners from growing it. So too did the falling price of grain. Chiarenti felt this was a pity: even if people might shun potatoes for their own consumption once grain was once again available and affordable, potatoes made an excellent forage crop for livestock. And forage was in short supply in Tuscany.98 The 30,000 pounds potatoes Chiarenti harvested in 1818 went to feed his horses, pigs and sheep, ‘which eat them very well’.99 Then came the drought of 1820, which affected most of the peninsula. It must have confirmed the widespread belief in the unsuitability of potatoes in a Mediterranean climate. In its detailed description of Montaione and its agriculture, the Dizionario geografico-fisico della Toscana, compiled during the 1830s, makes no mention of either Chiarenti or potatoes.100 While the Italian elites, lay and clerical alike, campaigned for the cultivation and consumption of the potato, Italian peasants remained largely reluctant. Not just for their own consumption; they were also unhappy growing it for animal fodder, lest it take the place of other crops. The potato was associated with dearth and desperation, negative associations it took a long time to shed. From the point of view of the agronomist, such as the reverend Paolo Giampaolo, the attitude was ‘due to inertia rather than intent’; but it might strike us as quite a rational position to take.101 The Tuscan authorities had done more than most to develop potato cultivation during the crisis. Their efforts were made easier by the existence of a substantial corpus of works in support of the potato and its uses by a host of Tuscan authors, such as Chiarenti. They received constant encouragement, assistance and expertise from Florence’s reform-minded Accademia dei Georgofili. It had the right climate and terrain. If the potato was going to succeed anywhere in Italy this place should have been Tuscany. And yet it did not, not in Tuscany, or anywhere else in Italy for that matter. After the subsistence crisis subsided, grateful Italians returned to their bread and their maize. The potato went back to being fodder for animals – and the

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least popular fodder at that. A decade after the crisis George William Tighe, an Anglo-Irishman resident in Pisa, had potatoes sent to him from the mountains of Pistoia, Pescia, Massa and Carrara, from Florence and from Rome. They all turned out to be of the same variety. ‘The best varieties of potato are yet little known’, Tighe concluded, ‘and the fact of having neither good varieties nor adequate crops has prevented the potato from achieving its rightful place in Tuscan agriculture’.102 The man in charge of the Grand-Duchy’s forests, the Prague-born Karl Siemon, later reported that in 1839 only one variety of potato was known on the Casentino region, and even that was ‘planted in very small amounts’.103 In addition to a lack of suitable varieties for local needs was the persisting lack of agreement on how best to cultivate them. As Raffaele Pepe noted in 1823, even where potatoes were increasingly planted, as in his native Molise, they still had not entered into local systems of crop rotation.104 Potatoes had not yet found their rural niche. The 1830s promised little change. A description of 1832 noted how ‘landowners had great difficulties in obtaining the cultivation of potatoes, and it is normally only the livestock which enjoys their bounty’.105 And an almanac published in Arezzo in 1836 singled out the continued ‘poorly advised repugnance towards potato cultivation’.106 Looking back on this period, the Bolognese novelist Riccardo Bacchelli had his doubts, too. Bacchelli undertook painstaking historical researches for his ‘mill novel’ (romanzo molinaresco), first published in 1938–40 and tracing the life of a family and its floating mill on the River Po near Ferrara. When the protganist of the saga inaugurates the mill in the fateful year 1816–17, on 29 September, the feast day of St Michael, a special celebratory meal is offered for the large number of guests, consisting of tagliatelle, tortellini, chicken, meatballs (with garlic and parsley) – and potato gnocchi. Bacchelli glosses: ‘In those times, potatoes were still almost something new, recently brought in, the harvest of which has been celebrated right up until our own time on St Michael’s day, by eating these gnocchi.’ To which he adds, parenthetically: ‘If, however, more detailed studies suggest that, despite the philanthropist Parmentier, the potato was not yet so widespread in the Ferrara area, it means that history has played a trick on me here, and they were pasta gnocchi instead’.107 Although many Italians planted and ate potatoes during the subsistence crisis, 1816 was not the year when potatoes entered the Italian diet for good. This would not happen for at least another 50 years. To understand why it took so long, especially compared with other parts of Europe where the potato was enthusiastically received, we need to go back some three centuries, and start at the beginning.

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An Exotic American in Italy: 1573

If the crisis of 1816–17 saw the third ‘introduction’ of the potato in Italy, and not an entirely successful one at that, when was the first? The earliest detailed, firsthand Italian description of the potato gives us an idea. It comes from the pen of Tuscan monk Vitale Magazzini, written sometime before his death in 1606. The potatoes, recently brought here from Spain and Portugal by the Discalced Carmelite friars, are to be planted in good soil, fresh and moist, as one plants cane buds; which are then dug up in October, and they crop heavily, and they are eaten sliced, or in the manner of truffles or mushrooms, fried and floured, or in the pan with verjuice [a condiment made with sour grapes], and they are pleasant to the taste with the flavour of cardoons; and they multiply innumerably, and are easily cooked and are tender.1

Magazzini evidently had more than a passing acquaintance with the potato. He compares its taste and preparation to that of other well known foods and he provides details about its growing season and planting methods, knowing enough not to plant the seeds, but a low-lying bud. Magazzini suggests that the potato had been tried before in Italy, before interest in it had faded. Then it came back again with the Discalced Carmelites, a Spanish branch of the Franciscan Order. In 1584 a friar named Niccolò Doria founded the first Italian monastery of the Discalced Carmelites in his native Genoa, so perhaps they brought potatoes with them on that occasion or soon afterwards.2

INITIAL REACTIONS, OR ONE BOTANIST’S TRUFFLE IS ANOTHER’S PYCNOCOMUS Magazzini alludes to a primary, but passing, phase of interest in the potato in Italy. Indeed there are some earlier Italian descriptions of the potato, but whether their authors had actually seen the tuber they were describing is another matter. The middle years of the sixteenth century witnessed a fervid exchange of seeds, dried specimens and illustrations of plants within a European network of scholars interested in the natural world. One of these was Pietro Antonio

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Michiel, a Venetian patrician and amateur botanist. Michiel worked for a time at Padua’s botanic garden but he also maintained his own. Michiel is the first Italian to write about the potato. He is also the first to write about it as a kind of truffle. During the years from 1550 to 1573 Michiel compiled a massive manuscript collection of five ‘books of plants’ in which he attempted to detail the known plants of the time. The collection is confused and contradictory, overwhelmed by the detail it contains (and the spelling is atrocious!), but it provides an often reliable guide to the state of contemporary knowledge about plant species. In the ‘yellow book’, devoted to ‘thorny and prickly plants, and with bulbous and rounded root’, entry number 62 refers to the papa.3 Michiel uses the potato’s native Peruvian (Quechuan) name, suggesting a Spanish source for his information (to which we shall return below). Michiel is clear about its origins: ‘It is found in the Indies’. At the same time, as far as herbalists are concerned, this new tuber was a species of truffle. The rest of the Michiel’s entry concerns the potato’s resemblance to the truffle – which already grew in Italy, he notes, in Romagna, Verona, Friuli and Tuscany – in its form, growing habit and uses. Michiel regarded the potato’s generation underground as something belonging to the realm of mystery, a ‘secret humour in the earth’, like the truffle or mushrooms. He probably had not seen a potato plant grow, because he did not know how to relate its single root to the ‘mass of them in reproducing’. (Tubers can appear several feet from the parent plant, so Michiel’s reaction is understandable.) Finally, there is the matter of use, since potatoes are consumed, just as truffles are. ‘The Indians eat them, which also makes us think they are like truffles, although I do not know whether they differ in taste’. The potato–truffle comparison suggests a bright future for the potato. ‘Our truffles are eaten by princes and important people and are much prized’; they ‘are fried in oil, roasted, or boiled, and then are eaten with [black] pepper’; and they are ‘appetising and lust-inducing’ (which is either good or bad, depending on one’s point of view). Mind you, we can infer from Michiel’s comments that he had not actually tasted a papa, so he did not really know; all of his information appears to be second-hand. The accompanying illustration, like those for most of his New World plants, is similarly vague.4 Michiel gives us no explicit indication of who his contact might have been for his information about the potato. But just a few years later one of Europe’s richest and well connected men obtained some potatoes from Michiel’s native Venice. In November 1580 Hans Fugger wrote from Augsburg to thank Hieronimus Ott in Venice for sending him the ‘tartuffali’.5 Fugger was an astute and avid collector of rare novelties and curiosities from the New World, with a dense network of correspondents and contacts throughout Europe, aside from

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being the scion of a powerful banking dynasty. Alas there is no record of what Fugger did with his potatoes! When potatoes are first described in print in Continental Europe, the source for the actual potatoes are also Italian. The botanist Charles de l’Écluse (Carolus Clusius) first describes the potato in his Rariorum plantarum historia of 1601 and then again in a section devoted to ‘American exotics’ in a 1605 work.6 De l’Écluse recounts how he was sent a couple of tubers while in the employ of emperor Maximilian I at his court in Vienna, in 1588, by the prefect of Mons-en-Hainault, who had in turn obtained them from a friend of the papal legate in Belgium. In that same year de l’Écluse had an illustration done of them (Figure 2.1).7 De l’Écluse tells us that the Italians referred to potatoes as tartouffli, the word Fugger used. Potatoes were already ‘common and frequent in certain parts of Italy’, de l’Écluse remarks. So much so that ‘they used to eat the tubers of it cooked with mutton in the same manner as they do with turnips and the roots of carrots’. Indeed, he adds, ‘they actually employed it for fodder for pigs.’ However, the Italians did not remember whence they had first obtained them. For de l’Écluse, the ultimate source had to have been Spain or America. He seems disappointed to have to relate that Padua’s botanic garden did not actually have any, since it might have been able to clear up the question. In fact it did. As de l’Écluse was writing, in 1601, it had had potatoes in its collection for at least ten years. When the first complete list of the garden’s plants was compiled, in 1591, by the third prefect of the garden, the ‘gentleman botanist’ Giacomo Cortuso, it contained 1,170 entries, and one of them was the potato.8 In any case, De l’Écluse would have been disappointed by the attribution Cortuso gave it – not New World but ancient. It is typical of the ongoing search for classical antecedents to New World plants that Cortuso should call his potato, not by any of the names used hitherto, but ‘Picnocomo di Dioscoride’. In other words, the pycnocomus as described by the ancient authority on materia medica, Dioscorides; a plant which other sixteenth-century botanists had been unable to identify – so why not apply the name to the potato! No surprise then that Cortuso was the same botanist who referred to another New World arrival, the tomato, as ‘Lycopersicon di Galeno’, or Galen’s wolf-peach. De l’Écluse may not have known about Padua’s pycnocomus-potato, but another famous botanist of the day, Gaspard Bauhin, did. The Swiss Bauhin actually visited Padua, and in his Podromos theatri botanici of 1620 he refers to Cortuso’s label.9 Not that Bauhin agreed with it though. In fact Bauhin was the first to call the potato Solanum tuberosum esculentum, later adopted by Linnaeus. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The important thing is that for Bauhin the potato was a new plant, as it was for de l’Écluse. However, that was about all the two could agree on. De l’Écluse coined the Latin tag papas

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Figure 2.1 The potato plant as painted for Charles de l’Écluse, which details the leaves, flower and berry but cuts off the roots, leaving the tubers stranded. ‘Aardappelplant’, water-colour, 1588. © Museum Plantin-Moretus/Prentenkabinet, Antwerp – UNESCO World Heritage.

peruanorum for the potato, in homage to its native name and origins. Only a new binomial would do. Not only was it not mentioned by the ancient authorities; it was also unlike anything de l’Écluse had seen before. It had leaves like those of a horseradish, flowers smelling of linden and round fruit-like roots,

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similar to the quasi-magical, man-like roots of the mandrake. De l’Écluse found the potato unlike either the truffle or the chestnut. For Bauhin, the potato was obviously a Solanum: the plant’s leaves resembled those of the tomato, its flowers those of the aubergine. The whole plant smelled strongly. Alas, for the potato, these were all highly suspect plants. The European solanums – mandrake and belladonna, for example – were considered vision-inducing, linked with poison and magic. The aubergine, only recently arrived from the Middle East, and was still associated with Jewish food habits and was called the malus insanum, or ‘mad apple’. The tomato was still too new to have found favour in Europe, though its identification as a variety of aubergine was not helping its image much. De l’Écluse’s potato is dark red and very late maturing. It is distinct from modern varieties in its irregular shape, outgrowths and very deep eyes. What is curious is that this type of potato, combined with the white-skinned and earlier-maturing variety described by John Gerard in 1597, could have been responsible for all potato varieties developed in Europe prior to the advent of ‘modern’ breeding, in the middle of the nineteenth century.10 De l’Écluse was quite right to point to the potato’s journey to Italy via Spain or direct from the New World, where potatoes were first domesticated and where different varieties evolved. Today, ‘primitive’ cultivated potatoes occur at high altitudes in the Andes, from Colombia and Venezuela through Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia to northern Argentina, with an outlying population at lower altitudes in Chile. The climatic range is from near-alpine to temperate, but most occur in tropical latitudes (though high up) where the days are always short. Native peoples in South America still sow a dozen or so mixed native varieties together in the same plot, somewhat haphazardly, with each used in a different way from the others. A hundred different varieties can be found in the same Andean valley.11 To protect this traditional system of mixed culture and the traditional cultivars associated with it, the International Potato Centre in Lima (Peru) today maintains some 5,000 different varieties. As far as European contact is concerned, the potato is first mentioned in a Spanish chronicle of Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, by the soldierscholar Pedro Cieza de León. In the first part of his chronicle, relating to events of 1538, Cieza de León notes how the inhabitants of Quito relied on the potato as a staple, in addition to maize and quinoa. The first part of the chronicle was published in Seville in 1553 and appeared in an Italian translation, printed in Rome, just two years later.12 It is without doubt the source for Michiel’s information, described above. Spanish chronicles about the conquest, like Cieza’s, were quickly translated into Italian, as well as other European languages, and had a wide circulation.13 Michiel could have read Cieza’s work in one of five different Italian editions, four of which published

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in Venice. Cieza describes the papas roots as ‘almost like truffles though they have no firm envelope and these when cooked have a soft pulp like a cooked chestnut; when dried by the sun they are called chuño and are stored for use’. The comparisons with both the truffle and the chestnut would become well established in Europe. By contrast, the slow freeze-drying of potatoes into chuño would not make it across the Atlantic. Europeans might not deign to eat it at first, but already by the time of Cieza de León Spaniards in Peru were making large amounts of money selling chuño to the impoverished Native Americans toiling at the silver mines of Potosì.14 Fifty years later the Spanish inhabitants of Quito were eating chuño too, alongside the European crops and tools they had brought with them. Some sense of the sheer number of potato types did reach some Europeans. In his dictionary of the Aymara language of 1612, the Italian Jesuit Lodovico Bertonio, active a long way from his native town of Rocca Contrada, gives some of the different names applied to the diverse potatoes found in the central Andes (today’s Bolivia).15 Jesuit missionaries like Bertonio made a point of understanding local cultures, from China to Mexico, as part of their conversion strategy. Dictionaries like Bertonio’s were part of this. So we learn that the Aymara, then as now, differentiated their potatoes according to tuber phenotype (characteristics such as shape, skin and flesh colour, and spacing of the ‘eyes’), ecology (resistance and adaptibility), and culinary uses (texture and taste). And, then as now, there was the custom of planting a range of varieties of many colours and shapes together in the same plot, described as cchalu in Bertonio’s dictionary (today’s chalo). By Bertonio’s time the potato had been tried as food in Spain. There is second-hand evidence that potatoes were sent from Cuzco (Peru) to Spain in 1565, at the behest of Phillip II, who then presented them as a gift to pope Pius IV later that same year. This may even have been the Belgian papal legate’s source, as referred to by Clusius.16 From first-hand evidence, in the form of notarial records, we know that potatoes were being exported from the Canary Islands to Antwerp as early as 1567 and to Rouen in 1574. Through the 1570s and 1580s Seville’s Hospital de le Sangre was buying locally grown patatas, though we’ve no idea how they were used.17 All goods entering Spain from the New World had to pass through the port of Seville, so the city was an important crossroad for the importation and diffusion of New World plants, as food and medicine. It is significant that the bewildering variety of shapes, colours and textures known in the Andes, each with their own names, was now reduced to a single entity by Europeans. Despite this early adoption, the potato remained little more than a curiosity in Spain. In Italy the potato seems to have aroused much less curiosity than some of the other ‘exotic Americans’, such as maize, chillies and tomatoes. The

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potato is notable by its absence in most Italian botanical works. Neither Pietro Andrea Mattioli, in his commentary on Dioscorides, first published in 1544 and revised repeatedly by him until his death in 1577, nor Castore Durante, in his Herbario nuovo (1585), mentions it.18 Other early possible references, like Antonio Pigafetta’s in 1522, turn out to be about the sweet potato – a source of confusion for many years. Aside from the description in (the unpublished) Michiel, the only other early Italian reference is by Girolamo Cardano. In his De rerum varietate of 1557, Cardano remarks that potatoes, which he also calls papas, are better tasting than chestnuts, are like truffles, and are used instead of bread by the Peruvian Indians. It is no surprise to find the potato cropping up in ramshackle encyclopaedia of ‘natural phenomena’ by the physician, philosopher, mathematician, magus (and heretic) Cardano. But he has not actually seen or tasted one himself. Still, Cardano’s conclusion about the use of the potato as bread – ‘It is thus that Nature wisely provides us for all our wants’ – foreshadowed by two centuries the potato propaganda to come.19

USES AND ABUSES It was not immediately obvious what the potato might be good for. Physicians and botanists – and most early botanists were physicians, in any case – were not exactly brimming with suggestions, or even enthusiasm, for the new plant. The were bewildered with something not found in Aristotle, Pliny, Dioscorides or Virgil. From a medical point of view, they were on their own. The perception that it resembled a truffle was problematic: harmful and appealing at the same time. Truffles had long been an elite foodstuff. They were expensive and, as such, the object of courtly gift-giving throughout Italy. Presents had an active function in building and cementing social relations – the rarer the better. In the Tuscan Grand-Duchy members of the Medici family frequently exchanged baskets of truffles with one another, along with other foodstuffs, as a simple search through the Medici Archive Project database reveals.20 The dukes of Savoy, with their own convenient supply, presented truffles to other European courts every December, as part of an active strategy to foster diplomatic relations.21 In the sixteenth century, when the potato was still a relative rarity, and so quite mysterious, it was also exchanged. A chain of gifts put the potato into de l’Écluse’s hands, as we’ve seen. A valuable rarity perhaps, but when Europeans tried to prepare the potato in the same way as the truffle, they soon lost interest. We know next to nothing about how the early potatoes were cultivated, how they tasted and how

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they were cooked in Italy. But they must have palled in comparison with the truffle, ‘baked in the embers’, eaten on its own with ‘its seasoning, that is salt and pepper’, as well as in ‘broths, stews and pies’.22 Other New World arrivals, like maize and the chilli pepper, made effective substitutes for existing foodstuffs. Maize could be turned into flour or meal; chilli pepper into a spice far cheaper than black pepper; and American beans were accepted so heartily that they lost any separate identity. By contrast, the potato, like the tomato, would only come into its own when Europeans learned to treat it as something different and developed new culinary associations for it. This acculturation was only achieved in the nineteenth century, as we shall see. For now, the potato met with best ambivalence, at worst disregard, following the initial flurry of botanical interest. Physicians were not about to advise eating something they associated with the truffle. The truffle was a paradox, ‘strange and dangerous’,23 dark and ugly, yet highly prized, it grew underground like a humble vegetable yet was relished by the higher-ups in society. Its ability to blend in with its environment made it the symbol of deceit and hypocrisy. In what country other than Italy would noblemen allow themselves to be led around their estates by pigs, the joke went.24 Medical men advised caution and temperance, advice the elites did their utmost to disregard. The problem was that truffles were too nourishing, leading to an increase in the ‘appetite for coitus’. According to the Bolognese physician Baldassare Pisanelli, truffles ‘are harmful to the humours, complexions and melancholic complaints, and at the same time render the breath foul and are very windy’. The fact that truffles grew in the ground explained why they ‘are wont to induce apoplexy, epilepsy and similar diseases caused by cold humours’, in the words of Pisanelli’s commentator, the Piemontese Francesco Gallina.25 All this was transferred to the potato. Indeed, the potato’s withered and knobbly appearance suggested it might cause diseases like leprosy, scrofula and syphilis.26 Chestnuts, regarded as the poor man’s truffle, were not much better. ‘Amongst all the wild fruits they furnish the body with considerable nourishment, but they are not to be praised as everyday foodstuffs’, Gallina wrote. This was because chestnuts ‘tend to generate a fatty liquid which induces obstructions, and they are also windy, difficult to digest and can constrict the body’. (The same would be said of the potato.) For these reasons, ‘delicate persons’ should avoid chestnuts altogether, Gallina concluded, ‘leaving them to mountain people, who, because they harvest little grain, use [chestnuts] in place of it, making flour out of them for breadmaking’.27 Two centuries later, this was exactly the use being proposed for the potato. But in the sixteenth century no one was sure how to turn the potato into bread, the main staple. They had greater success with maize, one of the

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reasons why this other New World arrival succeeded where the potato did not. As a result, the potato was not about to take the place of noble cereals, like wheat. And it was not about to displace ‘inferior’ cereals either, of which there were many – millet, barley, oats, spelt – not to mention the many ingredients used to make flour by the desperate poor during time of famine, from the above-mentioned chestnuts to broad beans, lentils and chickling. Europeans were utterly unfamiliar with roots or tubers as a staple crop. Those they already knew, like the turnip, were at most winter vegetables. Moreover, they were reproduced from seeds, not eyes or cuttings, as in the case with the potato. Finally, there were ‘technical’ problems that delayed the potato’s spread. The first potato varieties introduced, to judge by contemporary botanical illustrations, were the short-day andigena varieties, rather than the longday tuberosum varieties. These would not have set tubers until the onset of shorter, colder days in autumn, so they may not have had a chance to ripen fully before the cold set in. Unripe potatoes are potentially toxic. All the earliest records – from Seville in 1573, from Fugger in 1580 and Clusius in 1588 – refer to potatoes harvested in November or December. The selection of varieties suitable for planting in the European spring took over one hundred years. No wonder the elites stuck to their truffles, and poorer to their chestnuts. For the first 50 years Europeans had not a clue what to do with the unaccustomed plant. They were not even sure when it first arrived: Magazzini is actually talking about a re-introduction, as we have seen. And then, writing several decades after Magazzini, the Paduan physician Giovanni Domenico Sala is the last Italian to pay the potato any attention for 150 years. In describing the ‘rough, reddish, edible root’, not long ago arrived in Italy, Sala lists its various names and attributions, and how it is cooked: in the embers, before being skinned and sprinkled with pepper.28 Sala is careful to distinguish potatoes (pappas) from sweet potatoes (battatas) and Jerusalem artichokes (asteris), but he nevertheless classifies them all together with other root vegetables, like turnips, parsnips and carrots. These are all cold and moist, in terms of their ‘qualities’. They are also overly nourishing and hard to digest for the average person, according to Sala, which made them suitable only for peasants and other manual labourers.29 Commoners had enough other root vegetables to satisfy them, however, and the elites soon shunned potatoes. Potatoes fell out of use in Italy after the first wave of muted botanical interest and curiosity. Confusion returned about what it was and what to call it: potato (our Solanum tuberosum), sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) were often confused or referred to in the same context.

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BARBARIAN INVASIONS: THE TUBER SPREADS The history of the vernacular names given to the potato is as tangled as the plant’s tubers. But it is worth exploring, since the variety of terms used to indicate the potato provides an indication of the shifting ideas about it. From the direct contacts with the native Incas during the age of discovery and conquest Europeans obtained the native word papas, as we’ve seen. The Europeans, in search of a way of rendering the strange novelty more familiar, compared it with what they knew, namely the truffle. Thus we have the turma de tierra (literally, ‘earth-testicle’) in the Spanish of the conquistadores and, before 1573, tartufo and tartuffolo in Italian. The term ‘truffle’ continued to be used for the various New World tuberous plants well into the nineteenth century. In the 1870s, in the dialect of Sondrio (Lombardy) potatoes were called tartufoi.30 (And so do we: whenever we use the term ‘tuber’, to avoid repetition of the word ‘potato’, we are simply using the Latin word for ‘truffle’.) When the potato arrived in France, from Italy, this became cartoufle (in the Théâtre d’agriculture by Olivier de Serres, 1600) and, eventually, kartoffel in German. This latter term is behind various words used in the Slavic languages, such as kartofel in both Russian and Polish and kartof in Bulgarian. It also found its way into the Italian spoken in northern Carnia (Friuli). In this poor, mountainous region, where many of the male residents were itinerant pedlars or seasonal workers in central Europe, potatoes were adopted relatively early and called cartufule or cartufule todescie.31 The German term, derived indirectly from the Italian, thus came full circle, re-entering Italian in a different form. So far so clear. But the German influence in central Europe is evident in other words for potato, too, like the Czech brambor (meaning ‘Prussian’), the Romanian brandaburca (from the German city Brandenburg), and the Carpathian szwabka (‘Swabian’). This offshoot happened in certain parts of Italy too. In the upper Agordino (Belluno) potatoes are still called sansoni, presumably because seed potatoes were brought in from Saxony, probably in the early- to mid-nineteenth century.32 And this is how the exchange might happen. When Mario Rigoni Stern’s fictional character Tönle Bintarn is forced to emigrate from his village high up in the Dolomites, he returns from peddling in Austria with little money but with a sack of seed potatoes: ‘potatoes with a dark, smooth skin . . . which could keep from one harvest to another . . . a kind of potato that for many a year gave good harvests and spread throughout our mountains’.33 So closely associated were potatoes with German-speaking peoples that a professor of agronomy in Pavia saw fit to remark that ‘the northern barbarians would not have invaded [ancient] Italy if they had known about the potato which feeds their descendants.34 No doubt meant ironically, it is

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still a strange thing to say, given that it had not stopped their descendants from ‘invading’ yet again. It seems only fitting then that Austrians or Germans were known generically as patate by Italians – and it was not meant as a compliment. When peasants in the town of Cornuda in the Veneto rebelled against their Austrian overlords in favour of the Italians, in 1847, they shouted ‘Long live Pius IX; death to the Potatoes!’35 This is where things start to get really complicated. In France, the term cartoufle (and truffe or truffe rouge) gave way to the equally suggestive and descriptive pomme de terre, or ‘earth-apple’. Erdappel was the term the Dutch had given to the Jerusalem artichoke, which had just made its way from New France (Canada). It was the same word the Dutch used for the cyclamen. In any case, when the potato came to Burgundy, locals applied the label pomme de terre to it. The flexible word pomme, just like ‘apple’ in English, was then used to indicate a range of fruits, including pomme d’amour, or love apple, for another New World arrival, the tomato. And just to confuse things still further, the French called the Jerusalem artichoke a topinambour, named after a tribe in Brazil. (But then the English ‘Jerusalem artichoke’ is just as bizarre a label, since Helianthum tuberosus has nothing to do with either Jerusalem or the artichoke.) ‘Earth apple’ for potato made its way into a range of languages, from Finnish (maaomena) to Greek (geó-melon). It was occasionally used in Italy, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pomo di terra is the Italian term Ferdinando Altieri gives for the English ‘potato’ in his bilingual dictionary of 1727.36 This is certainly due to French linguistic and cultural influence. Spanish influence lies behind the Italian use of patata. What the Spanish in America continued to call papas were called patatas in Spain, from at least the early 1570s. Patata was evidently derived from the word batata, the Inca term for the sweet potato. Sweet potatoes were encountered by the Europeans far earlier than potatoes, Columbus coming across them in Hispaniola in 1494. Durante describes batatas in 1585, in his Herbario nuovo. However, the sweet potatoes themselves, requiring a warm climate, never made much of an impact in Europe, certainly not compared to the potato. But they contributed the word patata; and even if the words are similar, early Spanish records seem clear about the difference between potato and sweet potato. By the end of the sixteenth century patate is the Italian word for ‘the rootes we call potatas’, according to John Florio.37 And this is what Magazzini calls them, too. Sardinia, with its range of cultural influences, was influenced by both traditions. In the northern part of the island, the potato is called pomu de terra, while in the centre-south it is either patata or batata.38 Patata was the wrong word anyway, according to one Italian champion of the potato in the late eighteenth century. Agostino Coltellini argued that the potato should be

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called ‘bread-tuber’ (pantubero) instead, because of its usefulness in making bread.39 To prove his point, Coltellini provided seventeen different combinations of potato and wheat flours to be used in the making of bread. Despite his earnestness, or perhaps because of it, the label never caught on. Whereas other vegetables were, and are known by a bewildering array of different regional and local dialect terms, in most of Italy the potato is known as patata, pure and simple. The word spawned few variants: only in Udine (Friuli) was the pronunciation patatis recorded.40 At most, it might be known by a variant of pomo di terra, as in Sardinia, as we have just seen, and in the province of Parma, where it was called pomdetèra in the 1870s.41 This is very different from maize, another New World arrival, but which was called by numerous different words, in both standard Italian and regional dialects – testimony to the rapid assimilation of maize into local agriculture and diet and its association with a range of pre-existing cereals.42 Moreover in Italy, the potato never gained any of the everyday, familiar labels it acquired in the British Isles, where it became a staple – like ‘pratie’ (from Gaelic), ‘tater’ (Welsh), ‘Murphy’ (Ireland), and ‘spud’ (from the particular spade or lifting fork used). The potato has never inspired Italian artists, although the pop-singer Rita Pavone did have a hit in the 1970s with weirdly off-the-wall novelty song ‘My Name is Potato’.43 There is nothing in Italian literature to rival Günter Grass’s ode to the tuber and its role in history, culinary and otherwise, to be found in his 1977 novel The Flounder.44 But the potato did contribute to a number of Italian idiomatic expressions, sayings and proverbs. A few are positive in nature, like the Palermitan proverb ‘Cu mancia patate un more mai’ (‘Potato-eaters never die’), which sounds like a slogan straight out of some potato marketing board, but was certainly the kind of message the nineteenth-century agronomists were trying to get across. Another proverb stresses the importance the potato came to play in peasant finances: ‘Se d’utonu on tanti patati, d’invernu tanci se s marida’ (‘If the autumn potato harvest is good, in winter many couples will marry’).45 It comes from the Ladino-speaking town of Comelico (province of Belluno) high in the Dolomites, close to the Austrian border – one of the areas where, as we shall see, the potato would acquire a significant role in the local rural economy. Others are neutral, of the common-sense variety, like Naples’ ‘Le patate son bbone cotte’ (‘Potatoes are best cooked’). More typical of the potato’s status in the popular imagination is this proverb, from the Slovene-speaking Natisone Valley (province of Udine): ‘Jubezan nja kompiar’ (‘Love isn’t a potato’), meaning that love is rare and special, not something common.46 The fact that most potato sayings and expressions are negative or derogatory is an indication of the potato’s low repute in Italy throughout much of its history. The potato owes some of this to its early association with the chestnut (something we shall revisit in Chapter 5).

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Despite – or because of – its undoubted importance for mountain populations, the chestnut’s association with poverty meant it was, by definition, also a ‘vile thing’ or ‘worthless’ (‘cosa vile’, ‘da nulla’).47 Hence expressions like ‘to be worth less than a chestnut’ (‘vale meno che una castagna’), and derogatory labels like ‘chestnut-eaters’ (mangiamarroni) applied to certain mountain populations – associations later assumed by the potato. Thus, today, we have spirito di patata (potato spirit) for foolish or silly humour; sacco di patate and patatone (‘sack of potatoes’ and ‘big potato’) to indicate a clumsy or awkward person; and naso a patata for a large, roundish nose, which Italian shares with English (‘potato nose’). In a lighter vein, patatina (‘little potato’) indicates a cute girl. The two languages also share the expression patata bollente (‘hot potato’) to indicate a delicate, ‘burning’ problem, which gets passed from person to person.48 In Sardinia ‘non fare le patate’ (‘don’t make potatoes’) meant not to go around telling lies and a liar was a patatangiu;49 the fact that these usages are no longer current mirrors the potato’s decline during recent decades, a theme to which we shall return later in this book. Long before any of these expressions, the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli wrote of a girl’s worries about remaining unmarried: ‘che rrestavi pe seme de patata’, that she might remain for seed (although seed potatoes strike me as being very useful).50 And in the period around Italian Unification when townsfolk stereotyped one another with derogatory labels, the inhabitants of Borboruso were so poor as to be called scippapatate (‘potato-snatchers’) and those of Malito patatari, both in the province of Cosenza (Calabria).51 Perhaps the most evocative expression of the potato’s plight over the centuries that follow is sostituire la patata al frumento (‘to substitute potatoes for wheat’). As used by the poet Giosuè Carducci, later Nobel laureate, it meant to denature something, to alter its basic characteristics.52 In Carducci’s case, the poet did not want to compromise his work in order to sell more copies. ‘Substituting potatoes for wheat’ was exactly what the reforming agronomists wanted to achieve, quite literally. But the attempt was invariably viewed by the public in the figurative sense used here by Carducci, worried that the potato would ‘denature’ their customary wheat-based diet. Both of these themes would characterize the potato’s history in Italy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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3

The Potato Apostles, 1764–67

Giuseppe Baretti’s mission: to explain the Italians to the English. This Turin native and long-time resident in London, friend to the likes of Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds, assumed the role of promoter of Italian language and literature. But even Baretti was at a loss as to how to explain the Italians’ refusal to adopt the potato, by now common in England (though not yet in the form of chips). In chapter 3 of his 1769 Account of the manners and customs of Italy, devoted to daily life and food, Baretti comments: We have not yet the use of the potatoes. . . . Such is the repugnance that the generality of mankind have for eating what they have not been accustomed to eat, that an English captain who brought to Naples a large cargo of potatoes during the late famine, was obliged to throw them overboard, as he could not even find people willing to take them for nothing. And yet we have several nations, if I may so call them, along the ridge of the Apennines, who eat almost nothing else through a good part of the year but chestnuts, of which they make even bread; and many poor peasants in other parts, who eat almost nothing else but polenta instead of wheat-bread.1

Baretti was writing in the aftermath of the worst series of harvest failures of the century, with the usual accompanying widespread famine and disease epidemics. In many ways the crisis of 1763–67 was a dress rehearsal for the crisis of 1815–17, explored in Chapter 1. In this chapter we shall try to understand the mystery of the potato’s Italian disappearance, which lasted something like 150 years. We shall examine the response of Italian state governments to the disastrous famines and accompanying epidemics of the 1760s, and the increasing place of the potato as a proposed solution. We shall survey a cluster of seven advocates of potato consumption and cultivation, our ‘potato apostles’, and ascertain what sort of reception they, and the potato, met with in the years up to 1816.

NAPLES AND THE FAMINE OF 1764 As Baretti suggests, the potato had no part to play. Indeed, from the time of Vitale Magazzini’s description of the tuber (prior to 1606) to the start of a

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low-level potato propaganda campaign in the late-1760s, the potato disappears from view. What happened to the potato in Italy during this 150-year silence has always puzzled historians (at least those few who troubled to mention it). The only dictionary of the Italian language, the Vocabolario della Crusca, gives no Italian word for the tuber, whether as tartufo, pomo di terra, patata or batata. The potato is conspicuous by its absence from any of the dictionary’s three sixteenth-century editions: 1612, 1623, 1691. It is particularly strange that it does not appear in the third edition, published in 1691. Not only because this edition was much updated and expanded over the previous two, but also because one of the contributors was Francesco Redi, the Tuscan grand-duke’s physician, who is generally given the credit with being the first Italian to taste and appreciate potatoes (and leave a record of the experience). ‘We cooked them by boiling’, Redi recounts in a letter of 1667 to the lecturer in botany at Pisa University, ‘then, having sliced and floured them, we fried them in butter, and they were quite tasty’. Good enough to eat indeed; shame the patatas Redi was enthusing about were sweet potatoes.2 In any case, the word did not make it into the dictionary. The potato is as difficult to unearth as a truffle. And in fact that is where we find it; or at least, that is where we find the closest thing to a potato. In the fourth edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca, 1729–38, under ‘truffle’, we find a separate meaning for ‘white truffle’, tartufo bianco, describing today’s Helianthum tuberosus, the Jerusalem artichoke, and what the Dutch called the ‘erdappel’ (as we saw in Chapter 2).3 Not quite the potato, then. The only indication of Italian usage during this period comes from bilingual dictionaries published abroad. Eighteenth-century Italian–English dictionaries give the label pomo di terra for potato.4 The compilers do not give their source; it could not have been the Vocabolario della Crusca. The usage may be a Gallic influence. Later on, when Italian agronomists started campaigning for increased cultivation of the potato in Italy, they often cited French treatises, which of course called it pomme de terre. There are limited, sporadic references to the potato in Italy during this period. As an academic curiosity, it survived in botanic gardens, like those of Bologna and Florence.5 Its presence as a foodstuff is limited to just a few areas. In the mountain areas of Piedmontese Savoy the potato was apparently grown and eaten by Protestant Waldensians from at least 1701, who called them trifole (truffles, again). In that year a merchant brought potatoes to a Waldensian community that had migrated to Württemberg, ‘for their subsistence and pleasure, as they were accustomed to do in the Waldensian valleys of Piedmont’.6 The potato was also cultivated in the French-speaking area of Valle d’Aosta. In the late 1700s, two potato propagandists refer to established potato cultivation in the nearby Lanzo Valley. Here the potato had long constituted

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an article of trade and was familiar enough to the area’s peasants to have a fixed place in cultivation practices. They alternated potato and maize in the same furrow, a practical guarantee against harvest failure, as at least one of the crops was bound to prosper.7 Otherwise the potato disappears from view, goes underground, one might say. In the previous chapter we looked at some of the reasons why the potato was unattractive to Europeans – that it could not be made into bread, that early varieties would not have ripened, and so on. What this does not explain, however, is why the potato should have found such fertile terrain in places like Ireland, in parts of France (Alsace and the Dauphiné), and in the Low Countries, from the early decades of the seventeenth century, while being rejected just about everywhere else until the late eighteenth century, and in Italy until the mid nineteenth century.8 It is ironic that the earliest source of potatoes for Europe’s keen botanists was Spain and Italy, in southern Europe, while the regions quickest to cultivate and consume it were all in northern Europe. Why was its contribution as anti-famine food not felt in Italy, as it was in Ireland and the Netherlands? The answer must lie in large measure in the difficulties of growing potatoes in a Mediterranean climate, before its particular ecological niche could be found. The potato was regarded as ‘quite reluctant to become acclimatized and propagate in this climate’.9 In northern Europe, where the main threat to the harvest was too much rain and cold during the summer months, the potato did well. In much of Italy, by contrast, the usual danger was drought. Moreover, it took a long time before Italian potato exponents finally realized that if potatoes were to grow in dry, stony soils, they needed plenty of help, in the form of manure. As a result, the potato held little obvious attraction for Italian growers. It is a pity that sixteenth-century botanists did not pay closer attention to where the potato was grown in its Andean home, where cultivation and consumption patterns are all about altitude (a subject we shall explore more fully in Chapter 5). Diet changes as one ascends the Andes. Since most of Italy is mountainous, much could have been learned from native American practices. However, in addition to being dismissive of Native American culture, Europeans had yet to explore or perceive the ‘mountain’ in its specificity. The first scholar to take an interest in mountains as such was Alexander von Humboldt, in the early nineteenth century, and he did so by studying the Andes from a combined geographical, social and ethnological point of view. Von Humboldt wrote enthusiastically of potato varieties and cultivation techniques around Quito and the Santa Fé altiplano, and proposed ‘recourse to seed potatoes in [the potato’s] natural country’ as a solution to the deterioration of European stock.10 It was only in the nineteenth century that Italian

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agronomists began recommending that the potato be grown higher up, where chestnuts prospered. In any case, for the Kingdom of Naples, the calamitous combination of dearth-famine-disease came right in the middle of what should have been the kingdom’s golden age. From 1734, for the first time in centuries, it had its own resident sovereign, Charles of Bourbon, and numerous reforms had been undertaken. In 1759 Charles left Naples to become Charles III of Spain, leaving control to his prime minister, the Tuscan Bernardo Tanucci (until prince Ferdinand came of age). In 1763 extremes in weather, from prolonged drought to hailstorms, foretold a poor harvest.11 It was not so much the drought or the hail, extremes to which the Mediterranean is well accustomed, that brought harvest failure; rather it was the wrong weather at the wrong time. Winter 1763, which should have been wet, was ‘quite mild . . . without rain or winds’, followed by a spring which, instead of being temperate, was ‘bitterly cold, very rainy and stormy’, with reports of ‘terrible floods’ throughout the Kingdom.12 In such conditions wheat would have normally been imported from Sicily, as Naples had done in 1759, but on this occasion Sicily was just as hard hit. Fruit and legumes, both essential elements of the Neapolitan diet, were either completely ruined or were in very short supply. To make matters worse, the shortage of acorns prompted landowners to feed their livestock cereals and maize – leaving poor humans with little to eat.13 The famine reached its crisis point during the winter and following spring, when wheat prices reached three times their normal level. Neapolitans’ daily bread was reduced to a ‘mixed loaf made of ground broad beans, lupins, barley and a bit of wheat flour, with other mixtures of disgusting and harmful foodstuffs’, according to a contemporary chronicler.14 Few Italian states were in a position to help. Adverse weather affected not only cereal production but most foods, in large parts of central and southern Italy. In the southern part of the Papal States and parts of Tuscany the famine was made worse by the failure of other crops, such as maize, which were normally used as substitutes for wheat. This resulted in famine conditions and localized rioting. But both states were largely able to cope, buying in food supplies where necessary. And when the maize crop recovered, as in 1765, famine was averted.15 This was no thanks to landowners. If some landowners in the Kingdom of Naples reserved precious cereals for their pigs, in the vicinity of Perugia (Papal States) they refused to come to the aid of indebted peasants. In the words of one priest, called upon to identify the paupers in his parish: even though some are tenant farmers and others are day-labourers, and even if they have good masters, because they have debts with their masters who do not want to give

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them anything for their support, they are forced to survive on acorns and bran, and some of them are reduced to begging.16

The Neapolitan prime minister Tanucci had the thankless task of trying to locate grain supplies from other Italian states, which were jealous of their own supplies. ‘I did everything’, he wrote in a letter in the winter of 1764. ‘I had many sleepless nights . . . I acted the trader to try to obtain outside wheat supplies’.17 A few months later, Tanucci wrote that ‘we begged at the gates of all Europe’, before finally managing to obtain vital grain shipments from Piedmont.18 (This, however, had the knock-on effect of causing a grain crisis in Sardinia, the source of most of Piedmont’s grain.) Part of the problem was Naples’s own provisioning system, the Annona, overseen by a patrician elite with its own interests to protect. Add to this the sheer size of Naples, Europe’s third-largest city after London and Paris, especially when compared to the slight population of the rest of the Kingdom. The governing elites lived in fear of an urban uprising, and did everything to ensure the supply of affordable food to the capital. Reformers like Paolo Mattia Doria noted the resulting problem. ‘The city of Naples has become so overflowingly numerous of people’, Doria wrote in 1740, ‘that not only is its hinterland not sufficient to feed it but almost the entire kingdom is not enough to supply the demand for necessary foodstuffs’.19 And this was in ‘normal’ years. The experience of centuries had taught that the usual accompaniment of famine was epidemic disease, particularly typhus. The poor were the usual victims, as we saw in Chapter 1. The same happened here in 1764, as reported in March. According to the physician Antonio Pepe: The disease started by attacking the most wretched people, chiefly those engaged in buying and selling and in the foulest trades in cramped conditions, who lived in the nearby quarters, in storehouses and slumhouses, crowded, dark, full of rubbish and without ventilation, where the families were large.20

As a result of the crisis, something between 30,000 to 40,000 city residents perished of hunger and disease. Mortality was high despite the capital having tried to extract as much grain from the provinces as possible. Moreover, while the poor of Naples had their Annona, the rural poor were on their own, with little other than whatever local ecclesiastical poor relief was available. The monti frumentari, or charitable grain banks, normally lent seed corn to the rural poor, to be paid back at harvest time, with a small interest charge; they were now reduced to giving what seed corn they had left for immediate consumption by famished peasants. Outside of Naples the prices of all foodstuffs reached unheard-of levels, not

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just cereals and legumes, but wine, olive oil, lard, chickens and eggs. So wrote the archpriest of the small mountain town of Casalciprano, near Campobasso (Molise). Revd Tommaso Perna decided to keep a record of the famine for his successors, ‘so that it could be recounted from time to time to his parishioners in sermons to keep on the path of virtue and away from sin’. This is what the townspeople of Casalciprano were up against in 1763–64: There was total scarcity of fish, fruit, acorns and even snow; plants did not grow on the land, not even wild ones, and what was not eaten by the animals was considered desirable by men. Abominable meats were eaten, dogs, cats, mules and even snakes. Bones of any sort whatever were collected by the starving poor, burnt in the fire and and the burnt parts chewed on as food. People went in the stables where the horses were, and gathered up their dung, from which they picked out any barley corns they could find and they ate them, as I saw much to my sadness with my own eyes when I went to assist the dying and administer the last rites. Because of the unbearable hunger even otherwise honourable people gave up their honour, which previously they would never have done for even the largest treasure.21

The number of dead in the Kingdom was put as high as 300,000. The famine-epidemic of 1764 has been described as a watershed, the reason why we have devoted much space to describe it. It highlighted the injustices, inequalities and inefficiencies present in the kingdom’s social, economic and political life. As the reform-minded abbé Ferdinando Galiani put it a few years later: ‘Naples has suffered much more than a famine’.22 The effects of the famine were felt beyond Naples, leaving ‘a deep mark on Italian life’, according to the intellectual historian Franco Venturi. For the first time, people thought about how the deadly rhythms of dearth, famine and disease could be overcome; how the masses of unemployed poor could be put to work and conditions be improved; how states could enter into international markets, strengthening local markets at the same time. As a project, it would take generations, but it could be accomplished. And it was, as far as Venturi is concerned. We need only consider the fact that 1763–67 was the last major famine in Italian history.23 Except that it was not. The states of Italy were not much better at dealing with the famine of 1815–16 than that of 1763–67, as we have seen. Little was done to improve the lot of the urban and rural poor. Major urban regeneration would have to wait the better part of a hundred years. But Venturi does have a point. Ideas were put forward that involved more than short-term poor relief and bread provision, ideas that attempted to examine structural problems inherent in the political economy of the states themselves. Of course, it did not happen right away. In Naples, at least, ‘big’ ideas were in short supply in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. The physician Antonio

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Pepe entitled his description of the epidemic ‘the bedside physician’, which suggests a dedicated concern for the poor victims. But his suggestions on how to avoid the epidemic were directed solely at the elites. These included staying away from the poor and living gaily.24 Prime minister Tanucci was himself disgruntled at the lack of change. It was widely recognized that the grain provisioning system was at the heart of the problem, and calls were made for it to be abandoned and trade liberalized. However this only happened 30 years later in 1794, more the result of the Annona’s woeful financial state than deliberate state policy. In fact the only immediate response to the crisis was to plant more wheat. In many areas of the Kingdom of Naples high wheat prices led to a rapid and uncontrolled expansion of cereal cultivation. This may have made economic sense when wheat prices were high, but the practice continued even when unfavourable market conditions prevailed. The landowners’ near obsession with wheat also came at the expense of other crops, which hit the peasants who farmed the land hardest. Finally, it resulted in much deforestation, whose detrimental consequences on the ecosystem would only be apparent in the longer term. One of the areas so affected was Molise. In the 1790s it was described as an area ‘that has no forests, because they are all cut down, that has little fruit either in summer or winter, that cultivates only wheat, barley, spelt and a little maize’.25 The potato was not the most obvious solution to the Kingdom’s problems. Only abbé Galiani even mentioned it.26 The writer and economist Galiani was living in France at the time, as secretary at the Neapolitan embassy in Paris. But the potato had little part to play in his discussion of the grain trade. Perhaps it was too early: Antoine-Augustin Parmentier – to whom we shall return later in this chapter – had only just undergone his forced potato diet courtesy of his Prussian captors.

ENLIGHTENMENT POTATOES It was elsewhere in the peninsula that reformers first began to call into question the very bases of economic life. It happened in Tuscany, as well as in Lombardy and Piedmont – areas less directly affected by the famine. Agricultural reform was a central plank of this project. It involved issues such as the cultivation of lands left uncultivated, the role of landowners, the reorganization of the grain supply system, and the advocacy of certain crops. These became hotly-debated issues during the latter half of the century (and were just as hotly debated by historians almost exactly two hundred years later).27 Tuscany was the first to take practical measures, liberalizing the grain market in 1767 and abolishing

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its Annona eight years later. It was in this reforming context that people’s thoughts began turning to potatoes; in a short time the cause for the potato would become part and parcel with the cause for agronomy as a whole. Throughout Europe, states were becoming aware of the potato’s potential. The first ruler to do so was Fredrick the Great of Prussia. The trigger on this occasion was war. During the war of the Austrian succession, 1740–48, Fredrick realized how valuable potatoes were in keeping his peasants alive, despite the ravages of invading armies. Granaries could be plundered; potatoes and other root crops could be kept hidden underground until it was safe to eat them. Fredrick ordered his government to distribute free seed potatoes throughout Prussia, with instructions on how to plant them.28 Or, as the novelist Günter Grass has former serf and ‘farm cook’ Amanda Woyke recount: ‘In the old days . . . there was nothing but grits, and when there warn’t no grits, we had nothing at all. Then Ole Fritz sent us this dragoon with potatoes, and we started growing spuds’. Amanda foresaw a Prussia ‘all planted with potatoes . . . There won’t be any more hunger then. Everybody will be full, and the sweet Lord will love Ole Fritz’.29 In Russia, the government of another ‘great’, Catherine this time, launched a campaign in 1765 – although the potato did not become a major crop there until after another series of harvest failures, in 1838–9.30 In Italy the first discussion of the potato’s potential came from an area, Venice, hardly affected by the famines of the 1760s. In March 1765 Francesco Griselini published a short discussion of the potato in the journal which he had founded in Venice just the year before. The Giornale d’Italia was dedicated to the advancement ‘of the natural sciences, agriculture and commerce’. It was the logical place for an article on ‘the cultivation and uses which various regions of Europe make of the potato’. Griselini learned about potatoes from the Irish and English in Venice. Potatoes could be obtained from English, Irish or Scottish ships, which all carried them as provisions. Griselini suggests that in times of famine, Italians could reserve maize for people and feed the potatoes to the animals.31 It may not seem like much, but it was the first Italian discussion of the potato in 150 years. In the Tuscan Grand-Duchy, the Florentine Saverio Manetti was the first to recommend the potato as a means of alleviating famine. He did so in a treatise on bread-making published in the immediate wake of the crisis. Breadmaking might seem a perverse topic, given that it was precisely the shortage of the item in question which had led to the crisis; but Manetti’s aim was to suggest other ‘products of the vegetable kingdom, which share the qualities of wheat and which can substitute for bread in the common diet’.32 The composition of bread, the main staple, was a key issue throughout Italy. Manetti surveyed the different types of bread – from ‘simple bread’ to ‘mixed bread’, from ‘ration bread’ to ‘boiled bread’ – and recommended various vegetable

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additives. Manetti was a prominent physician and naturalist, professor and secretary of the Società Botanica Fiorentina, Europe’s first botanical academy, located at Florence’s botanical garden, the ‘Giardino dei semplici’. Manetti’s interests were far flung; he even had a genus of climbing plants from Central America named after him (the genus Manettia, which includes the flowering houseplant Manettia inflata, or ‘Brazilian firecracker’). So it is appropriate that in the final section of his treatise, Manetti turned his attention to plants that might be used in bread-making that were not ordinarily grown and used in his native Tuscany: sago, manioc, arum and potato. Manetti’s suggestion came at a time of calls for increased economic liberalization, the greater use of science and technology in agriculture, and a greater involvement on the part of landowners. It was a time of personal commitment. Manetti’s fellow Tuscan, like him both a physician and naturalist, Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, went a step further than Manetti the following year. In 1766 Targioni Tozzetti published a 20-page pamphlet at his own expense, which he distributed free, on the use of various ‘vegetable substances’ which could be mixed with wheat flour to ‘augment bread’.33 Targioni Tozzetti was troubled by the ‘exterminating diseases’ resulting from the consumption of ‘harmful substances’ by the numerous desperate poor, ‘driven by maddening hunger’.34 The potato was one such substitute. ‘It is a great embarassment for Italy’, Targioni Tozzetti wrote, ‘which allows herself become bewitched by the pleasure for fashions of every type’, even the most ‘ridiculous’ and ‘ruinous’, but did not welcome ‘the cultivation of potatoes’. They had only attracted the interest of ‘a few curious people’, who were too few to ‘have any say over the poor’.35 It was the duty of literate people, like physicians and surgeons, as well as parish priests, to spread his advice. Targioni Tozzetti’s pamphlet struck a physiocratic chord, quickly going through two further editions (Pisa, 1766 and 1767) and generating a flurry of correspondence and papers. In 1767 a patrician of Pistoia, Anton Filippo Adami, presented a paper at Florence’s Accademia dei Georgofili in which he argued that agricultural practices had to change, new techniques and new crops had to be introduced, such as the potato.36 The canon count Guasco praised the potato’s nutritional virtues and cheapness of cultivation, while Agostino Coltellini listed 17 different combinations of potato and wheat flours in the making of bread and pasta.37 A slightly more tangible response to Targioni Tozzetti’s suggestion was in the form of a short essay in favour of potato cultivation. The author was abbé Ubaldo Montelatici, a Lateran canon, who had founded the Accademia dei Georgofili 14 years earlier, with the aim of reforming Tuscan agriculture.38 In 1765 the Georgofili received the patronage of the grand duke, Peter Leopold, and it was to the grand duke’s cabinet secretary and treasurer, Giacomo de Sabouin, that Montelatici dedicated his study. It

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consisted of a survey of writings on the potato’s cultivation and uses, which Montelatici hoped would ‘be of use to the public’. One of the authorities he refers to most often is Antonio Zanon, fellow of the Georgofili, and author of a study printed that same year. Zanon’s study is significant for a number of reasons.39 To begin with, it was the first book-length treatise on the potato to be published in Italy. Second, it was based on actual cultivation of the potato, rather than on second-hand reading. Third, it described trials, involving various varieties of potato, planted in different terrains. An Enlightenment spirit pervades the book. Zanon was a silk merchant from Udine; when he moved to Venice in 1738 he became interested in economic, manufacturing and agricultural reform. Together with the landowner Fabio Asquini he set up the Società di Agricoltura Pratica in Udine in 1762, and kept up a lengthy correspondence with Asquini while serving as his business agent in Venice.40 Zanon was the author of various works. He shared the reforming zeal of Targioni Tozzetti and Montelatici, both of whom he cites in his potato treatise. Indeed he corresponded with Montelatici about potato cultivation in Tuscany. Otherwise, the authors he refers to are all nonItalian, mostly Swiss and French. Since Zanon could not plant potatoes himself, he did the next best thing: he had Asquini and another landowner, Giovanni Socrate, carry out trials on their lands. In 1765 Zanon obtained some ‘English and Scottish potatoes’ and sent them to Asquini and Socrate. Asquini had his planted in a fertile, hilly terrain; Socrate in a thin, sandy soil. Each planted half English and half Scottish potatoes, according to Zanon’s detailed instructions. Come harvest time, in September of 1765, Socrate’s harvest, in poorer soil, was the greater. This was great news for Friuli, with its gravelly soil and mountainous terrain. Zanon reminds his readers to bear in mind that there are two main types of potatoes: the primaticcia, or early, white-skinned, round and delicate, but which produces less; the serotina, or late, which is red-skinned and commoner, but with a higher yield. This is still an important distinction today, at least in Italy. Zanon is the first Italian ‘potato apostle’. In his eyes the potato could do no wrong. Both people and animals could eat it; indeed the latter were happy with the peelings. Not only did it thrive in poor soils, it was actually good for the soil, making it ideally suited for crop rotation with wheat and maize. It yielded up to 90 times the seed potatoes planted. Its health-giving qualities had been affirmed by learned physicians throughout Europe. Good bread could be made from a mixture of three parts boiled potatoes and two parts wheat flour. The potato would make an ideal food, if only the elites would set the example: If the peasants and the poor see gentlemen and polite and well-off people eating them once and a while, and serving them at table in a simply-prepared manner, as is done in

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all the countries where they have been introduced, we shall soon see the people of Friuli become as fond of this food as the Irish are.41

An unfortunate comparison perhaps, in light of the disastrous famine that would strike potato-reliant Ireland some 90 years later; but Zanon had made his point. What effect did it have? Zanon’s enthusiasm was not shared by everyone in Friuli. In the Giornale d’Italia, a certain ‘P. B. G.’ wrote that if it had not been for his own experience he would have been completely taken in by Zanon’s book. He, too, tried his luck with the potato, ‘cultivating them in his patrician house with all the care and attention for new things that comes naturally to everyone’. But he soon turned against it. The bread Zanon praises was actually ‘wheat flour ruined by being mixed with potatoes’, ‘of poor quality, very heavy, unhealthy and of no usefulness, whether in time of abundant harvest or dearth’. Zanon’s overreliance on writers from over the Alps only made matters worse, the article concluded.42 Initial enthusiasm for the potato soon turned to disillusionment. An opinion expressed in 1775, in response to Zanon’s fervent efforts to spread the potato, summarizes this neatly. The writer is referring to his native Friuli: Many of our [landowners] were keen to cultivate them even in the most sterile lands . . . But it soon became obvious that in this province, where so many better cereals grow, even twice a year, like the excellent and productive maize, we do not have to limit ourselves by necessity to searching for a new foodstuff, much less one hidden underground. Let us willingly leave potatoes to those peoples who inhabit cold and harsh northern climes, while those of us born and nourished under a benign sky, satisfy ourselves with the gifts our sunny land provides.43

If the elites had already given up on the potato, what chance for the rest of the population?

SEVEN PAMPHLETEERS IN SEARCH OF A FOLLOWING Zanon was certainly not the last Italian potato prophet; indeed he was the first in a long line of them. We saw in Chapter 1 how the ‘last subsistence crisis’ begat a flurry of potato propaganda pamphlets in the years 1815–19. One might expect the same in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. After all, in France, Parmentier’s landmark first study of the potato appeared in 1773, followed by others in 1789 and 1794.44 Parmentier published with a marketer’s zeal and savvy, changing the title of his first treatise – from Examen chimique

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des pommes de terres to Ouvrage économique sur les pommes de terres – in order to attract the broader readership which he felt the subject both deserved and needed.45 Thanks to the studies of the apothecary-chemist Parmentier, converted to the potato cause as a result of being briefly faced with diet of potato soup as a Prussian prisoner-of-war in 1762, the potato became all the rage in France and the French became potato-eaters virtually overnight. At least that is what traditional histories tell us. In fact, Parmentier largely limited his advocacy of the potato to that of a flour-extender in bread-making and the potato did not enter the mainstream of the French diet much before the 1840s. The ‘Parmentier myth’ was a creation of the French Third Republic, taught to generations of French school children since then.46 Parmentier’s most important contribution was to bring science to bear on the study of the potato, in the context of his chemical study of a wide range of foods. However he was not the only Frenchman to write in favour of the potato in the late eighteenth century and, in Italy, Parmentier was no better known in Italy than any of his contemporaries writing in French, like Nicolas Mustel, François Rozier and Samuel Tissot, and his works appeared only in edited collections alongside other authors.47 In Italy potato writing was actually rather subdued during the last quarter of the century, especially in comparison with the intensity and vitality of 1815–19. Titles appear in a trickle: four in the 1770s, seven in the 1780s and five in the 1790s. But if we exclude re-editions, collections of previously published works and translations, the total goes down to seven original Italian works dedicated to the potato: two in the 1770s, three in the 1780s, two in the 1790s. With no large-scale famines for 40 years after 1764, some of the urgency went out of potato writing. There is no doubting the commitment of most of the works published during this period. But others have a slightly jaded feel, largely content to repeat the findings of others. It is as if writing about the potato had become an intellectual fashion, something every self-respecting gentleman-reformer should have on his Curriculum Vitae; as if the potato offered Italian men of science the opportunity to ‘place their knowledge at the disposal of the authorities’, while advancing also their own ‘interests in that service in the normal fulfillment of ambition’, as Charles Gillispie has said about France.48 What do our seven authors have in common? And what can they tell us about contemporary attitudes to the potato? First of all, potatoes were still a novelty. Not long ago, as one writer notes, ‘our talking about potatoes was considered the stuff of fools’.49 When another writer tasted his first potato, it was as a ‘prank’, the potatoes disguised, cooked in the way of mushrooms (one of the ways the Tuscan monk Magazzini had suggested, almost two centuries earlier).50 Another author, Pietro Maria Bignami, commented on the initial difficulties in persuading peasants to eat

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the novel foodstuff, an attempt which is a second point the authors share. Bignami added that the peasants were soon eating them ‘with great relish, beseeching me to sell them some next winter, and in the market square I sold many, getting a good price, and the solicitous requests continued after I had sold out of them’.51 Bignami was fortunate, if that is the right word, in that his own potato efforts coincided with a year of dearth, resulting in increased demand for anything deemed edible.52 But it leads us to a third point the seven writers share: an overwhelming, unflinching enthusiasm for the tuber. Their own direct experience of the potato has not tarnished the exaggeratedly high opinions of the very first potato apostles. Their own trials have not yet disproved the fallacy that potatoes could prosper in the poorest of terrains, ‘gravelly and sterile, unsuitable for any sort of cereal’.53 (In fact, potatoes need very rich soils to do well.) There was one advance, however, and it constitutes a fourth point. This generation of studies paid attention to the different types and varieties of potato becoming available by the latter decades of the eighteenth century. This not only extended the potato’s possibilities; it also helps to explain its limited attractions before this period. Niccolò Dalle Piane notes how there were ‘up to 40 different’ potatoes, recognizable by their different flowers and tubers, ‘having very long ones, round ones, smooth ones, knobbly ones, et cetera’.54 In France, Dalle Piane says, they choose the smallest round, beige ones for seed, because they produce the most ‘floury’ (farinacea) potato – an important adjective that indicates how potatoes were still being used in both countries. Tuscans prefer white potatoes, according to Dalle Piane, which he thinks are also most suitable for Liguria, although he does not say why.55 Although there were numerous varieties in circulation, they were still limited to two basic types, as indicated by Filippo Baldini: ‘large and red’ and ‘small and yellow’. Baldini prefers the former, which helps explain Dalle Piane’s preference. ‘The best [potatoes]’ Baldini writes, ‘are however those that are well nourished, large and tender, which tend towards red on the outside and towards white on the inside, and they taste almost like chestnuts, if a little on the bitter side’.56 Fifth, at a time when the unification of Italy was still a long way off, the authors write for the benefit of their own particular region, their own States, from Piedmont in the north to Naples in the south. This was part of a much larger project involving the civil use of science. In the agricultural field, it begins with institutions like the Accademia dei Georgofili and its many fellows, such as Zanon, and continues through our seven pamphleteers. As in the France examined by Gillispie, potato advocates and other reform-minded agronomists are but one example of the systematic intersection ‘between science and polity, between men of knowledge and men in power’.57 This concern

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for the agricultural improvement of their own States was certainly praiseworthy; but it was also short-sighted, since it often left them trying to reinvent the wheel, duplicating the work of other agronomists elsewhere in the peninsula. This regional focus was exacerbated by a question of practicality: the difficulty in obtaining material printed from other Italian States. The Bolognese professor of agronomy Filippo Re complained that ‘in Lombardy one encounters less difficulty in obtaining books from Paris than from Naples . . . I found it quite amazing that in Florence books printed in Milan are hard to find. They say it’s the same for Piedmontese material’.58 For the historian this regional focus does have one advantage: the authors give precious information about local notables in their regions who had experimented with potato growing on their lands. Our seven authors can be divided into two broad groups: physicians and priests. Three are physicians: the Turinese Antonio Campini (1774) and the Neapolitans Filippo Baldini and Giovanni Faicchio (both in 1783). Two are clerics: the Roman abbé Giovanni Battista Occhiolini (1784) and the Genoese Niccolò Dalle Piane (1793). Of the remaining two authors, Pietro Maria Bignami (1773) is a member of Bologna’s guild of bankers and moneychangers, while Vincenzo Corrado (1798), resident in Naples, is a cook. Both the clerics Occhiolini and Dalle Piane state charitable reasons for writing, perhaps not surprisingly, and write with rural readers in mind. Occhiolini, prior at St John Lateran in Rome, stresses his intention to write ‘clearly in order to make myself understood by country folk, mostly labourers and uneducated’.59 Dalle Piane is writing on behalf of Genoa’s Società Patria for the benefit of the ‘rural parish priests in the Dominion of the most serene Republic of Genoa’.60 The potato is consonant with Christian virtues: its poor keeping qualities, normally seen as a negative feature, should rather be seen as a sign of God’s ‘loving providence’, since it prevents men from speculating in the potato, as they do with cereals in time of dearth, to the detriment of their fellow men.61 Dalle Piane’s pamphlet abounds with references to other clerics who have taken up and encouraged potato cultivation amongst their parishioners. Like Pietro Quilico, parish priest of San Vito in the town of Marola (gulf of La Spezia), also known for his new method of cultivating grape vines; and Michele Dondero, parish priest of San Lorenzo, in the town of Roccatagliata (in the mountains eighteen miles from Genoa). But most of Dalle Piane’s praise goes to Geremia Fenelli, a Franciscan friar in the town of Vernazza (better known today as one of the Cinque Terre). In his parish bulletin, the Giornale del Paroco, Fenelli had written about potatoes, which he called tartufi, in 1773, extolling their virtues and describing their cultivation. It was this short article, Dalle Piane recounts, that inspired the Revd Dondero.62 Dondero must have been a confused man when he first tried to follow Fenelli’s instructions, since Fenelli’s tartufi were

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probably Jerusalem artichokes. But Dondero persisted with his potato trials and was elected fellow of Genoa’s Società Patria as a result of his efforts.63 Other priests elsewhere participated in spreading the message around the same time as Dalle Piane. One was the abbé Paolo Balsamo. The figure of the abbé (from the French, literally abbot; abate in Italian) is typical of eighteenthcentury France and Italy: churchmen who derived an income through attachment to a monastery, but without having to render service, leaving them free to take up other pursuits, like teaching and writing. Abbé Balsamo, who had travelled in England and France, was appointed to Palermo’s newly instituted chair of ‘Agricoltura e pubblica economia’ (Agriculture and public economy) in 1787, where he was able to try out new agricultural methods and instruments at a nearby estate, belonging to the nobleman Vincenzo Palmeri. Balsamo’s influence was more than academic, however. When town lands in Sicily underwent a census in 1791, with the aim of improving cultivation and countering the effects of deforestation, numerous landowners applied for plots. They justified their requests, promising extensive improvements and innovations, along the lines Balsamo was proposing. The landowner Federico Manzone applied for four salme of land in the town of Piana dei Greci (now Piana degli Albanesi, in the province of Palermo), to introduce land reforms that would serve ‘as an example’. And group of four landowners requested two salme, promising to cultivate it ‘as in Lombardy’ (the Lombard system put pasture and livestock raising before cereals) and experiment with the English plough and harrow, introduce stalls for cattle and potato cultivation. The initiative led to little permanent change, but it was a start.64 Churchmen sometimes presented their farming advice in the form of a ‘catechism’, using the same question-and-answer format more typical of basic of religious instruction. One such work published at this time, in 1792, was Revd Teodoro Monticelli’s Catechismo di agricoltura pratica e di pastorizia. Paternalistic in tone, Monticelli wrote for ‘the public education of peasants’. Even if the peasants concerned had been able to read and understand the book’s contents it was unlikely they would have had the means to implement its suggestions. Still, Monticelli offered some basic guidance on the potato, in particular its use in feeding livestock.65 More realistic and purposeful in its pitch was another Catechismo agrario, published the following year, and also written by a southern Italian cleric, Giovan Battista Gagliardo. It was directed ‘for the use of country curates and estate factors’.66 They, more than the peasants themselves, had the means to affect change in agricultural practices. A related pedagogical approach chosen by agronomically-minded ecclesiastics was the dialogue. Abbé Giovanni Battarra, professor of theology in Rimini, presented his farming advice in a series of dialogues. The work met with some success, to judge by its four editions, the last one 65 years after

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Battarra’s death.67 The twelfth dialogue is between the peasant Cecco and his father and regards the ‘blessed use of the potato’. In it, Cecco recounts how that morning he took his lambs to the landowner and, after market, the landowner gave him two sacks of ‘roots like truffles called potatoes’. The roots can be used to make bread and can be eaten cooked ‘in various ways’. They are ‘greedily’ eaten by oxen, sheep, pigs and chickens, ‘which fatten them up a lot’. To which the father replies: ‘Blessed potatoes. When are we going to plant some?’68 But let us return to our group of seven late-eighteenth-century potato pamphleteers. The main category of people to write in support of potato cultivation and consumption were the physicians. The same would be true in the period 1815–19. Along with their public health experience and concerns, doctors had the necessary leisure and means. They were also, quite frequently, landowners themselves. The first physician to write a potato treatise was Antonio Campini, in 1774. Nine years later his example was followed by two other physicians, both Neapolitan. Giovanni Faicchio gives the famine of 1764 as his reason for writing.69 He signals that the potato had finally become a plank in the Neapolitan reform project. Faicchio’s treatise is the lesser known of the two, perhaps because he said little that was new: his wish that Neapolitans would be more like the Irish, whose potato-eating saved them from famine in 1670, is straight out of Zanon. The better-known treatise is Filippo Baldini’s, likewise written for the benefit of the Kingdom of Naples.70 Baldini tasted his first potatoes at the table of the Irishman John Child, second earl Tylney of Castlemaine, long-time resident in Italy, and dedicated his book to him. Or, to quote Baldini, never at a loss for a flourish: ‘It was not long ago that I, having the honour, as I had had on many other occasions, to be admitted to your table, was served among the many magnificent and delicate dishes a cream of such exquisite flavour that the novelty of it prompted me to inquire as to the matter of its composition’.71 A lot of fuss over some mashed potatoes, you might think; but Baldini is the first writer to investigate and detail the potato’s health-bestowing properties. At the time he published his ‘reasoning’ on the potato, Baldini was physician to the Neapolitan royal family (1780–90) and was committed to the improvement of public health in the Kingdom. His works on water baths in the treatment of disease saw him elected fellow of Florence’s Georgofili in 1773, of Siena’s Accademia dei Fisiocritici in 1774, of Bologna’s Accademia delle Scienze in 1775, and of Naples’ newly-founded Accademia delle Scienze e Belle Lettere in 1780. Baldini’s work on the potato should be seen in the context of his other medical studies, too: on the effects of horse-riding and hunting, on correct breastfeeding, and later work into the medical topography of his native Naples.72 Since Baldini had his scientific credentials to respect, his investigation into the ‘effects’ of potatoes on human bodies involves nothing so straightforward

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as eating them. In an echo of Parmentier’s chemical researches ten years earlier, this is what Baldini does: he takes eight ounces of boiled potatoes, reduces them down to an ‘extract’ of eight drams, of which he distils a portion to obtain ‘a very acid liquor’. He then mixes this liquor with human blood, and finds that they do not separate. Baldini also tests the liquor in the blood drawn from of a sufferer of ‘inflammatory disease’, and finds that they do not separate there either. Baldini’s conclusion: ‘I can freely deduce that the force of the potatoes must be that of dissolving viscous and slow blood, when it has become such, and to strengthen the solids when they are relaxed’.73 In other words potatoes thin or strengthen our blood, according to the circumstances, and fortify the flesh. By thus opening blocked obstructions, potatoes would cure scurvy and ‘hysterical and hypochondriacal diseases’, regardless of the sufferer’s complexion, temperament or age. A patient of Baldini’s, suffering from ulcers in the urinary tract, was cured in six weeks by drinking ‘potato water’.74 Baldini’s impact on Neapolitan culinary habits was negligible, perhaps not surprisingly. However he spent the last 30 years of his life in Vienna, where he would have been able to eat potatoes to his heart’s content.

THE RECEIVING END Was anyone eating listening to all this advice? Many of the studies realize that the elites will have to set the example if the potato is to succeed. But there was a problem here. Even that symbol of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, noted the potato’s tendency to cause flatulence, adding that this posed no difficulty for labourers and peasants because they had tough stomachs.75 The medieval and renaissance notion that elites and commoners had different bodily constitutions was evidently still present. But Dalle Piane challenged his elite readers to eat potatoes anyway. After all, other foods cause flatulence –peas, chickpeas, almost all vegetables – and yet we still eat them. For Dalle Piane boiled potatoes ‘taste the best’. True, ‘the most refined palates’ will be ‘somewhate reticent towards this foodstuff ’ at first, since they will be disappointed by ‘a certain insipidness’; but soon ‘they will become accustomed’ and ‘become attached to them’.76 A decade earlier Occhiolini had suggested using the berries, ‘which have the taste of sour cherries’, in sauces. True, Occhiolini also suggested drying the leaves and smoking them instead of tobacco and using pieces of rotting tuber as a night light, because of their phosphorescence! But he is also the first to recommend the use of potato flour and mashed boiled potatoes in the making of pasta and dumplings.77 This is a direct link with today’s gnocchi.78 But refined palates called for refined recipes; and no one, so far, had provided them. A ‘hot potato’ indeed.

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The difficulty in persuading people to eat potatoes is illustrated by the experience of the traveller Henry Swinburne. He is the intrepid Englishman we first encountered in Chapter 1, carrying his potatoes as he went. While staying at a monastery in Monteleone (Calabria) Swinburne thought to invite ‘the heads of the monastery to partake of my dinner’.79 However ‘no mode of dressing these roots, that I was able to direct, was fortunate enough to suit their palates: after the first mouthful, they all declined eating so insipid a dish’. Evidently not even the simplest of monks – they were Minims, whose rule meant a perpetual Lenten fast – would eat Swinburne’s plain boiled potatoes. His manservant had greater success with the monastery’s lay brothers. ‘For having covered the plate with oiled butter, mixed with a strong seasoning of pimento and garlick, his cookery met with universal applause’, Swinburne comments. The secret evidently lay in adapting the potatoes to local preferences, an assimilation of the new to the old which produced something new in turn. Close to the century’s end a 60-year-old chef and Celestine monk in Naples did this in print. Vincenzo Corrado was the ‘celebrity chef ’ of his day, successfully popularizing elite cookery for a broader bourgeois public and possessed of a keen eye for spotting new trends and developing them. He first published Il cuoco galante (The gallant chef), which had brought him fame, in 1773, followed by a vegetarian cookery book, Del cibo pitagorico, a few years later (1781), a survey of the ‘nature, agriculture, sheep farming . . . and trades’ of the Kingdom of Naples in 1792, as well as a host of other lesser works. Although Corrado was the first to capitalize on the new-found popularity of another Solanacea, the tomato, he had not so far included the potato in any of his recipes.80 This was despite the fact that Corrado dedicated his Del cibo pitagorico to the same earl Tynley who would be the dedicatee of Baldini’s potato treatise.81 Corrado remedied this in his Trattato delle patate per uso di cibo, published in 1798.82 He was not the first Italian to detail the sheer variety of the potato’s culinary uses; the Sienese architect Leonardo De Vegni had already done this six years earlier, describing a range of uses in 14 different categories, starting with breads and ending with stews, and including uses in soups and salads, fried, in meatballs and fishcakes, in omelettes and fritters.83 It is impossible to say whether De Vegni’s list was an influence on Corrado; but it does give an idea of the sorts of ways the potato was being prepared in Italy at the time, by at least one afficionado. In any case, Corrado is the first to provide the recipes. His calling the cookery book a ‘treatise’ was either a sign of pretence or commitment (or a mixture of both) on Corrado’s part, as was the fact that Corrado sent a presentation copy to the Accademia dei Georgofili in Florence.84 In his dedicatory preface, in which Corrado modestly lists all his previous books, numbering this his eleventh, he justifies his writing thus: ‘to satisfy a request from above and to follow along with the fashion’. The Kingdom of Naples has

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no real need of potatoes, Corrado exclaims, because ‘in the gentleness of its climate and the fertility of its soil’, it ‘abounds with many and enough different vegetables’ to satisfy ‘the opinion, taste, sensibility and variety of appetites and inclinations’. Needless to say, Corrado makes no mention of the 1764 famine. Indeed the same ‘inconstancy of the elements’ which elsewhere ‘destroys nature itself, in the Kingdom of Naples strengthens and reanimates it’. Corrado is not exactly a potato apostle, then; rather, he writes to satisfy the new taste for potatoes, ‘to make them more used in cooking, in imitation of the peoples overs the seas and over the mountains’.85 Corrado delivers what he promises. The book gives 54 different ways of serving the potato, as well as a variety of sauces for them: from potato salad (‘patate in insalata’) to potatoes seasoned with pistachios (‘patate al sapor di pistacchi’); from potato ‘mouthfuls’ (‘patate in bignè’) to tomato-stuffed potatoes (‘patate ripiene al colì di pomidoro’); from a potato omelette (‘patata in frittata’) to potatoes roasted, fried and creamed. There are potatoes in gnocchi and potato pies, potato puddings and potato cakes. There is even a recipe for potatoes with truffles, which is somehow appropriate, given the earliest assumptions about the potato’s identity.

TWO OF CORRADO’S RECIPES, WHICH HAVE SINCE BECOME NEAPOLITAN FAVOURITES Patate alla salza di acciughe (Potatoes with anchovies) After the potatoes have been cooked in water and cleaned over their skins, leave them whole and place then well presented on a plate. Mince the right amount of pine-nuts with the same amount of anchovies, and minced fine, mix in some lemon juice and [olive] oil, season with pepper, pass through a sieve, and serve on the potatoes.

Patate in gattò (Gâteau of potatoes) After the potatoes have been baked in the oven and cleaned of their skins, mash them with veal fat. Season them with chopped parseley, spices, and mix in a combination of diced ham, pig’s liver, sweetbreads, mushrooms, and so on. Then mix in beaten eggs, and pour into a casserole dish the inside of which has been coated with butter and breadcrumbs, and place in an oven and allow to solidify, rise and form a crust. And once that is done, it is ready to serve. Source: Vincenzo Corrado, Trattato delle patate (1798), in Tullio Gregory, ed. Del cibo pitagorico (Rome: Donzelli, 2001), pp. 124 and 133.

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The significance of such recipes cannot be underestimated. It was much more than giving people options: it made potatoes ‘fit’ for human consumption, by signalling the differentiation of potatoes as food for animals and as food for humans. Potatoes were usually boiled or cooked in the embers and fed to the animals with the skins still on; and at first people ate their potatoes in the same, basic way. Then people learned to skin their boiled potatoes. The next step, as signalled here by Corrado, was to devise recipes that utilized the boiled potatoes, transforming them in the process to something distinctly un-animal-like, ‘civilising’ them. In the same Enlightenment spirit of progress and in order to set an example, ‘a most gentle lady . . . of those who, given to philosophy, raise themselves above the common ranks of women’, publicly ate ‘a pudding made of potatoes’ in the city of Perugia in 1784.86 While this was happening people also began to prefer distinct potato varieties from the ones fed to the pigs, better suited to their human food preferences. In terms of ascertaining potato cultivation and consumption, all of our seven authors refer to some limited growing of potatoes in their own regions. Dalle Piane, for example, mentions their cultivation in the Lanzo Valley in Piedmont, in the northern parts of Corsica (Genoese till 1768) and their sale in Genoa’s market (although these could have come from English ships).87 We have heard about the Tuscan preference for white potatoes, confirmed by the agronomist Marco Lastri.88 Bignami trumpets his own success around Bologna and Occhiolini refers to limited cultivation in the Roman countryside. In the Kingdom of Naples, Corrado refers to potatoes grown for use in bread-making in the mountain towns of Cava and Novi (Principato Citra), where beech and chestnut woods also abound, and Penne (Abruzzo Citra), where the potatoes grow particularly large.89 Two other authors, both of whom travelled in parts of the Kingdom of Naples around this time, provide further details. From Giuseppe Maria Galanti, we learn that sporadic attempts were being made to introduce the potato in the two Calabrian provinces, namely in the Marchesato (Cosenza), but with limited success.90 As far as Abruzzo is concerned, the Swiss naturalist Karl von Salis-Marschlins commented on the fertile countryside around Lake Celano and Avezzano. ‘Not only all kinds of grain are cultivated here’, von Salis-Marschlins wrote, ‘but to my great surprize [sic] I saw several acres of potato grown’.91 As we enter the nineteenth century, other writers add to our picture of potato cultivation in Italy. Some examples point to an ever increasing acceptance. In Cuneo in 1802 the prefect of the Napoleonic Department of Stura wrote enthusiastically about the recent introduction of the potato there, especially in mountain areas dependent on the chestnut for food.92 Pavia’s professor of agriculture, Giuseppe Bayle-Barelle, grew potatoes in the university’s newly established orto agrario, an initiative that was halfway between botanic

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garden and experimental farm. White and red varieties were grown. BayleBarelle concluded ‘there exist attractive and useful varieties’, but worried that his exemplars would not survive the ‘rapacity’ of labourers and intruders – a sure sign of popular demand (or desperation).93 The abbé Carlo Amoretti wrote of potatoes being cultivated in the mountains around Milan. Amoretti, director of Milan’s Ambrosiana Library, with interests ranging from minerals to bee-keeping, thought that the potato would be useful in combating pellagra, a new disease rife amongst the maize-eating rural poor of north-eastern Italy. Amoretti found the potato well suited ‘to the peasant’s table as to the refined tables of the rich’, but did lament its slow dissemination, despite the activities of the agricultural societies.94 Other examples, in fact, suggest a slow take-up. The Turinese Giovanni Vincenzo Virginio, who mentions potato cultivation in the Lanzo and Susa Valleys, in Saluzzo and in the area above Nice (not yet ceded to France),95 would no doubt have agreed with Amoretti’s latter point about the potato’s slow spread. Virginio, co-founder of the Società Agraria Torinese and who had an estate at Pinerolo, attempted to introduce potato consumption amongst the Turinese, without much luck. As the writer of Turin’s chronicle (Diario storico) put it: ‘the lawyer Vincenzo Virginio, having cultivated them in great abundance’, brought them to market in 1803, only to find himself ‘forced to give them away due to everyone’s reluctance to buy for food something not then considered suitable for human beings’.96 Further down the peninsula, in the Tuscan city of Arezzo, the landowner Giovan Battista Albergotti had evidently just discovered the potato. Albergotti included three entries dedicated to its use and cultivation in a ‘book of secrets’ – containing a range of agricultural, medical, culinary and domestic advice and hints – that he compiled for his own use in 1809. The fact that the three entries are on the basic side suggests how, for Albergotti at least, the potato was still something of a novelty.97 Not only was Albergotti’s information basic, it was also less than accurate. He recorded in another commonplace book that potatoes tolerated drought and were not demanding on the soil, and so to be preferred to maize (which was then not yet a common crop in the area). Not to mention the fact that potatoes ‘saved France from hunger during the Revolution’, and, together with maize, had ensured that ‘there have not been any famines like there used to be’.98 Albergotti, who died in the summer of 1816, could not have known what calamity was just around the corner. On a broader level, the fashion for economic and agricultural surveys helps us draw a map of the potato’s spread on the eve of the West’s ‘last great subsistence crisis’. First and foremost is a survey conducted by Filippo Re into the state of agriculture in northern and central Italy, the Napoleonic ‘Kingdom of Italy’. Re was professor of agronomy at the University of Bologna and founding

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editor of the Annali d’agricoltura del Regno d’Italia. In 1809, in the Annali, Re formulated a questionnaire to which readers from the Kingdom’s various ‘Departments’ were invited to reply, as they did over the following two years.99 The twelfth question regarded potato cultivation. Some regional respondents reported a limited success, especially in mountain areas. In the Alto Adige potatoes had been grown for some 50 years in the Tesino Valley, where they formed part of the inhabitants’ regular diet; in Cadore they were eaten by children with milk; in Asiago potatoes were eaten in a few towns, by people when maize was dear, by animals when it was not; in Monza they were grown in modest quantities for human and animal consumption; in Trento potatoes were cultivated only at high altitudes where maize did not grow; they were also grown in Belluno and in Camerino, much further south. In other Departments potatoes had been recently introduced, and had met with initial success, sometimes due to demand from Austrian troops, before interest had faded, in preference for cereals. Such was the case in Bergamo, Rovigo, Verona, Mestre and Treviso, and Macerata. In other Departments – like Asolo and Cremona – potatoes were little grown. In Valdagno the peasants refused to eat them, while in Urbino the peasants apparently preferred more traditional fare in time of dearth – bread made with acorns. To the south, a more structured survey was that conducted in the Kingdom of Naples by the Napoleonic government of Joachim Murat, known as the Statistica Murattiana, although it, too, relied on the contribution of local respondents. It describes the grim living conditions of the Kingdom’s peasants, in stark contrast to Corrado’s rosy-eyed view of 15 years earlier. Potatoes were singled out as winter fare for the mountain-dwellers of the two Abruzzo provinces and parts of Molise.100 In Calabria Citra the potato was listed as a garden vegetable (pianta ortense), in the category of ‘plants whose roots are eaten’, but its spread was limited.101 In the Apennines of the province of Terra di Lavoro, inhabitants of the Majenarde and Meta mountains, ‘are fortunately starting to get used to the food of potatoes and cultivate them there with some success’.102 Potatoes ‘take the place of bread and of soups’, which is an interesting development. They were not using potatoes just as a flour substitute, as was the standard practice, but eating them in novel ways: ‘they season them with [olive] oil, pork fat, cooked grape must, or salt’. The word ‘fortunately’ in the above passage suggests another important element of the Statistica: how the provincial editors were themselves sometimes personally committed to the potato, as part of broader agricultural and economic reforms. In fact the editor of the Terra di Lavoro submission was the canon Francesco Perrini, not only a great enthusiast of the province’s vegetables, but a corresponding fellow of the Commissione di Agricoltura. Perrini praised the potato but bemoaned its limited spread in the province. The same

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was true of Raffaele Pepe, reporting on the situation in Molise. Pepe, at least, could boast of some use of the potato as a flour extender by the classe civile (professional class) in Molise, principally in the town of Campobasso. Pepe was an agronomist and fellow of the province’s Società di Agricoltura, as well as the author of several short articles in favour of potato cultivation. And one of the editors of Abruzzo Ultra’s two submissions was Giuseppe Alfieri Ossorio, fellow of the province’s Società di agricoltura. Ossorio singled out the tireless work of the parish priest of the town of Carsoli (Abruzzo Ultra), the Revd Segna, whom he heralded as ‘the apostle of potatoes’. But, Ossorio was forced to add, despite all of Segna’s efforts he had not succeeded in attracting ‘the total support of the people’.103

NAPLES REVISITED, 1803 This final comment of Ossorio’s suggests that the introduction of the potato in the Kingdom of Naples was then part of a concerted campaign. Who was behind it? In 1803 a collection of works about the potato was published in the city, dedicated to a 64-year-old French-born Englishman who had recently married his 13-year-old niece. Sir John Francis Edward Acton, baronet of Aldenham, just happened to be Neapolitan secretary of state, commander-inchief of both army and navy, and de facto prime minister to the king of Naples, Ferdinand IV. Acton had been busy conducting a reign of terror following the short-lived, French-supported Parthenopean Republic, when, in 1802, harvest failure struck the Kingdom yet again. (This was only a decade after Corrado had boasted of a Kingdom where ‘no one ever suffers famine or is beset by poverty.’)104 Acton quickly appointed a commission to deal with the problem.105 It seems that some lessons from the calamity of 1764 had been learnt. Every parish in the Kingdom was to have its own deputees in charge of local poor relief, who were to identify able-bodied and infirm paupers and single out possible public work projects. Limited funds – of two to four thousand ducats – would be available to each province. A regime of food coupons (biglietti) was to be introduced for bread purchases. But the backbone of the government’s initiative was the order that the Neapolitan version of Rumford soups (see Chapter 1) be served to the needy public in charitable institutions throughout the Kingdom. This was easier said than done, however. Having declared the ‘cheap soups’ (suppe economiche) to be the principal means of alleviating hunger, the commissioners now faced the problem of having to locate the potatoes from which the soups were to be made. To achieve this, the commission undertook the most extensive print campaign in favour of the potato by any Italian State. The commission produced

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a 200-page summa of contemporary knowledge about the potato: a Collezione of decrees, instructions and published works by the likes of Rozier, Amoretti, Baldini, Corrado and Onorati. The aim of the Collezione was ‘to make familiar in the kingdom knowledge of a branch of agriculture which will assist in a refound abundance in all periods’.106 Hence the treatises, some of which we have already encountered. More specifically, precise instructions were given on the preparation and serving of the ‘cheap soups’. Designs for a special oven were also included. Resembling an industrial furnace (Figure 3.1), Giuseppe Morina’s invention regulated the cooking temperature more effectively, saving on fuel.107 All very impressive; but was it enough? The Statistica Murattiana, compiled less than a decade later, is full of references to the famine of 1802–03; but it also suggests, as we saw above, that potato cultivation and consumption in the Kingdom remained limited to a very few areas, and even here only amongst the poor. How could it have been otherwise? Deeming potatoes a ‘good thing’ was not enough to transform the agricultural sector and the economic life of the Kingdom. And yet, an impetus for agricultural reform had been established, even if on a very limited scale. During French rule of the Kingdom, from 1806 to 1815, agricultural or economic ‘societies’ were set up in all the provincial capitals, and these were to continue the attempt to foster potato cultivation, especially following a ministry of the interior decree of 1811. Much of Europe, from France to Finland, was already doing the same thing, via their own Statesponsored societies.108 To go give an idea of the expectations, potato production in Napoleonic France increased substantially, perhaps by as much as 15 times (even if the real boom began after 1815).109 In the Kingdom of Naples, the government hoped to employ the agricultural societies as a means of affecting agricultural reform, alongside the provincial intendents and, at the local level, town councils and non-governmental officials, like landowners. The government of Murat tended to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to reforms, along Napoleonic lines. As the historian Walter Palmieri has noted, the central authorities in Naples ‘seemed to show a poor awareness of the fact that the widespread adoption of this or that crop, of this or that agricultural practice, required capital, new markets, land readustment policies, an overarching economic policy, in other words of a kind quite different from the one actually undertaken’.110 The provincial agricultural societies wrote reports. In an 1812 report, the Società dell’Agricoltura in Chieti (Abruzzo) noted that, in the mountain areas at least, every peasant planted a few potatoes – even if these certainly were not enough to feed everyone.111 The societies sponsored yet more publications. One of them related how the peasants of L’Aquila (Abruzzo) cooked their potatoes in embers, as they did with onions, carrots and chestnuts, ‘and cooked in

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Figure 3.1 Giuseppe Morina’s design for a cooking furnace to be used in the preparation of economic soups in the Kingdom of Naples, 1803. Collezione di quanto si è scritto di più importante e di più adatto intorno alla coltivazione ed uso delle patate (Naples: Stamperia Simoniana, 1803), pp. 204–5.

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Figure 3.1 Contd.

this way, they put them in their pockets and go to the countryside to work and shepherd their animals’. (Eating on the hoof is certainly nothing new.) Some rural households in the area had also started making their gnocchi out of a mixture of potatoes and flour, ‘which turn out quite tasty and much better than those made with wheat flour alone’.112 These are some of the earliest examples of how the potato was beginning to make inroads into the local diet, in a process of assimilation into pre-existing dietary patterns and habits.

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The societies also instituted prizes. In 1812 the Società di Agricoltura del Molise (in Campobasso) offered ‘a prize of 10 ducats to the peasant who plants potatoes in an open field of two maggia’.113 The winner of the prize offered by the Società Economica della Calabria Citra (Cosenza), in the same year, was a certain Tomasino Cosentini.114 He just happened to be a fellow of the society, which seems a bit of a cheat. Still, Cosentini was prescient in his conviction that potatoes could prosper in the mountainous Sila region of Calabria – where potatoes are now a dietary staple and whose potatoes have protected PGI status.115 We shall return to the importance of Italy’s mountains in Chapter 5. The same contribution by agricultural societies was being made elsewhere in Italy. In Sardinia, part of Piedmont from 1720, Cagliari’s newly-founded Reale Società Agraria ed Economica (Royal Agrarian and Economic Society) sponsored the publication of Giuseppe Cossu’s Instruzione on potato cultivation in 1805.116 It had probably been written much earlier but its publication was made all the more pressing by a famine in 1804. It is the only Italian potato pamphlet to be published in a dialect, in this case the language spoken in the centre-south of the island, not uncommon in works published by government officials and scholars in Sardinia at the time. Cossu was a dedicated reformer, as well as a lawyer, economist and governor of the island’s charitable grain banks, the monti frumentari. Cossu’s cooking tips are a bit of a disappointment though.

THE USES OF POTATOES Potatoes can be used in many ways; the most ordinary and simplest is to cook them in the embers like chestnuts, adding some salt after peeling them to make them more appealing to the palate; they are also good boiled in water, then sliced and seasoned with [olive] oil, vinegar and salt. Source: Giuseppe Cossu, Instruzione per la coltivazione e per l’uso delle patate in Sardegna / Instruzioni po’ sa coltura e po s’usu de is patatas in Sardigna (Cagliari: Stamperia Reale, 1805), in Alessandra Guigoni, ‘L’introduzione del Solanum tuberosum in Sardegna. Due documenti editi dalla Reale società agraria ed economica di Cagliari’, Archivio di etnografia, n.s. II (2007), p. 90.

When the island was hit by famine again, in 1812, the same Society proposed importing ‘small stocks of potatoes’ from Gibraltar and Malta (where the potato had only just been introduced by the English). Since Sardinia already traded with these areas, and providing no duty was imposed, the potatoes would meet with ‘an easy trade’. ‘A good part of the population was already accustomed to

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[potatoes]’, the proposal noted; ‘hunger is the best teacher for the rest’.117 It is difficult to determine what sort of response the proposal met with. Opposition to the potato came not only from the peasants who were being asked to grow and eat it, but from the landowners and agronomists themselves. Because the propaganda campaign in favour of the potato made such use of the medium of print, dissenting voices are difficult to spot; they had little to gain by putting their opinions on paper. By and large the landowning elites were hostile to potato cultivation on a large scale, since they were doing quite well selling their cereals, even when these were bought at ‘political’ prices during famines. In 1808, however, the president of Udine’s Società di Agricoltura, Gregorio Bartolini, was asked whether any new products or methods of cultivation had been adopted in the previous 50 years in his locality. This is how Bartolini replied: I think that nothing new in agricultural methods or types of crop has been introduced into this town, not just in the last half-century but over centuries. Since the only products are usually wheat, maize and legumes their was no place for new crops; so no new effects on the products or conditions of the inhabitants. Given that the countryside is flat and produces sufficient cereals, it will never be useful to substitute these with potatoes.118

Bartolini’s confidence is startling; and yet, despite the disastrous effects of past famines he was clearly not alone in his low opinion of the potato. Similar opinions were still being expressed after Italy had recovered from perhaps the ‘last subsistence crisis’, that of 1816–17.

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4

‘Substituting Potatoes for Wheat’: The Late Nineteenth Century

Where did the potato apostles go wrong? Why, by the 1820s, some three hundred years after the potato’s first introduction in Italy, and after 60 years’ concerted campaigning on the part of agronomists, had it made so few inroads? According to Carlo Berti Pichat, the agronomist-advocates had only themselves to blame for the indifference that followed their campaigns. This indifference resulted from the exaggerated praise heaped on this tuber, since a few office agronomists wanted the labouring peasantry to believe that it was eminently qualified to substitute for wheat. Further exaggerations were that the potato did well in any terrain and that it did not need manuring. Finally, it proved impossible to make people believe that the potato tasted better than wheat bread, maize polenta and different kinds of fruit: foods greatly superior in flavour and taste to this tuber’s insipid pulp.1

And, yet, the potato had somehow become established in Italy. By the time Berti Pichat wrote these words, in 1866, potato production in the province of Bologna alone was over a million Bolognese pounds (or 362,000 kg). And in the former Papal States, of which Bologna was the second city, production was in excess of 20 million pounds (7,240,000 kg). Berti Pichat thought the figure deserved to be much higher; but even so it represented quite an increase from 1820. In that year, only a few years after the famine-epidemic of 1816, a miserable 40,932 pounds (14,817 kg) of potatoes had been harvested in the province. The decade that followed saw annual production rise to an average 175,000 pounds. However, the real increase in potato cultivation in the Bologna province began in the following decade: during the 1830s annual harvests averaged 650,000 pounds. And this increased still further to an average of 950,000 pounds during the 1840s.2 Compared to 1820, the figure reached in 1850, when 1,241,828 pounds (449,542 kg) of potatoes were harvested, represents a 30-fold increase in as many years. Production kept rising, year on year, throughout the middle decades of the century. By 1874 the province of Bologna was producing 8,242 metric tonnes; that’s 18 times the 1850 harvest (and 556 times the 1820 harvest).3

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And, as we shall see in this chapter, Bologna was by no means exceptional in its adoption of the potato. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the potato go from being an alternative crop to a mainstream one, in many parts of Italy. Potatoes did begin to ‘substitute for wheat’, in Giosuè Carducci’s phrase (see Chapter 2), or at least compliment it. Across the Alps and down along the Apennines from Liguria to Calabria, on the main islands, and into the cities of Italy, the potato became part of the diet, spawning regional piatti tipici as it went – potato pies, potato salads, potato soups, potato gnocchi, potato-filled ravioli, rice and potatoes, pasta and potatoes, legumes and potatoes, vegetables and potatoes, tripe and potatoes. How this happened and what factors prompted such a transformation in Italian attitudes and habits – in agriculture, trade and diet, from upland farm plots to lowland cities – is the subject of this chapter.

PEASANTS DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES In the 1830s it was still easy to come across sections of the population who felt ‘a great distaste for potatoes’; who believed that it was ‘food more suited for pigs then for men’. So wrote Vittorio Angius and Goffredo Casalis, referring to the area of Oristano in Sardinia.4 If nothing else, their comments suggest that the potato had at least become accepted as viable livestock feed. In itself, this was a significant development, since traditionally little or nothing had been grown specifically to feed animals. They had had to make do with what they could forage; winter fodder consisted of leaves stripped from the trees and vines. The peasants who now grew potatoes were less likely to eat them themselves, unless their other crops failed. And yet, attitudes appear to have been changing. Significantly, it happened without the ‘benefit’ of any propaganda campaign. It was driven by local, small-scale, domestic needs; not by government-led campaigns or the decisions of reforming landowners. To pinpoint more precisely when, how and why this shift took place, let us take the example of Molise, in the southern Apennines, made possible by Angelo Massafra’s research.5 At first, potato cultivation in the Molise region tended to make use of fallow land. This development happened, not as the agronomists recommended, in order to produce more animal fodder and establish a more efficient system of crop rotation; rather, because peasant families sought to meet their own consumption needs (there being as yet no market for their potatoes, in any case).6 The smallholders and tenant farmers of Molise managed this without adequate capital, animal labour or manure, but by a more intensive use of their own labour, including that of women and children. Potato cultivation was quite labour intensive, beginning with ploughing, harrowing and rolling,

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followed by manuring (where done), planting (making of holes and dibbling), earthing up and weeding, and ending with harvesting, gathering, cleaning, and transport.7 But if there was one thing that Italian agriculture had no shortage of, it was people, and this was certainly true of Molise, whose population had continued to increase throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.8 The pressure on land meant that in order to make ends meet the same peasant was forced to be at the same time a smallholder, a tenant farmer and a day-labourer.9 In addition to this, and like their counterparts in the Italian Alps, thousands of peasant men from Molise were forced to migrate each year in order to make ends meet, in their case to nearby Puglia, ‘where they stay for around seven months to work the fields, reap the harvest, cut firewood and make charcoal’.10 And back in Molise, where generally small, rugged and steep plots of land made the plough a rare sight, favouring use of the hoe and spade, the potato offered another possible resource. Moreover, potatoes, like broad beans and other legumes, were still free of any sort of tax or tithe. The adoption of the potato thus represented a partial solution to an economic problem. It is not surprising that it was put into practice by peasants working on a small scale, in more marginal upland areas, and not by the state or large landowners. Such solutions, the agricultural historian Joan Thirsk has written, ‘are more likely to come from below, from the initiatives of individuals, singly or in groups, groping their way, after many trials and errors, towards fresh undertakings’.11 Smallholders, or even tenant farmers working their own patch of land, are more likely to tailor their crops to their own immediate needs and resources, rather than to the market. It is dynamism of a different sort, driven by necessity.12 In difficult situations, they will grow a variety of crops to spread the risk, make intensive use of their own labour throughout the entire course of the year, take into consideration the changing requirements of their own family and its cycle, and emphasize immediate susbsistence needs over market prices and differences in soil types. Small-scale potato cultivation was a rational part of such strategies. This is what happened in the early 1830s in Molise, when it became common practice to plant potatoes ‘either in-between series of grape vines or in-between rows of maize’.13 Polyculture such as this was a carefully varied system, mixing trees (prudently spaced), vines (which might festoon the trees), cereals and vegetable crops in the same field. Except in areas where grain was dominant, polyculture was commonly practised throughout the Mediterranean. It made the most efficient use of limited resources: because the plants had different needs, they did not compete with one another; variety spread the risk, so that if one crop failed, another might be less affected; and, even when the field was left fallow, the trees and vines continued to produce. The system’s flexibility allowed for the introduction of new crops. The spread of maize in Molise

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had taken place several decades earlier, and now it was happening to potatoes, which were finding a place in local agricultural practices. But the agronomist Raffaele Pepe was not convinced that the potato had found a place in Molise. Reporting on the activities of Campobasso’s Società Economica during 1834, Pepe noted that the potato’s spread was being held back by the very success of maize. True, there were areas where potatoes were being bought and sold; but they were still deemed suitable only ‘as food for pigs and for children to eat with their bread’.14 In market terms, potato production and prices had as yet made no impact on trade in general. In agricultural terms, the potato had not yet found its niche: it was ‘neither a garden nor a field crop’, there was no set time for its planting, and it lacked an established place in the system of crop rotation. Pepe recommended that the most pressing concern was to determine whether the potato ‘could be used in crop rotation between wheat and maize or between legumes and cereal crops or other crops customary in the provinces’.15 An intensive biennial system of crop rotation became the standard one, regardless of what the agronomists like Pepe suggested, alternating wheat, maize and legumes/potatoes, without an intervening period of fallow or pasture to restore the soil. Despite this hesitation, some 20 years later, in 1855, potato production in Molise had risen to 530,568 tomoli (294,465 hectolitres).16 On its own this figure does not tell us much. A more useful statistic is the proportion consumed by people: 40 per cent. The bulk (60%) was fed to livestock or used as seed. This is a useful proportion to keep in mind for other regions of Italy. This leaves 117,786 hectolitres for human consumption, and given that the population of the province of Molise was 360,600 (in 1851),17 this means 32.7 litres per person, or, roughly, 23.4 kg.18 As this is a provincial average, the figure would have been higher where production and consumption predominated, the central Isernia district. In some towns here potato production amounted to half or more of overall agricultural production, which included wheat, maize, barley, oats and spelt.19 Production and consumption were certainly high, and steadily rising, in Molise. But, by way of comparison, and by very rough estimate, France’s per capita consumption was four times higher, while in parts of Belgium the potato had already taken the place of bread on the peasant’s table, to say nothing of the potato’s place in Ireland before the great famine.20

ITALY AND THE EUROPEAN POTATO BLIGHT On the face of it, there could not have been a worse time to turn to large-scale potato growing than in the middle years of the nineteenth century. With what turned out to be rather unfortunate timing, in 1845 the Interior Ministry of

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the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies set out to encourage potato cultivation. It required towns to supply figures on the local potato crop.21 In fact it had been doing so for a couple of years, in response to ‘news of the extraordinary poverty throughout the Kingdom as a result of this year’s [1843] harvest failure’. Naples, the capital, escaped the worst: the price of potatoes, maize and legumes had gone up, but otherwise ‘[the city’s] external aspect presents no signs of want’.22 It is ironic that the watershed in Italian potato production and consumption was exactly this period, the mid-1840s. Ironic, because this period witnessed yet another series of harvest failures and, of course, the great Irish potato famine; yet the aftermath was a push to develop ever more varieties and increase cultivation. Where the potato was a virtual monoculture, and where climatic conditions had favoured it, the sudden arrival of the potato blight (Phytophthora infestans) from North America all but destroyed the crop, with dire consequence for the populations who depended on it as a staple. Whole crops rotted in the fields virtually overnight while farmers and agronomists alike stood by helpless. Potatoes had long been victim to a range of diseases and pests, but nothing on this scale. The cause of the ‘potato disease’ was put down variously to bad weather, poor soil, the devil. Those who linked the ‘potato disease’ to a fungus were on the right rack, but they were unsure whether the fungus was the cause or the effect.23 In any case, it was here to stay. Today, science may have identified the fungus’ gene sequence, but after more than 150 years Late Blight remains the most destructive disease of the potato, responsible for losses amounting to $6.7 billion a year, despite the intensive use of fungicides.24 In 1845, all of the existing varieties succumbed. Potato breeding was still in its infancy in the first half of the nineteenth century and the ancestry of different types are difficult to trace (records are hard to come by since the developers of new varieties regarded them as ‘trade secrets’ not to be disclosed).25 Nevertheless varieties like the ‘Regent’, ‘Black’ and ‘Irish Apple’ had become well known; none was more famous than the ‘Lumper’. In Ireland, the famine was due to the failure of this single variety.26 The ‘Lumper’ was the greatest cropper of its day; developed as stock-feed, it had become the staple of the poor. The result of the fungus and the resulting famine is well known: the continuing failure of the potato crop in Ireland caused something like 700,000 deaths and led many more people to emigrate. What was a national disaster in Ireland was a series of regional crises on the European continent, including parts of northern Italy. Due to the blight, which reached Belgium first in 1845, much of the European potato crop was also wiped out. But because the potato was not the only staple, and because the blight did not strike all areas equally, the effects on the population were not

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as tragic nor as long-lasting as in Ireland.27 Even so, the adverse weather that helped spread the blight during 1845 and 1846 affected other staple crops as well, like wheat and rye, especially in the latter year. At a time of population and economic growth throughout much of Europe, food remained a weak point. The combined harvest failures were calamitous, especially in the Netherlands, Belgium and Prussia. People suffered real hunger and hardship in all of these areas, as suggested by a slow-down in the bodily growth of people who were adolescents during these years, and birth rates declined. Mortality increased too, with an estimated 200,000 famine-related deaths on the Continent. In Italy, because the potato was a supplementary crop, and because numerous different varieties were grown, in a range of different conditions, the immediate impact of the 1845 attack was less severe. It appears to have been confined to Alpine areas. The Austrian province of Trieste managed to get in an early harvest and was spared the blight, that year at least.28 However 1845 was exacerbated by a more general harvest failure in 1846. So, while 1845 was cold and wet, favouring the development and spread of the potato fungus, the following spring was exceptionally hot and dry, followed by summer thunderstorms. The failure of the 1846 potato crop in places like Cadore (Veneto) was a severe setback, at a time when the wheat and maize crops also did poorly, causing prices to double.29 The result was a subsistence crisis not unlike that experienced elsewhere in Europe. Moreover, in northern Italy, similar to areas in northern Europe, the harvest failure had a part to play in sporadic social unrest in rural areas. The food crisis may also have been a contributing factor in the urban riots 1848, which broke out throughout Europe.30 In northern Italy, these were directed against Austrian rule. On 22 September 1847 the Austrian ‘imperial-regal government’ of the Veneto had attempted to calm the fears of landowners and peasants with an Istruzione popolare circa la malattia delle patate.31 The circular was divided into six headings: choice of seed potatoes, planting, cultivation, harvesting, storage and uses for diseased tubers. The advice was basic: how to reduce the damage caused by the blight. Because there was as yet no solution the advice necessarily centred on sound agricultural practices. This did little to stem the rising dissatisfaction with Austrian rule in the Veneto, which of course was about much more than rotting potatoes. Sometimes through the efforts of liberal landowners or the local clergy, sometimes spontaneously, some elements of the peasantry protested against the Austrians and in favour of ‘Italian’ rule. In December of 1847 the villagers of Cornuda (Treviso), on coming out of church, had cried: ‘Viva Pio Nono; morte alla Patate!’ (as we saw in Chapter 2).32 Pope Pius IX was, at the time, the hope for those in favour of a united Italy, and the patate were the Austrians. One of Cornuda’s priests was known to harbour anti-Austrian sentiments.

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The harvest failure and resulting famine were politicized, as groups opposed to absolutist rule exploited the food riots in a liberal-nationalist direction. One of these was a physician of Spilimbergo (Friuli), a certain S. Pognici. In 1847 Pognici wrote a poem which appears to be about blight-damaged potatoes, but is in fact a veiled denunciation of Austrian rule. The blight had the colours of the Austrian flag: You’ll be wasting your time / If you look for white, / Red and green / Signs on their sides: / The black spot / The yellow stain / This is the problem / Which is never wrong! / They have large spots / My Potatoes. [Tu il tempo perdi / Se guardi ai bianchi, / Ai rossi, ai verdi / Segni sui fianchi: / La nera macchia / la macchia gialla, / Qui sta il busillibus / Che mai non falla! / Han grosse macchie / Le mie Patate.]

The only solution to the infestation, railed Pognici, was to get rid of the ‘Patate’: And I mean to say / That every land / Must suffer / If in its breast / Seeds and temperaments don’t change . . . / Potatoes always! / Always potatoes! / They have sucked too much, / For sacred God! / Too much, from / Italy’s blessed garden; / And now’s the time / That they be chased out / To their ruin / These Potatoes. [E valgo a dire / Ch’ogni terreno / Deve soffrire / Se nel suo seno / Sementi e tempre / Non sian cangiate . . . / Patate sempre! / Sempre patate! / Troppo succhiarono, / Per Dio sacrato! / Troppo dell’Italo / Giardin beato; / Ed è pur ora / Che sian cacciate / Alla malora / Queste Patate.]33

The short-term effects of the riots against Austrian rule, like the attempts to counter the potato blight, were limited; the longer term was another matter entirely (for both Austria and the potato). The long-term impact of the blight in Europe was quite positive: an impetus to concerted potato study and the development of new varieties. A frenzy of publications resulted, both in Italy and in the rest of Europe, as agronomists and scientists tried to understand the disease and propose solutions. Moreover, as a response to the blight, plant breeders engaged in the ‘holy grail’ quest for a blight-resistant potato, which included going back to the Americas.34 Each new variety was a ray of hope. Claims of resistance were made, only to be dashed, as new victims succumbed in turn. From the 221 varieties present in Europe in 1848, the number rose to over 600 during the next 30 years. In the Casentino mountains of Tuscany the number of cultivated varieties went up from one in 1839 to 27 in 1854, with 11 varieties being particularly widespread.35 Gone were the days when the potato was the object of study by abbés and landowners with a passion

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for amateur agronomy; it was now part of the systematic research of Italy’s ‘Stazioni Sperimentali Agrarie’ and by holders of the cattedre ambulanti, itinerant agricultural instructors, particularly important in the spread of new knowledge and technology in the countryside. Potato cultivation had become a set part of the curriculum in agriculture courses, like that offered by Berti Pichat and from which we quoted at the outset of this chapter. The latest potato varieties were developed, stocked and sold by the growing the numbers of Italian plantsmen and seed companies. One was the Savoyard August Burdin, the largest vivaista in the Kingdom of Sardinia, with establishments in Turin and Milan. As part of his marketing strategy, Burdin founded a ‘pomological museum’ to display (and publicize) the latest species of fruit and vegetables. In 1857, he engaged a local artisan, Francesco Garnier Valletti, who had developed his own technique for the modelling of ‘artificial plastic fruits’.36 Over the next few years Garnier Valletti modelled mostly fruits for the exhibit, like apples, pears and peaches. But amongst the vegetables, by far the most numerous were the potatoes (Figure 4.1). Garnier Valletti painstakingly modelled some 40 different varieties for display, including some of the latest American (‘Ruby’, ‘Snowflake’), German (‘Euphyllos’), British (‘Paterson Princess’) and French (‘Truffe d’août’) varieties, as well as more local ones (‘Susa bicolore’, ‘Nostrana gialla’).37 Potato cultivation continued to rise in Italy. ‘There is a real mania today, quite open to criticism, to want to plant them everywhere’, wrote Revd Luigi Mucci, parish priest in the town of Supino (in the foothills between Rome and Naples) and amateur agronomist, in 1852.38 Potatoes ‘have now become such a necessity’, Mucci noted, ‘that we would not know how to do without’.39 Since traditional Italian varieties had all succumbed to blight, especially the ‘more delicate and flavoursome ones’, ‘rendering them unfit for any use whatsoever’, growers turned to new varieties.40 At first these came from elsewhere in Europe; then great store was put in varieties from the United States, since they seemed more resistant. But in production terms varieties like ‘Early Rose’, ‘King of the Flukes’, and ‘Snowflake’ were disappointing, at times producing less than ‘our standard varieties’, according to the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, reporting on the development several decades later. And ‘considered from the point of view of human nourishment’, none of them had ‘the good qualities’ of varieties introduced from France, England and Germany, like ‘Marjolin’, ‘Segonzac’, ‘Vitelotte’ and ‘Keen’s Seedling’.41 The agricultural crisis of the last quarter of the century, initiated by the import of cheap grain from America, Argentina and Russia, was the darkest test yet for the new country, unified in 1861. The crisis had an adverse impact on the entire Italian economy, fundamentally agrarian as it was (80% of the population derived its livelihood from the countryside). Per capita

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Figure 4.1 Francesco Garnier Valletti’s resin models of the ‘Nostrana gialla’ and ‘Susa bicolore’ potato varieties, two of over a thousand surviving models of fruits and vegetables he made, now preserved in the Museo della Frutta ‘Francesco Garnier Valletti’, Turin.

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consumption in Italy plummeted to 1,800 lire, the lowest point it would ever reach.42 The agricultural crisis culminated in indebtedness for peasants, social disruption and large-scale emigration. It also spurred on potato production as Italian farmers looked for alternatives to low-priced wheat and maize, and grapevines hit by the phylloxera disease. On top of this, the much-hated ‘milling tax’ (tassa sul macinato), in force from 1869, which enforced a duty on goods milled into flour – all cereals, but also including chestnuts and legumes – no doubt spurred landowners and peasants alike to consider growing potatoes. Potatoes were not affected by the milling tax; this specific tax aside, potatoes had always had the attraction that something grown and even stored under ground is necessarily harder to tax than something, like a cereal, which has to be publicly milled and baked. It is no surprise that the peasants who made up the majority of the country’s population protested against the flour tax, in town and village centres up and down the peninsula, resulting in several hundred deaths and thousands of arrests.43 The peasants were doubly affected, since the tax also hit consumers, especially the less well off, for whom bread made up a susbtantial part of their diet, as bread prices rose and then stayed high even after the tax was finally abolished in 1884. By century’s end the potato was being recommended for its value as a cash crop, and heavy cropping varieties developed by plantsmen in the United States and Northern Europe were much in demand. These high yielding (‘gran reddito’) varieties were described in numerous Italian publications from the mid 1890s.44 The problem with ‘our standard varieties’, wrote the agronomist Ulderigo Somma in 1904, was that Italian growers cultivated potatoes ‘for direct consumption, often without paying attention to the quality, shape or taste they might have and which could make them more attractive in the marketplace’.45 As a result, growers were not seriously concerned with the preparation of proper seed potatoes and in trying to counter the degeneration of varieties which inevitably occurs over time. ‘In Italy’, Somma pointed out, ‘in contrast to what Vilmorin et cetera have achieved abroad, no one has been concerned with the selection of native varieties, for which reason their yields are meagre in comparison to those provided by foreign varieties’.46 It would seem that existing Italian companies like Ingegnoli and Sgaravatti operated on too small a scale to imitate larger concerns like Vilmorin in France and were unable to fill the gap. However Somma had to admit that the native varieties did quite well in the sometimes difficult mountain conditions in which many of them were grown.47 We shall return to focus specifically on Italy’s mountains in the next chapter. There was much room for improvement nevertheless. Although land area dedicated to potato cultivation went up substantially in the period 1874–97,

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production actually went down. Blight was partly responsible, attacking Lombardy and the Alto Veneto between 1878 and 1884, Abruzzo and Calabria in 1879, Campania in the years 1881–84 and Piedmont and the Basso Veneto from 1887 to 1891.48 But this was only part of the explanation; after all, blight continued to be a problem throughout Europe too – as it still can be. The fact was that Italy’s potato yields were the lowest in Europe: 3.3 tonnes per hectare, against Belgium’s 16.49 One explanation for this was fact that most potatoes were grown not as a single crop in open large fields, but amidst other crops, on tiny patches of land, by smallholding peasants, who were the norm in mountain and hill areas of the country. We saw this above in our example from Molise. Adverse growing conditions and the lack of resources for improvements to the land were other factors in low potato yields, as was the persistent use of tired old varieties. Somma’s manual was an attempt to persuade growers to pay greater attention to the varieties they grew, depending on their eventual use. ‘In addition to the improvements to be achieved in their organoleptic characteristics’, Somma wrote, ‘[potatoes] could find a broader application in fattening livestock and in several industries’.50 In other words, the same aspirations that Italian agronomists had been expressing for a century and a half. The interest on the part of agronomists like Somma to increase agricultural production and efficiency was not matched by the state. Since Unification, the government had done little to improve the diet of Italians, other than legislate against food adulteration and fraud and sponsor parliamentary inquiries into living conditions and agricultural production. One of these was the massive Jacini inquiry, named after its chairman, the senator count Stefano Jacini, and begun in 1877.51 It culminated in a 15-volume report a few years later, more consulted by social and economic historians in the last 50 years than it ever was by politicians at the time. Such investigations were part of a broader interest in the ‘social question’ by Italian intellectuals and scholars after Unification. None of them helped poor Italians much. The mountain areas in particular were regarded as marginal and their specific conditions and needs not given much consideration. The inhabitants were given even less; indeed the montanari themselves were seen as the cause of many of the problems facing mountain areas, as the incessant hunt for farming and grazing land was linked to deforestation.52 Increasing potato consumption, so long hoped-for by agronomists, could signal different things. On the one hand, they offered new possibilities to poor peasants, eking out a living in adverse conditions. On the other, they might signal an impoverishment of already meagre diets during the decades following Unification. In either case, the peasants were limited, or they limited themselves, to what they themselves could produce: self-sufficiency of a sort, but at the level of subsistence.53 The presence of potatoes might be the result of the

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peasants’ own initiative, as in Molise. In other areas, tenant farmers were eating the same food they were now growing for the landlord’s livestock – he having since decided that potatoes were a ‘good thing’. In this respect, mountaindwelling peasants had slightly more decision-making powers and room for manoeuvre than those of the lowlands, who were increasingly relegated to the status of landless farm labourers during the nineteenth century. We shall investigate their response, and its unforeseen consequences, more fully in the next chapter. Put briefly here, mountain areas would experience a potato paradox. In many mountain areas potato consumption was perceived as a sign of poverty, where an increase in nutritional levels was accompanied by a decrease in dietary variety and where a potato-fuelled increase in population would lead to pressure on available resources. In lowland areas, however, the potato could also provide evidence of an improving diet (even if the difference is a relative one). In the Lombard countryside around Milan, for example, the appearance of a minestrone of rice, potatoes, cabbage and beans at the midday meal was a sign of variation in what had been an almost exclusively maize-based, pellagra-inducing diet.54 Carlo Amoretti had recommended the potato as a counter to maize and pellagra back in 1801, as noted in the previous chapter; pellagra rates would continue to rise throughout most of the century, until the disease became a scourge of the rural workforce, claiming thousands of victims.55 In his first treatise on the disease, the physician, Giambattista Marzari identified a winter diet based solely on maize as the chief cause of pellagra. He proposed the potato as a way of weaning the peasants of the Veneto away from their maize dependency. Arguing that a million Europeans could not be wrong, Marzari pointed to the Irish, the Swiss, Germans, Alsations and many French as peoples who now ate the potato during the winter months and so were free from pellagra.56 Because the Italian sufferers of pellagra were generally landless farmhands and day-labourers, they had little option but to eat the maize that often constituted part of their meagre salary, and the advice about potatoes took a long time to get through. One hundred years later, the advice for defeating pellagra was unchanged.57 The presence of potatoes in Lombardy, therefore, was a sign, belated though it was, that some change was taking place. Likewise, in the hills of the Roman countryside the presence of potatoes, alongside legumes, vegetables, salt, meat, dairy products, eggs, and especially, wheat bread, was a sign of a better standard of living for the area’s peasants than those of the lowlands – the malaria-ridden Agro Romano, where maize flatbread (here called pizza) and polenta comprised the basic diet.58 Before land reclamation in the 1930s, the peasants of the Agro lived in squalor

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and misery amidst majestic classical ruins, using maize stalks to build the wretched huts they lived in.59

THE DIFFERENT FACES OF INCREASING POTATO CONSUMPTION If potato consumption was increasing, the tuber was being used in different ways by the rich and the poor. It also had different cultural associations for each. This contrast is well illustrated by a scene in Vincenzo Padula’s five-act play, Antonello, capobrigante calabrese (Antonello, Calabrian head-brigand). Padula was a Calabrian priest, who had taken part in the peasant uprisings of 1848. He moved to Naples and founded several short-lived periodicals, including Bruzio, in which this play was first published in 1864. It is set in the Sila mountains of Calabria, in 1844, during a real-life uprising led by the brothers Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, in which the region’s brigands also took part. In scene 1 of Act 3, in their forest hideout the brigands are holding a nobleman, Brunetti, hostage in their mountain hideout. A shepherd arrives with food and drink taken from Brunetti’s house. Don Peppe [shepherd]: Now empty that basket. There are cheeses and salamis, foreign wines, liqueurs and sweets inside. In the other basket you’ll find lunch for everyone. Corina [brigand]: Well done! What things! What lovely things! What vapours! What aromas! And what in heaven’s name is this? Brunetti [rich gentleman]: It’s a croquette. Corina: A croquette! I’m forty years old and I’ve never heard this word before; so that if I hadn’t become a brigand I would’ve died like a beast, never knowing what a croquette was. And this other thing? Brunetti: Potato mousse. Corina: . . . Actually made of potatoes, the ones we dig up from the ground? Brunetti: The very same. Corina: . . . That a thousand times I’ve planted, boiled, and eaten alongside my pigs? Brunetti: Neither more nor less. Corina: But what have you rich people done to our dear Christ that’s so special for you to be able to keep dishes as fine as these to yourselves?60

As the scene suggests, the consumption of potatoes by the poor was closely linked to its use as livestock feed. The same potatoes boiled to feed the pigs

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went to feed the peasants who looked after them. They were simply prepared, another source of starch, either as a substitute for bread or used alongside legumes in soup. In the south, where vegetables formed the bulk of the diet, potatoes were combined with another New World plant, the pepper (either sweet or hot). For a hungry people, the tasty and filling combination was welcome enough to become proverbial. ‘If you want to settle your stomach, eat two cooked potatoes fried with peppers’, as the Calabrian saying went.61 Cold cooked potatoes formed part of a meagre lunch consumed by landless peasants, under the shade of tree, together with dark bread, a handful of olives, a slice of cheese.62 If, in peasant cookery, the potato was consumed in its most simple forms, in elite cookery the potato was transformed, turned into a sophisticated accompaniment to meat and fish. Not a staple foodstuff, therefore, but a source of additional variety. As the permanent secretary of the Società Economica of Calabria Citra prophesied in 1844: ‘pleasing foodstuff for the peasant, served in superior fashion it [the potato] flaunts itself on the tables of the great’.63 The rich were indeed consuming potatoes, or at least beginning to. In Cagliari (Sardinia) the marquis of San Filippo, Vincenzo Anastasio Amat Amat, consumed vegetables like potatoes, tomatoes, salads and greens daily; other vegetables, like aubergines, courgettes, carrots and artichokes were eaten less often.64 On the mainland, in the town of Varese (Lombardy), the nobleman Domenico Adamoli not only grew potatoes on his estate, along with a wide range of other vegetables. They also figure in a recipe collection compiled by his wife Laura Prinetti, in ‘a salad made of cubed potatoes, anchovy fillets, sweet peas, et cetera, with mayonnaise, gelatine as a garnish, and on top of the salad slices of chilled beef or veal spread with mayonnaise’.65 The Adamolis lived a kind of happy self-sufficiency, consuming what they themselves produced, and doing well in terms of quantity and quality. In Italy it was only the large landowners who had this privilege. At a time when ‘fine’ food was French food, the adoption of the potato by the elites of Italy would not have been possible without its adoption by the elites of France. As a guide to Italian elite cookery, we have the Frenchinfluenced Trattato di cucina, by the Turinese Giovanni Vialardi, sous-chef to Carlo Alberto of Savoy and Vittorio Emanuele II, first king of Italy.66 French terms and recipes abound, such as Vialardi’s recipe for potato pie (‘gateau di patate farcito alla savoiarda’), his recipes for cooked potato pieces (‘alla lionese’ and ‘alla maître d’hôtel’) and slices (‘alla provenzale’), and his complex recipe for filled potato nests (‘in crostata alla printanière’, which he says would go well with meat or fish dishes, ‘in occasione di un elegante pranzo’). But Vialardi also includes slightly simpler recipes for boiled potatoes (‘all’inglese’), puréed

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potatoes (also ‘all’inglese’), potatoes cooked in embers, and baked, seasoned potatoes (‘alla bergamasca’).

PATATE ALLA BERGAMASCA (BERGAMASQUE POTATOES) Slice 6 nice large potatoes, cut them in half, and shape a kind of bird’s nest with a serrated knife, emptying them out inside and make a filling with some hard bacon fat [lardo], 1 hectogram of lean meat with nerves removed, some garlic, parsley, a small piece of the soft part of the bread moistened with milk, salt, pepper, some onion, chop everything very fine, mixed with a whole egg, and fill the potatoes, place on a large flat pan greased with abundant clarified butter, dust with some bread crumbs, moisten them with some melted butter, place them over a high flame, until they are coloured underneath, then cook them gently in an oven until tender and of nice colour, and serve very hot. Source: Giovanni Vialardi, Trattato di cucina, pasticceria moderna, credenza e relativa confettureria: basato sopra un metodo economico, semplice, signorile, e borghese (Turin: Favale, 1854) (cit. in Marchese, Benedetta patata, p. 24).

How close this reflected actual practices is hard to say. Menus, strictly in French (after the fashion of the day), offer one possibility. Starting at the top, royal state occasions: potatoes are present, but in disguise. Typical is ‘aspic à la Parisienne’, a gelatine with small pieces of artichoke, tongue, mushroom, truffle and potato, served in April 1864.67 The most common side dish, to the point of being an obsession, served from April to September, are peas, usually as ‘petits pois à l’Anglaise’ (with baby onions). When the occasions are not affairs of state, potatoes appear, but still in the presence of other vegetables. Here echoes of Vialardi are more evident: as in the ‘salade à l’Alsacienne’ served in April 1887 (finely sliced apples and boiled potatoes, with walnuts and lettuce, and a dressing of mayonnaise, Worcester sauce and mustard).68 Moving down a rung, we do find potatoes in aristocratic menus of the period. For instance in the ‘pommes paille’, a side dish of matchstick potatoes (‘patate tagliate a fiammifero’) served in honour of the duke of Genoa and his bride at Rome’s Hotel Quirinal in May 1883.69 As we move down to the local elites, we can make use of manuscript recipe collections. Somehow these suggest a greater immediacy and greater proximity to actual use than printed cookery books. The anonymous author of an 1822 handwritten cookery book intended for ‘mothers of families’ in Cuneo, and dedicated to the local military governor, suggested several uses, including a potato pie which mixed in cream, sugar and cinnamon.70

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PATATE NEL BERRETTINO (BONNET POTATOES) Cooked, peeled and well pounded in a mortar, one incorporates cream into the paste if desired, with milk, a good amount of sugar, eggs and cinnamon. Spread butter and breadcrumbs into the [flour] bonnet, pour on the paste mixture, and having place pieces of butter and breadcrumbs on top, put it in the oven. Two pounds of potatoes require two eggs, just under one coffee-cupful of cream, and two spoonfuls of sugar. If the mixture is prepared in the morning beforehand, so that it incorporates easier, it will come out better. Source: Anonymous, ‘Polizia e cucina. Corrispondenza col commandante o meglio governatore della divisione di Cuneo’, manuscript dated 1 January 1822, published as Polizia e cucina. Istruzioni a una cuoca piemontese del primo ’800 (Alba: Ordine dei Cavalieri del Tartufo, 1984).

Some 40 years later the cook Giovan Battista Magi of Arezzo (Tuscany) started a recipe collection for his own use – since the recipes are minimalistic, without doses or detailed instructions – presumably cooking for a local bourgeois or aristocratic family. The cookery book contains recipes for ‘fancy and home cooking’, making use of local ingredients, but is also open to recipes from outside Italy, such as steak ‘papilion’ (papillon), ‘saucraut’ – and a potato ‘fram’ (flan), not unlike Corrado’s potato gâteau.

FRAM DI PATATE (POTATO FLAN) Boil them until half cooked, then put them in a casserole dish and mash them so they are all broken up, put some sauce in little by little, salt, pepper and some cinnamon; livers and meat cuts can be added in little pieces, seasoned, then bake in the oven until a crust forms, whether in a mould or as preferred. Source: ‘Libretto di cucina di me Gio Batta Magi aretino, mese di marzo 1842’, MS, ed. Piero Zoi, Libretto di cucina di Gio Batta Magi (Arezzo: Letizia Editore, 2006), p. 2.

Another Tuscan cook, this time an innkeeper, also kept recipes for his own use (and perhaps for his successor, too). Luigi Bicchierai, known as ‘Pennino’, ran the ‘Locanda Bicchierai al Ponte’, located at Ponte a Signa, along the River Arno. His career as innkeeper there spans some 60 years, from 1812, when he took over from his recently deceased father, until his own death in 1873, at the ripe old age of 81. The Arno was navigable by small canal boats and his clientele

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consisted of boatmen, couriers, travellers, government officials, as well as local people. In his commonplace book Bicchierai described the inn as ‘a large premises with fireplace, for taking a break, eating and playing cards, and in winter for drinking a flask of wine, and in summer too, but beneath the pergola out back’. There was ‘the kitchen, with a small baker’s oven and stove, and water from the spring in the woods’, and, upstairs, ‘there were four bedrooms, and the fireplace in one room, the large one, with five comfortable beds’.71 Dishes were simple and filling, like Bicchierai’s potato pie (torta di patate) – made from potato purée, mixed with eggs and béchamel, put into a baking dish and baked in the oven – and his minestrone, or zuppa d’ortaggio, which could be served again the following day as a ribollita, now a classic part of Tuscan cookery.

ZUPPA D’ORTAGGIO (VEGETABLE SOUP) This is a soup that has to be made with a hailstorm of vegetables as I will describe right away and in detail. 800 [grams] to 1 kilogram of fresh Toscanelli beans (half that if dried), 6 bunches of Swiss chard, 1 bunch of kale [cavolo nero], half a cabbage, 3 celery stalks, 4 carrots, 4 nice potatoes, 3 red tomatoes, one onion, half a ginger, 1 sprig thyme, one glassful [olive] oil, 2 cloves garlic. Pour the oil into a large earthenware pot, lightly fry the chopped onion and thyme, and when the onion has coloured, add all the seasonings and the tomatoes. Leave it to cook for a few minutes and then add the beans, which you have previously boiled and mashed, leaving a few whole for appearance, and all the other vegetables which have to be well washed and cut into pieces. Pour in five ladlefuls of cold water, add salt and pepper, and boil at low heat for at least two hours. The soup should be served in soup bowls into which you have put two slices of bread toasted and rubbed with garlic. A bit of raw oil onto each and you may serve. If there is any left over, put some toasted bread into the pan, so that all the liquid is abosrbed. Cover it and the next day prepare a mixture of some finely chopped onion and a little ginger and spinkle this over, pour over some oil and put in the oven; when it has come to the boil, take it out and you can serve it cooked again [ribollita] like this, but quite presentable and tasty. So that nothing goes to waste. Source: Franco Tozzi (ed.), Pennino l’oste (Signa: Masso delle Fate, 1996), pp. 33–4.

The difference between peasant and elite consumption is supported by rudimentary ethnographic analysis conducted in 1879. This found widespread consumption of the potato in Italy, but with pronounced regional high and

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low points. It also noticed a pronounced difference between rich and poor. The analysis was based on a survey of 488 Italian towns, grouped into eight different geographical areas, and whose residents were divided into ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ families.72 In general terms, it confirmed that the diet of most Italians had changed little from the previous century, with a monotonous predominance of maize meal, lesser cereals, chestnuts and legumes. What is novel, however, is that the potato united the new nation, straddling the north–south divide. Social scientists and parliamentary inquiries had found that the average northern Italian ate more and better than the average southern Italian, and tended to be healthier as a result; and while southern Italians consumed a predominantly vegetable diet, northerners had greater access to meat, eggs and dairy products. But the 1879 study indicated that the potato was a resource in areas of the north, centre and south. Consumption was highest in the ‘Abruzzi-Molise-Terra di Lavoro-Campania’ area, where 45 per cent of poor families reported a ‘significant use’ of potatoes; this contrasted with the only 4 per cent of rich families in the area who did. In the north, in the ‘Piedmont’ area, 38 per cent of poor families reported a ‘significant use’ of potatoes, while only 6 per cent of rich families did. In the ‘CapitanataBasilicata-Calabria-Puglia’ area the difference was between 25 per cent and 4 per cent, while in ‘Liguria-Toscana-Roma’ it was 23 per cent and 7 per cent, making it the area with the highest ‘notable use’ of potatoes by rich families (both in absolute terms and in comparison with poor families). By contrast, a northern and southern ‘area’ were united in reporting ‘no significant use’ of the potato by families: the ‘Sicilia-Sardegna’ area and the ‘Veneto’ area. Italy did not yet include provinces like Trieste or Trento, still part of Austria.

THE URBAN POTATO From the mid-nineteenth century the Italian potato ‘went to town’. In addition to supplying the peasants’ own consumption needs, further impulse behind increasing potato cultivation came from the growing towns and cities. Urban demand helped turn the potato into a cash crop, for the first time. Potatoes had often been offered for sale in Italian city markets, but this was primarily for the benefit of foreign residents and occupiers. Now the natives were buying them too, due to a combination of increasing availability and falling prices relative to income. As a result, a labourer in Genoa could buy twice as many potatoes with his daily wage in 1910 (32 kg) as he could have done following Italian Unification in 1861 (Figure 4.2).73 And this was welcome at a time when Italian labourers spent well over half of their income on food, sometimes as much as three-quarters.74 But especially so during the last

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60 50 40 30 20 10 1861 1865 1875 1885 1895 1906 1910 1915 1918 (a) 1925 1929 1935 1940 1941 (b) 1941 (a) 1942 (a) 1943 (b) 1944 (a) 1945 (a) 1950 1955 1960 1965 1985 1995 1998

1784 1792 1795 1801

0

Figure 4.2 Quantity of potatoes purchased with a day’s labour in the Province of Genoa (in kilograms), 1784–1998. Notes: (a) Black market; (b) With ration card (tessera) Source: Francesco Casaretto, ‘I prezzi delle patate dal ’700 a oggi’, in Massimo Angelini, ed. Le patate tradizionali della montagna genovese (Rapallo: Tipografia Emiliani, 1999), pp. 93–6, online at www.caprifico.it/scritti/scritti_massimo/1999_le_patate_tradizionali_libro.pdf.

two decades of the century, when food prices rose dramatically because of a widespread and prolonged economic depression, which came to a head in the widespread food riots of 1898. Information regarding urban consumption comes from a wide range of sources. In 1874 the then well known Turinese agronomist Marcellino Roda reported that the inhabitants of his native city were consuming 4,700 tonnes of potatoes a year. Most of these, ‘in fact the most favoured . . . come from Alpine and sub-alpine areas’.75 The Venetians, whose potatoes were grown in the sandy soil of the estuary, stocked up during times of strife. Scipio Slataper’s maternal grandmother, ‘the Venetian lass’, ‘rubicund and light-hearted’, ‘would tell me about the siege of Venice [1848–49], of the sackful of potatoes down in the cellar, of the bomb that smashed part of the house’.76 One hopes that the Austrian bomb left the potatoes unharmed, so they could continue to feed the family. In Slataper’s native Trieste, as in the rest of the Karst region, then part of Austria, it was already a staple, one of a dietary trinity of starches: ‘pane, patate, polenta’. In a description of Florence ‘of old’, before Unification in 1861 and before its decade as the capital of Italy, Giuseppe Conti described the vegetable-sellers who would line the Via delle Sette Botteghe up to the church of Sant’Andrea. Boiling in large, black cauldrons, ‘which it was better not to look at’, were a wide range of vegetables, including potatoes. They did a thriving trade for the many citydwellers who ‘went to buy them to save on fuel’.77 Or who perhaps did not have

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adequate cooking facilities of their own. The poorest urban and rural labourers alike ate the pre-modern equivalent of fast food: simple meals, quickly eaten. In Naples, too, ‘our populace especially eat great quantities of boiled potatoes during summer, and huge cauldrons can be seen in all the streets’, according to two local physicians reporting on the health of the city’s poor.78 Marcellin Pellet, the French consul-general in Naples, was struck by the way ‘labourers who work away from home . . . eat half a kilogram of bread at lunch’, accompanied by whatever was in season: a romaine lettuce, a bunch of radishes, a fistful of cherries or other fruit, broad beans, cheese, ‘or, if they wish something hot, potatoes, chestnuts, boiled lupins, maize cobs boiled or roasted’.79 According to the journalist Matilde Serao, four soldi was enough to buy ‘a salad of cooked potatoes and beetroot’ or ‘a large salad of raw greenish tomatoes and onions’, staple accompaniments to the midday bread of the ‘Neapolitan populace’. Better-off labourers, with 8 soldi to spend, according to Serao, ‘eat large dishes of green vegetables, endive, cabbage leaves, chicory, or all these together, the so-called minestra maritata [mixed vegetable soup]; or a stew, when it is in season, of yellow squash with a lot of [black] pepper, or a stew of green beans, seasoned with tomatoes, or a stew of cooked potatoes with tomatoes’.80 Mind you, the vegetable-based diet that prevailed in Naples, even amongst better-off labourers, was not seen as a good thing by contemporary physicians. Rather it was the cause of their poor health and their ‘lymphatic temperment’ (for which, read ‘lethargy’).81 But, then, Italian social scientists said the same of the peasantry.82 Better the diet of a tobacco factory worker in Bologna. Although he spent 60 per cent of his wages on food for himself and his wife and two children, he was able to provide a bit of variety. The two kilograms of potatoes he bought per week – along with bread, rice, pasta, dried beans, fresh vegetables, cheese, eggs, salt cod, cured meat, wine, oil, lard, butter – allowed for two simple meals a day.83 In Rome, potatoes were similarly associated with the working classes and their ceaseless struggles to make ends meet. Potatoes appear several times in the sonnets Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli wrote in his native Rome during the 1830s, where they are inevitably associated with poverty. Belli’s sonnets – earthy, satirical, often anti-clerical – capture the oral speech of the city and convey a realism unusual in the literature of the time. A man out of work complains that he sleeps ‘on a mattress / just like a sack of potatoes’;84 a man has no money to buy his wife a present for her birthday, after he has bought ‘a pennyworth of potatoes’, wine and bread;85 the wretched poor who have not enough even ‘to dispel hunger with potatoes / and pork scratchings’;86 and, on a lighter (!) note, the fact that we are all destined to die, ‘to make soil for chickpeas and potatoes’.87 At least the serving of boiled potatoes seasoned with pork scratchings suggests a novel urban street food. The assimilation of the

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potato is here brought about through its transformation – the potato-fed pig transformed into a condiment for the potato as human food. Even the peelings had their uses. During the feast of the ‘Madonna di Settembre’, in Florence’s via dei Servi and Piazza SS. Annunziata, people would blow on clay whistles and throw potato and cucumber peelings, ‘and whatever they could get their hands on’ into the Chinese lanterns (le rificolone) so they would catch fire.88 The urbanization of the potato was in fact a Europe-wide phenomenon. From the 1820s the ‘baked ’tato man’ had become a fixture of London’s streets. The potato became a staple of Britain’s cities, thanks to the vendors of baked potatoes – aided by the population explosion of the industrial revolution, the lack of fuel and cooking utensils in poor urban homes, and the potato’s cheapness.89 By the 1870s, the sellers of pommes frites had likewise become an established presence in Paris and the towns of northern France, as well as in Belgium. The sale of ‘chips’ to accompany inexpensive fried fish in Britain also dates from this time.90 The urban potato acquired other associations during this period, for example, as institutional food. Its use in institutional contexts is in a direct line back to the Rumford soups used at the start of the century. Indeed soup kitchens were set up in the main Italian cities, beginning with Turin in the 1880s, and then in Milan, Naples and Rome. As far as the institutional setting is concerned, what is different from the earlier period is the quality and quantity, so the potato-charity association need not have been a negative one. By the end of the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth) the Istituto dei Poveri in Trieste often served ‘pasta and potatoes’ for lunch, alternating it with polenta; whereas dinner generally included meat, as in ‘lamb with potatoes’ or ‘horse stew with polenta’.91

FOREIGN MARKETS AND LOCAL FUNCTIONS These urban potatoes were of necessity grown in close proximity to the towns where they were eaten. Because of their bulk and weight, it was not economically feasible to transport potatoes great distances. Even in the Unites States, during the mid-nineteenth century, potatoes were not transported more than ten miles; any more than that and the costs of transport began to exceed the costs of production.92 This also explains why Italian peasants grew them first and foremost for their own use, at most selling them at local markets; and why consumption figures closely follow production rates. The advent of the railways altered this picture in some important ways. In the decades following Italian Unification the country’s railways underwent

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rapid expansion, from 4,500 km of track in 1865 to 16,000 in 1900. The rail network in Italy and to the rest of Europe made the transport and export of potatoes feasible, accentuating its possibilities as a cash crop. At least, this was the case for Italian growers located within accessible distances of the railway. For those who were not, potatoes continued to be grown by and for peasants and their livestock. And even for those within easy reach of the rail network, the markets for Italy’s main agricultural products tended to be either international, on the one hand, or regional, on the other hand, there being little in the way of a national market until the 1930s. For instance, dairy products from the Po Valley, like parmesan cheese, were either exported abroad or sold within the confines of northern Italy; citrus fruits from the south were either sold locally or shipped to northern Europe or across the Atlantic.93 This divide, in terms of possibilities and limitations, also applied to the potato, as is evident in a report prepared by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, regarding the years 1870–74.94 I have put the data on potato production by province into map form (Figure 4.3). Italian agronomists were becoming aware of the potential advantages Italy had over the main potato-producing regions of northern Europe. It was time to make a virtue of necessity. The warm climate favoured the growing and marketing of early potatoes. Central and southern Italy in particular should take more advantage of the shorter growing cycle that went with a warmer climate. ‘Thus while in Belluno its growing cycle takes 170 days’, wrote Somma in 1904, ‘this is reduced to 140 in Piacenza, 135 in Florence, 130 in Grosseto, 110 in Catania and 85 in Palermo’.95 This realization was assisted by another factor: climate may have played a part in the potato’s spread in Italy. The period from 1798 to 1919 is considered ‘wet’ by Italian climatologists. This would have made it more amenable for introducing large-scale and sustained potato cultivation than the previous period, 1710–97, which is considered ‘average’, with greater extremes of wet and dry years.96 Thus assisted by climate, by latter half of nineteenth century the potato could benefit from a functioning, national rail network, with lines to France and Austria.97 Links to the markets of western and central Europe and lowering transport costs accelerated the commercialization of Italian agriculture. One of the areas able to benefit from connections beyond Italy was the province of Florence. From producing potatoes consumed locally by northern Europeans resident in the city, it turned to exporting them. ‘Most of the potatoes exported during the months of June and July’, the Ministry of Agriculture report noted, ‘come from cultivations in the lowlands near Porta al Prato and Porta San Frediano and are bound for the markets of Austria, Germany, Belgium and England’. Exporting potatoes to northern

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Sandrio

Como

Belluno

Udine

Turin

Production over 20,000 tonnes Production 15,000 to 19,999 tonnes Production 10,000 to 14,999 tonnes Production 5,000 to 9,999 tonnes Production 2,000 to 4,999 tonnes Production under 1,999 tonnes

Parma Florence Arezzo

Perugia Teramo L Aquila Campobasso Benevento Avellino Cagliari

Potenza Cosenza

Messina Catania

Figure 4.3 Map of Italian potato production by province, 1874. Source of data: Ministero dell’Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Relazione intorno alle condizioni dell’agricoltura nel quinquennio 1870–1874 (Rome: Barbera, 1875–8), vol. 4. Map by the author.

Europe might seem like carrying coals to Newcastle; Florence was able to get its potatoes to them several months before they matured locally, satisfying a demand for early potatoes. It was a recent development. In 1874 a meagre 60 tonnes of potatoes had been exported; three years later the figure had climbed to 400 tonnes. This might have been but a small fraction of potato production in the province (16,422 tonnes), but it was a start. All that was needed to ‘extend this cultivation’ was government assistance in obtaining seed potatoes ‘of the varieties most in demand abroad’.98 Hitherto the

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potato with which Florentine growers had had the most success was ‘in the Bohemian variety called Chiphel’.99 Ten years later the business was booming, potatoes having become ‘a real vegetable crop, carried out in a dedicated and diligent manner’.100 Even closer to potential markets was Liguria, especially along the coast, which by the early 1880s was sending its early potatoes, ‘which are quite sought after’, to Turin, purchased by the Cirio Company for export abroad.101 The Lombard provinces of Sondrio and Como were also well connected. Sondrio was at the time Italy’s greatest producer of potatoes, at just under 56 thousand tonnes.102 This was clearly far too many potatoes for the local population of 111,241 people to eat (which would work out at over 500 kg of potatoes per capita each year, almost a kilo and a half of potatoes per person per day!) A portion was consumed locally, some was fed to livestock, some was shipped to the towns and cities nearby (Bergamo, Milan), and some was exported. Como, and perhaps Sondrio too, was able to take advantage of the vicinity of Genoa and other Ligurian ports ‘for the provisioning of the shipping lines’.103 What was then a trickle of Italian emigrants to the Americas would soon become a flood, and potatoes would be a part of their on-board diet. And what potatoes were not consumed in the region, exported, or used to supply steamships, ‘are currently purchased for starch manufacture’, then a new industry. Southern Italian producers also made use of railway connections, especially those farmers in the fertile plain outside Naples. A myriad of very small but productive farms produced a wide range of vegetables and fruit for what was then Italy’s largest city. In the words of the editor of the Campania volume of the Jacini parliamentary inquiry: ‘This grandiose and not unwealthy centre of consumption, for its needs, has given the agriculture of the surrounding areas a unique aspect, in that it has determined the extension and intensity of each crop, all the growers having no other aim in their labours than the conquest of the Naples market’.104 These mostly poor and illiterate market gardeners made laborious and intensive use of every inch of their small plots. By the time of the Ministry of Agriculture report and the Jacini inquiry that followed it, potatoes were being cultivated and marketed, especially early varieties (primaticce). What was not consumed by the Neapolitan metropolis was exported to northern and central Europe. This was not a chance development but the product of concerted effort: ‘every endeavour is made to have the earlies, which are sold at a higher price; indeed still earlier varieties are being introduced, grown for export’.105 Another southern area was located along the Adriatic in the more moutainous Abruzzo, with its rail line running from Lecce northwards. Likewise, the provinces of Benevento and Avellino – second and third, respectively, in terms

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of production after Sondrio – made the most of their vicinity to Naples, in addition to producing for their own consumption.106 Other provinces of the Mezzogiorno were not so lucky. The railway line on the Tyrrhenian coast, that began at Genoa and travelled south through Livorno, Rome and Naples, famously came to an abrupt end at Eboli (and used for the title of Carlo Levi’s memoir, Christ stopped at Eboli). This left the mountainous regions of Calabria and much of Basilicata all but cut off. The provinces of Cosenza (Calabria) and Potenza (Basilicata) had both become large potato producers, but most of this went to local consumption, human and animal, as we shall see more fully in Chapter 5. The scale of the transformation was suggested by Domenico Moschitti, of Potenza’s Società Economica (Basilicata). Whereas ‘a while ago they were widely considered disgusting as the food of unclean animals’, potatoes ‘now adorn the dishes of the rich’ as well as ‘forming a defence wall against famine and the hunger of the poor’.107 Because of inadequate transport links for decades after Unification, food production and consumption were thus necessarily local. The editor of the Cosenza section of the Ministry of Agriculture report noted that ‘the produce of the orchards and vegetable gardens are almost all destined for exclusive consumption in the place of production, sometimes in nearby towns, but never beyond the confines of the province’. Rather perversely, he blamed the province’s peasants and their ‘feeble agronomical knowledge’.108 (They were certainly knowledgeable enough to cultivate potatoes high in the mountains where little else would grow and to make them into a dietary staple for themselves.) Sicilian production was also limited to local consumption. Of all the Italians, the inhabitants of Sicily were perhaps the least drawn to the potato. Sicilian peasants were certainly no better off than any others, but at least the island’s tradition as the breadbasket of Italy meant that they had readier access to wheat. ‘The Sicilian peasant’, wrote the parliamentarian Sidney Sonnino in 1877, ‘eats bread made of wheat flour and, with the exception of cases of dire poverty, is adequately nourished, whereas the Lombard peasant eats maize almost exlusively, and suffers a physiological hunger even when his stomach is full’.109 The potato did take hold in mountain areas of Sicily, however. Finally, the same could be said of Sardinia, characterized both by its mountains and by its insularity.110 ‘Potatoes and more potatoes. For two days Olì ate nothing but potatoes and a few chestnuts’: so wrote the Sardinian novelist Grazia Deledda in 1904 of her poor peasant protagonist, Olì, capable of any sacrifice for her son.111 In Deledda’s novel, Cenere (Ashes), it is the women who cultivate the potatoes, store them, and cook them. Potatoes form a recurrent motif, an indication of the struggle against poor living conditions. This might suggest that the potato was considered a low-status food item, something to

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be scorned, as is so often the case in contemporary literary representations. Quite the contrary was true: as a staple food that could be stored, like wheat, potatoes were regarded as a resource and a measure of relative wealth. The widow in Cenere, looking back, remarks: ‘We were well-off . . . we had wheat, potatoes, chestnuts, raisins, land, houses, a horse, and dog. My husband was a landowner’.112 Potatoes have usurped the place of chestnuts in this provisions list, something we shall return to in Chapter 5, and are second only to wheat in importance. And yet Sardinia hardly figures in national potato production figures of the time, perhaps because most of the crop was produced in kitchen gardens for domestic use. In Sardinia, sheep-rearing (for cheese, meat and wool) was the main agricultural activity, with intensive cultivation of crops limited to bands of land around the towns, in small plots. Nevertheless the potato had an early start on the island. As early as the 1830s the people of the upper Barbagia ‘do not just grow potatoes for their own subsistence but do a remarkable trade in them’. In the mountain town of Fonni (at 1,000 metres above sea level) in particular ‘the earth is perfect for potatoes’ and production was ‘not much under’ 4,000 starelli – a not unsubstantial 144 tonnes.113 They were already growing named varieties, like the little white ‘Zuccherino d’Annover’ (Hannover Sugar-Sweet), the yellow ‘Lingua di bue’ (Ox-Tongue) and the red ‘Sorcio’ (Mouse).114 The region’s potatoes were used in soups as well as in bread, which ‘everyone has got a taste for’. This provided another option where there had formerly been only wheat bread (‘for the well-off ’), barley bread (‘very frequent in the lower class’), sorghum bread (‘of rather limited use and only as a supplement when wheat and barley are wanting’) and acorn bread (‘formerly common in almost all areas’).115 By the time of the Jacini inquiry, the Nuoro area (province of Cagliari) was producing 2,270 tonnes of potatoes, in threeyear rotation consisting of wheat, broad beans, and wheat-barley-potatoes. And in the province of Sassari 3,000 tonnes was produced, ‘and they are dug up in August to preserve them from disease’.116 All of this for strictly local consumption. Before we conclude our national survey, there were two further provinces in the united Italy which produced potatoes for their own consumption and tended not to export. However, in the case of Arezzo (Tuscany) and Parma (Emilia), this was due not so much to poverty and a lack of transport infrastructure as the local demand for cattle feed. As a result, potato cultivation was carried out on a large scale in both provinces. The main production area in the province of Parma was around the town of Borgotaro (also Borgo Val di Taro), first introduced to potatoes in the 1750s by the then governor, the Irishman William Power.117 They did not really catch on. In 1791 Parma’s botanic garden listed potatoes under the heading of ‘exotics’

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and propagated them by seed rather than tuber,118 obviously not intended for agricultural use. But other indications suggest potatoes were already being cultivated, certainly by the turn of the century. ‘Potatoes can be seen cultivated almost everywhere’, at least in Santa Maria del Taro; the author of this description, Antonio Boccia, was impressed, even if the town’s inhabitants ‘know nothing about their cultivation, planting them too close to one another’.119 By the 1870s, however, the inhabitants of the province of Parma had learned how to get the most out of their potatoes, now cultivating them as part of an intensive and continuous crop rotation. The agents of this change were the middle-sized renters. No longer just occupying an intermediary role between the great landed proprietors and tenant farmers, these renters had assumed an important entrepreneurial place in the area’s fast expanding rural economy.120 By the 1870s the most common varieties were the ‘San Giovanni’ (St John) – grown ‘not so much for the good quality of the product but because they mature before the heat of summer arrives’ – and the ‘Veronese’.121 Further south, in Arezzo and the fertile plain of the Val di Chiana (Tuscany) the potato was considered a field crop. Here tenant-farmers had long kept their own kitchen gardens: ‘each tenant family tends a small plot as close to their house as possible for the production of necessary vegetables’; these did not include potatoes, ‘because there are enough in the fields’.122 Field-grown potatoes nourished the famous ‘Chianina’ cattle of the region, not yet destined for bistecca alla fiorentina but still primarily work animals. Whether the potato was grown in open fields or kitchen gardens, the cultivation methods were the same throughout Tuscany. ‘In March or April’, according to an 1884 report, ‘potatoes are laid out whole, but more often in pieces, in furrows in the ground 30 or 40 centimetres apart, in earth that has been well dug over and manured; and when the leaves and stems turn yellow the potatoes are harvested, lifting them with a hoe . . . or with a small plough made for the purpose’.123 The use of a specially made implement confirms how the potato was becoming a cash crop in some areas. The potato owed its eventual affirmation in Italy, after three centuries of false starts, to a range of factors. As an agricultural crop, grown first on a small scale to satisfy strictly local demands for animal (and human) feed, it burgeoned into a large-scale crop exported to the markets of northern Europe. The development of numerous new varieties after the calamitous arrival of the potato blight, allowing it to be adapted to particular conditions and helped to raise yields, at a time when a hated milling tax was in force on cereals, made it attractive to growers. It found a place in established crop rotations. And in addition to its uses as livestock feed, farmers were able to find an expanding market for their crop. The potato was entering the diet of Italians, from the mountains to the

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cities. From staple food of the rural and urban poor, it gradually went upmarket. At a time of generally growing propserity in the 1890s and early 1900s, a combination of falling potato prices (the result of increased production), the availability of different varieties suited to different uses in cooking, and the high recommendations of cookery book writers like Pellegrino Artusi helped in this trend. In particular, as we shall see in Chapter 5, the potato thrived in upland areas, with their more marginal economies and poorer growing (and living) conditions.

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5

‘Up Here it Makes More Sense to Plant Potatoes’: Potatoes, Population and Emigration in Italy’s Mountain Regions It is truly a hard life that [the mountain-labourer] leads . . . Still very young, as soon as his strength permits, he starts working and, at the age of 14 or 15, emigrating. With the approach of the autumn season, when it is no longer possible to work in these mountains, he is forced to look elsewhere for work in order to earn something to support himself and his family. . . The painful exodus begins in the months of October and November, when, leaving his family, and with forty or fifty lire in his pocket, of which thirty or forty are needed for the trip, he emigrates, usually taking his chances, in search of work. He goes to Corsica, Sardinia . . . he goes to Africa and Turkey. Over there he gets together with ten or twelve other men into a work gang [compagnia] with a boss, and he works twelve or fourteen hours, he lives in a shack he himself builds out of branches and leaves, he almost always sleeps in his clothes, on a pile of leaves and straw over which he lays the same sack that he uses during the day for his work and which is soaked with his sweat; and when he returns to his shack in the evening, exhausted, he has to prepare supper for himself; and all this in order to save some money to send to his family waiting in need back home. This is the life he lives every day for eight or nine months, till finally the much awaited month of June arrives, when he can do his reckoning. . . He brings home as the savings from his honest labours some 100, 200, or 300 lire, little of which remains however after just a few days back home, since he has had to pay off the debts incurred by his family during his absence for food, which is mostly wheat or chestnut polenta or bread made of rye and wheat, and pay off the money he borrowed in order to emigrate. He rests for ten or fifteen days, then takes whatever jobs our local mountain areas can offer, and this often means going a few miles from his own town, to which he only returns on Saturday evenings. And in this way he passes the summer season, until autumn comes round again, and he leaves once again; and this happens each year. . . . And we must not imagine that this style of life ends any time soon, on the contrary lasting for forty or fifty years; and in this way the labourer is forced to pass two-thirds of his life away from his family. . . . Nor should we imagine that after many years of labour this poor man can live a quite life, having gained the recompense from his hard labours; no, this rarely happens. As long as he has the strength to, he emigrates, but old

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age comes to him too and the decline of his powers; he can no longer feed himself, and so he appeals to his son, his relations, but they too are wretched, with large families to support, and so can give him very little; and many times the son, without thinking that his turn will also come, pressed on by his wife, will deny his own father a piece of bread or even force him to leave his home.1

So wrote Il Montanaro, Pievepelago’s local newspaper, in November 1883. In discussing the migratory phenomenon, which had become a structural feature of this small town in the northern Apennines (province of Modena), the newspaper reported how ‘the condition of our labourers has much changed in the last twenty years’. In fact, ‘with the rise in population, and so with needs . . . [emigration] has gone much further afield’.2 Whereas previously it had been limited to the Maremma plain of Tuscany, emigration now took in other areas of the Mediterranean. A few years after this article was written, the migratory patterns of Italian mountain-dwellers would change much more dramatically: from a steady but modest movement of people it would become a flood, and from a seasonal pattern it would become permanent, extending to the more distant shores or North and South America. It is hard to imagine that a simple tuber could have had much of a role to play in this shift, and yet it did. This is no easy thing for the historian to investigate, given the lack of research. Of the three interwoven strands to be surveyed in this chapter – potatoes, mountains and emigration – the latter, emigration, has received has received the most attention on the part of historians. But even the interest in Italian emigration is quite a recent development; for decades after the end of the period of mass emigration, Italians had seemed quite happy to ignore the phenomenon, as if it constituted a source of embarassment, a sign that the country was not ‘modern’. In what is now a country of immigration, the subject of emigration is now somehow ‘safe’, even a source of nostalgia.3 For their part, Italy’s mountains have rarely received serious scholarly attention, apart from that of the occasional ecologically-minded historian concerned about their ‘decline’. Massimo Quaini, a geographer, asks: When and how did we become so short-sighted as to eliminate the world of the mountains from our mental landscape? Perhaps . . . the world of the mountains never really entered with all their otherness into the European culture of modernity. We have always read them with completely alien parameters and grids, conceived in the cities, at universities, a thousand miles away from the mountains.4

It is certainly a strange paradox that whereas in Ireland it was the failure of the potato that led to mass emigration, in Italy emigration was at least partly due to the potato’s success. The massive spread of the potato in Italy, outlined

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in Chapter 4, occurred from the 1850s onwards – two or three decades before mass emigration from Italy began, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It is as if the potato provided the penultimate resource for the mountain-poor of Italy; after which, only emigration remained.5 As we shall see, temporary migration had long been part of the multifaceted economy of mountain regions, so much so that there was a veritable ‘culture of mobility’, but beginning in the last quarter century this migration became increasingly permanent, involving millions of people. ‘The main actor in this initial movement of people’, in the words of Ercole Sori, ‘is the whole mountain arc of the Alps and the northern Apennines surrounding the Po Valley, together with an island in the southern interior, that hardest part of the “backbone” that from Molise and interior Campania extends down into northern Calabria’.6 A glance back at Figure 4.3 (Chapter 4) shows the co-relation: the ‘darkest’ provinces, those producing the most potatoes in 1874, are generally the same ones that would be most affected by the phenomenon of mass emigration. From the provinces of Cuneo, Belluno and Udine in the north, to Potenza and Cosenza in the south, there is an evident co-relation between high potato production (close to or over 200,000 tonnes in 1874) and mass emigration (of at least 36 emigrants per 1,000 head of population in the period 1876–1901).7 Clearly, Italians did not choose to emigrate after having had their fill of potatoes, so what kind of link is it? That is precisely the questions this chapter seeks to answer. My working hypothesis is that the potato, by providing a stable crop and an additional source of nourishment, contributed to population increase, which, when viewed in a context of limited resources, was a contributing factor to mass emigration. If potatoes meant less variety in the diet, they allowed for survival – indeed an increase in the number of calories. This was certainly welcome when we consider that in preceding centuries the average calorific intake had rarely been adequate, especially in view of harsh living conditions and heavy workloads. The potato helped make the food supply more regular and increase general nutritional levels. Another New World plant – maize – played a similar role, especially in northeastern Italy; however, maize, when consumed in the form of polenta, and to the exclusion of other foods, brought with it the debilitating and often fatal disease, pellagra. The potato, by contrast, provided increased energy for work, a slightly increased degree of disease resistance, and higher natural fertility levels as a result. This helped fuel population expansion, as it had done elsewhere in Europe, from pre-famine Ireland to the Netherlands. William Langer put it this way: ‘the spread of the potato culture everywhere corresponded with the rapid increase in population’.8 But a correlation is not necessary a cause, and indeed the extent of the potato’s role in population growth in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains a moot point among demographers.9 And the function of

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over population as a factor in emigration has also been called into question.10 A survey of available Italian studies will help us test our ‘potato → population increase → emigration’ hypothesis. But, first, the mountains themselves.

A MOUNTAIN TOUR: SETTLEMENT, AGRICULTURE AND ECONOMY Fernand Braudel was the first historian to point out the crucial importance of the mountains, indeed their primacy, not only in the geography of the Mediterranean region but also in its social and economic history.11 For Braudel, the mountains of the Mediterranean were ‘forced to be self-sufficient for the essentials of life, to produce everything as best they can . . . even if the soil and the climate are unsuitable’. The mountains offered varied resources, but always in short supply. As a result, they tended to be overpopulated, ‘or at any rate overpopulated in relation to their resources’, resulting in a steady stream of migrants down to the lowlands or further afield, who formed a ‘reservoir of men for other people’s use’.12 To what extent does this apply to Italy’s mountains? If Italy is a Mediterranean country, it is also a mountainous one. Over half of Italy’s present surface area (54%) is considered ‘mountainous’, lying as it does at over 600 metres above sea level, which is the Italian State’s definition. Over half of Italy’s municipalities (52%) are found in ‘mountain areas’.13 The figure climbs to 100 per cent in regions like Valle d’Aosta and Trentino-Alto Adige (in the north), 99 per cent in Umbria (in the centre), and 90 per cent in Molise (in the south). Because these municipalities are not usually the country’s most populous – none of Italy’s major cities is mountainous – most of Italy’s population now lives in lowlying areas (82%). However, there are important regional differences to bear in mind: in six of Italy’s 20 regions over half of the population resides in mountain areas. At the beginning of the twentieth century, just over one third (35.6%) of Italy’s agricultural land was located in mountain areas. It was also the most difficult to farm, producing only 20 per cent of agricultural revenue.14 A tour of human activity in the mountains around the time of Italian Unification (1861) would have presented significant variation from the Alps of northern Italy, down the length of the Apennine chain, and over to the uplands of Sicily and Sardinia.15 The Italian Alps presented a well integrated, complex and balanced economic system, whose inhabitants made the most of very limited resources, linking the upland plains to the valley flour. Here, population was concentrated in towns and villages lying in the valleys, around and above which there extended a varied mosaic of wheat, rye, potato and buckwheat fields, with some maize and hemp. Maize was itself a relatively

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recent introduction, quickly becoming a symbol of peasant self-sufficiency, well suited to small plots and the hoe.16 In fact the main tools in these steep, stoney mountainsides were the hoe and spade, rather than the plough. At this altitude smallholding was the norm. In Piedmont, for example, there was an owner-cultivator for every seven inhabitants, forming ‘impoverished communities of equals’.17 The system provided a meagre livelihood, with smallholders cultivating for their own immediate needs rather than for the market, their yields low, but at least they could choose what to plant. Of course, any increase in population threatened to make smallholdings ever smaller, ever more fragmented. Above these scattered plots lay pastures, the mountains’ true source of wealth, producing a supply of animal feed for the winter months. Above the pastures, was woodland, sometimes privately owned but more often community owned and managed, according to local custom, providing wood for a range of uses. Higher still, where trees did not grow, were the alps, broad expanses of meadows, almost always communally owned, where the town’s herds, usually milk cows, pastured during summer. It is all too tempting to accept the stereotype of poor but self-sufficient, isolated and unchanging Alpine communities. Hard to cross, no doubt, but the Alpine chain never formed a barrier to communication. Indeed quite the opposite is true, when we examine their place in ongoing if fluctuating exchanges – of people, goods, technologies – throughout history, both into and out of the Italian peninsula.18 Nor, for better or worse, were Alpine regions ever completely self-sufficient in economic terms. An economy based on pastoralism, forest culture and agriculture was complemented by a vast range of other activities aimed at the maximization of local resources: crafts, mining, manufacture (metalworking, clothmaking) and trade.19 These examples of economic dynamism varied from place to place and over time, of course, but they all ensured a close and continuing connection with lowland markets. These markets brought benefits as well as change for the worse. For instance, the demands for wood from Venice’s industries resulted in widespread deforestation in the Dolomites of Belluno, bringing with it an economic and environmental crisis during the early nineteenth century from which the region would not recover.20 Nor were the Alpine regions simply a population ‘reservoir’, passively sending their always excessive population down to work and live in the richer plains. Historians differ on whether the Alps were overpopulated in relation to available resources. Some areas exhibit a low level of births and deaths – at least compared to southern Europe – and the capability of local populations to slow down population increase by limiting marriage.21 However historians agree that migration should be seen as a resource, actively employed according to local situations, specializations, needs and possibilities. It ranged from mass, seasonal migration, though to the life-cycle migration typified by the

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domestic service of young women down in the towns, to the more structured (and more profitable) movement of specialized artisans, such as masons.22 In the sub-Alpine areas of the Lombard lakes, the emigration of people had been a structural feature of economic life from at least the 1600s. The mountains of the Bergamasco witnessed the regular movement of around 30 per cent of its inhabitants, mostly men, whether for seasonal work, agricultural labour in the lowlands or more specialized building activities in the towns.23 The mountains of the Comasco regularly sent specialized building workers to sites throughout Italy and Europe, following very organized patterns of chain migration more typical of the mass emigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.24 The paradox is that, by providing an important economic resource, this regular migration may have contributed to overpopulation, rather than being the result of it. One thing is certain: emigration and the resulting absence of adult men had important consequences on the family structures and agricultural labours in the communities they left behind, as we shall see below. Continuing our ‘mountain tour’ on the eve of Unification, the northern and central Apennines would have offered the visitor a final phase of economic vitality and importance, obviously within the constraints of the mountain environment, and with due consideration of marked regional differences, before the agricultural crisis that would befall the whole country in the late nineteenth century.25 The northern and central Apennines differed from the Alps in that the presence of trees high up meant that animals could be pastured in only the few available open areas. Proceeding down the mountains, extensive beech forests and stands of chestnuts presented the first evidence of woodland management and the agricultural use of the land. Further down still, we would have encountered the first houses, hamlets and farms (poderi), which would have become more numerous as we descended. From the Apennines of Liguria down through Lazio, farmland was generally organized into poderi. Especially in Romagna, Tuscany, the Marche and Umbria, these poderi were owned by smallholders, often rented out to tenant farmers (mezzadri). According to the system of mezzadria, the landowner rented out the land, or grouping of plots, to a peasant family, along with the house, dividing the costs and produce with the family (the exact stipulations of which varied from place to place and over time). The steeply sloping areas high in the Apennines, above the altitude where olive trees and grape vines could be grown, were always relatively poor. This was compounded by a Mediterranean climate, with rainfall concentrated in the period from autumn to spring, followed by summer drought. The soil was not only low in fertility but often mainly clay. Further down, painstaking labour over the centuries had terraced and tilled the mountainsides, creating conditions that allowed grape and olive cultivation, cereal cultivation where altitude permitted,

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and livestock raising – cattle like the ‘Chianina’, pigs, and, in the harder-to-farm areas, sheep. Throughout the region much economic exchange was of a local, small-scale nature, part monied part barter, involving mezzadri, tradesman and itinerant pedlars, exploiting all the resources the mountain offered.26 Agriculture, however, bore the signs of the privatization of common lands, both pasture and woodland, encouraged in different forms by the various States of the region prior to Unification. The new Italian government would extend this policy. The two centuries prior to Italian Unification had seen some of the marginalization of the mountain economy of the northern Apennines to an appendage of lowland markets that would become more widespread from the late nineteenth century.27 Though not without important industries developed during the nineteenth century – one thinks of the woolen mills of the Casentino during the late nineteenth century – wealth creation was driven by outside forces. The nineteenth century brought with it rising local populations, typified by the Lucchese mountain village of Montefegatesi studied by Roland Sarti. Here, population increase was due to a rising birth rate early in the nineteenth century and declining infant mortality therafter, coupled with the availability of new crops like the potato, first introduced during the crisis of 1815–16 but widely cultivated from the 1850s.28 Regular migration was also a longstanding feature of the region. At the top end, there were the structured campaigns of groups of specialized artisans, whose networks stretched across Europe and beyond. A Tuscan joke had it that when Columbus arrived in America he was surprised to find a maker of plaster figurines (stucchinaio) from Lucca already there, peddling his wares.29 At the lower end, we have the regular movement of tenant farmers, virtually a structural element of the mezzadria system, with its excess population.30 Indeed Alberto Corsini describes a situation of increased demographic pressure, worsening living conditions in the countryside, and a shift in the economic relation between town and country as factors behind increasing emigration. He might be describing the late nineteenth century; in fact Corsini is referring to the early eighteenth century.31 As a result of this established pattern of migration, by the nineteenth century the economy of the entire Tusco-Emilian Apennines had become closely integrated. Rather than see the mountains as a ‘reservoir of men’ for the lowlands, as Braudel did, we might turn the formula on its head and regard the lowlands as a resource for keeping the economic system of the mountains alive and healthy.32 The region’s economic integration is exemplified by well established movements of people across the mountains, of which the mountaineer in our opening passage, taken from Pievepelago’s Il Montanaro, is one. Fully one-third of the Pievepelago’s 3,000 inhabitants regularly left to look for work elsewhere, where ‘regularly’ often meant a life-long routine of out-migration and return.33

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The movement of people followed set patterns: transhumance (to the Maremma plain for winter grazing of livestock), seasonal labour of woodsmen (woodcutters, charcoal-burners), casual labour on land reclamation projects (in the Maremma, but also in Corsica and Sardinia), and seasonal agricultural labour. Each of these migratory routes had its own history. For instance, inhabitants of the northern Apennines had first been attracted to work and settle in Corsica in the seventeenth century, when the island was a Genoese possession, a tradition that continued once Corsica passed to France. In 1893 alone some 9,000 Italians – mostly from the northern Apennines (the provinces of Lucca, Massa, Modena and Parma) – migrated to Corsica, in addition to the 23,000 already resident there. Most did so for seven or eight months, before returning to their mountain homes.34 The integration of the region was not only economic, but cultural. The constant movement of mountain inhabitants, with their widespread contacts, made them ‘cosmopolitan villagers’, who saw the world was an extension of the village.35 On a culinary level, the regular migration of mountain-men from Pistoia to the plains of Grosseto has meant that both areas fill their pasta tortelli with the same things.36 Back at home in the Apennines, women made an important economic contribution in the form of cottage industries: silkworm cultivation, straw-weaving and wool-making. As in the Alps, women also engaged in life-cycle migration, young women taking up employment as domestic servants in lowland towns. Despite harsh working and living conditions, there was evidently enough opportunity available within this economic system that central Italians – from Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and Lazio – would not participate in the mass emigration of the last quarter century to the same extent that Italians to both the north and south would. (As always, there is an exception to the exception, with high levels of emigration from the uplands of the provinces of Lucca, Massa Carrara and Modena.)37 Even if on a smaller scale, traditional migratory patterns could interlink with newer, transatlantic ones, as illustrated by the father of US immigration historian Rudolph Vecoli, who emigrated from Livorno to the United States to work on the ‘tracca’, the railway, after having worked in Corsica and in the quarries of Carrara.38 As we travel south to the Abruzzo in our tour, the Apennines are here at their highest, widest and wildest, with the aptly named ‘Gran Sasso’ (great rock) being the most visible feature. Human use of the Abruzzo consisted of three main environments, not always strictly related to altitude: the high mountains with rare traces of human habitation, the middle mountains with their terracing and compact villages, and the inter-mountain basins and open valley floors, where most of the population was to be found. The Abruzzo mountains were the focus of an extensive grazing sytem, providing winter grazing for tens of thousands of sheep from the Roman countryside and the flat plain of

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northern Puglia (the Tavoliere), passing along shepherding tracks known as tratturi. Some of the legal rights and privileges of this system would be abolished by an Italian law of 1865 and sheep-rearing would decrease throughout the region over the following 40 years, replaced by cereal cultivation. Further down the mountains of Abruzzo, agriculture was mixed and intensive, based on a simple rotation of cereals-fallow (maggese nudo), vegetable cultivation, and, in more favoured areas, olive and grape cultivation. That said, Giuseppe Maria Galanti, visiting in 1791–93, had been astonished to find grapevines thoughout the region, even ‘in places too high and cold’, at well over a thousand metres above sea level.39 Cereal cultivation reached 1,350 metres above sea level. As elsewhere in the Apennines, pressure on land had already lead to widespread deforestation before Unification and repeated cereal cultivation had impoverished the soils. Deforestation is a constant theme in discussions of this period. From 1877 to 1910 the Italian government sold off over half the country’s forests to the highest bidder – more than 2 million hectares of woodland, most of it moutainous.40 The novellist Riccardo Bacchelli described this policy as a ‘a hasty mistake and long-lasting misfortune; heavy damage in the name of fateful and deceptive profit’, in his saga of milling folk on the River Po.41 The policy has usually been regarded as a marked shift from the centuries’ old programme of careful forest management of what were common lands in the states of Italy prior to Unification. In fact, deforestation has a long history in the Apennines. Italian agronomical and economical treatises of the first half of the ninetheenth century abound in references to it and the damages caused by it, when population pressure (and the increased need for arable land), combined with the demand for wood (for industrial and other uses), forced towns to sell off portions of communal uplands.42 The Italian government turned this practice into a policy. Reporting in 1885, the provincial forester for the Abruzzese province of L’Aquila commented on the never-ending demand for such land, as a result of pressures which pushed agriculture further up the mountainsides: The uncultivated part [of the province] is limited to woodland and unfertile, rocky lands which do not permit agriculture, due also to their height above sea level; but the peasant, always in search of land to own or land at a lower rent, reaches as far as the highest peaks and gorges, tilling, felling, removing rocks and roots, and by heavy labour he is able to farm those mountainsides, planting rye and potatoes, so that during the rains people complain of the disasters caused by flooding in the fertile valleys below.43

As we descend southwards to the long, narrow toe and broader instep of the Italian ‘boot’, the southern Apennines of Calabria and Basilicata would have offered the visitor a striking reversal of the stereotypical pattern of

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lowlands/rich, uplands/poor. Here, by contrast, it was the mountains which normally provided the better standard of living, a refuge away from the dangers of the lowland and coastal areas, beginning with malaria.44 Most of the fast-increasing population – and between 1793 and 1881 it increased by 52 per cent – was concentrated in small mountain towns.45 In Calabria and Basilicata the uplands were much less integrated economically with the lowlands than in the northern and central Apennines. The trend towards settlement of the lowlands, which would become an important economic and social factor in the twentieth century, was only just beginning. Indeed, people of the lowlands regularly migrated upwards, like residents of the province of Reggio Calabria, who left their villages in the foothills to cultivate potatoes and grain in the Aspromonte mountains.46 (The irony is that, today, it is the coasts that are overpopulated and the mountains virtually deserted.) As so often in the South, areas of upland forest were treated to a bit of slash and burn agriculture, known locally as debbio, before being planted with potatoes or rye, and then abandoned as their fertility was exhausted. By century’s end, this was all the land there was for return emigrants. Those fortunate enough to return home with a bit of cash accumulated after years of hard labour abroad, were often disappointed to find that the only land available to them for purchase, in what was a very hierarchical and conservative system of land ownership, were small, tired plots up in the mountains.47 From the start of the nineteenth century the demand for farmland in Calabria and Basilicata, especially for cereal cultivation, was a constant source of pressure on remaining woodland. However, forested land was in short supply. In contrast with the northern Apennines, where woodland predominated over arable land, here it was arable land (planted with legumes and cereals) that predominated over woodland. This was made possible by the basic fact that the further south one goes in Italy, the higher are the upper limits for cultivation. But even on arable land yields were poor, often not enough to repay the effort, especially when the land was rented and the crop divided between tenant and landowner. Since pasture was almost non-existent, animal husbandry could not make up for poor crop yields, as in it did in the Italian Alps, where it formed the mainstay of the mountain economy. Forestry and ironworking had been important elements of the mountain economy in the southern Apennines, but these declined quickly after Unification and the end of markets within the former Kingdom of Naples. It was no longer cost-effective, given the absence of a road and rail infrastructure. Bizarrely, when the Ionian railway was built, beginning in 1866, the necessary wooden sleepers were shipped in from far-distant Trieste rather than use wood from the forests of the adjacent Sila mountains.48 Deforestation seemed to offer new possibilities, as towns sold off common land to help strained budgets and

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church lands were sold off; these proved shortlived and illusory.49 Indeed the results of deforestation were particularly disastrous in the southern Apennines, due to the region’s harsh climate, alternating between long periods of drought and brief, torrential downpours. Deforestation severed the close link between human habitation and natural habitat, altering local microclimates, exacerbating the threat of landslides, flooding and the formation of marshland. Seasonal migration and population increase were also facts of life in the southern Apennines, as we saw in the previous chapter with the men of Molise regularly leaving their mountains for agricultural work in Puglia. Naples, a state capital before Unification and still united Italy’s largest city, was another pole of attraction, a force it shared with other former capital cities, like Venice and Turin, as well as the new national capital, Rome. Throughout Italy, this kind of migation could be temporary or periodic, but could easily become permanent too, if new arrivals found a niche in the city. From the 1870s and 1880s this periodic movement was at first complemented, and then replaced, by permanent emigration overseas. This mass migration of Italian mountaindwellers overseas was less the movement of specialized labourers and pedlars, characterizing earlier periods, and more that of an unqualified labour force.50 To return to the case of Molise, between 1876 and 1925 a total of 349,000 passports were issued to emigrating Molisani, a number that represents ninetenths of the province’s population as of 1901.51 This startling figure reveals two things: first, that a significant quantity of this population movement was still in the form of repeat migration, although the distances involved were necessarily much greater; and, second, that the small, mountainous province of Molise was of the areas of southern Italy most affected by mass emigration, relative to population. It is also striking that the bulk of passports was issued between 1896 and 1915. This suggests that in the two decades prior to this, the men of Molise (and they were mostly men) had other opportunities – whether it was agricultural work in Puglia or migration to Naples or Rome – which were later replaced by the attractions of the United States. As with the southern Apennines, Sicily’s mountains, in the interior, had lost their ancient forests, leaving a wild, bare enviroment, scarcely populated. Here the land was organized into large estates (latifondi): vast fields and pasture, bereft of trees, where wheat was the main crop. By contrast, up the fertile slopes of Mount Etna there was more crop variety. When it came to the movement of people, Sicily would have offered a contrast to the other areas we have visited in our ‘mountain tour’. In the early modern period overpopulation had never been a problem, given the dominance of the large estates, and the island was more a source of immigration than emigration. But economic development in the late eighteenth century, especially in the eastern part of the island, saw the beginnings of a reversal of this trend, which was compounded by the

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beginnings of mass emigration from latifondi areas towards the end of the nineteenth century.52 Likewise, in Sardinia population density had traditionally been low: the reason why the island was characterized by immigration (from central Italy, as we have seen) rather then emigration during the nineteenth century. The island’s emigration patterns have more in common with central than southern Italy: even when emigration did gain pace, the preferred destinations for Sardinians were in the Mediterranean and Europe, especially France, rather than the Americas, in marked constrast to the patterns for Sicily and Southern Italy.53 Throughout Italy’s mountains, farming formed the backbone to fragile economies, although they were also dependent on seasonal or temporary outmigration and small cottage industry in order to make ends meet. Most of this farming was to satisfy local food needs in a system which could verge on selfsufficiency. This explains why so much effort was put into cultivating cereal crops on lands not naturally suited to them, producing low yields that were not economically viable otherwise. This was made possible by the abundance of human labour, enough that it overcame the limited fertility of the land. At the same time, however, the large populations living in areas of limited natural resources were keen to exploit every possibility. And this is where the potato came in.

MONTANARI AND PATATARI: POTATO CULTIVATION AND CONSUMPTION IN MOUNTAIN AREAS High in the mountains of the Valle d’Aosta, peasants would choose the largest and strangest shaped potato they could find and drop it at the landowner’s feet. He would then pick it up and throw it as hard as he could into the fields, as a kind of propitiatory rite auguring a fruitful harvest.54 In Sardinia, potatoes began to substitute for more expensive cheese in the making of culurgiones (large ravioli); a small dish of these potato-filled culurgiones would be left out on windowsills on 1 November as an offering for the deceased.55 The entry of the potato into local ritual practices was a sure sign that it had become a part of an area’s culture, in the broad, anthropological sense of this term. As suggested by the success of potatoes in Italy’s diverse mountain areas, from the Valle d’Aosta in the north to the slopes of Mount Etna in the south, an important development during late nineteenth century was the realization that the potato was best seen as a upland crop. Typical was the Sora district, then part of Campania and now part of Lazio, shaped by the Liri River Valley and the Apennine mountains. In the valley, according to the proceedings of the Jacini inquiry, ‘the cultivation of potatoes is very widespread, but in small proportions, in that there is almost no peasant who does not cultivate some

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on his little plot of land for his own use’. But it was higher up that the potato really came into its own: ‘On the other hand, on lands located very high up in the mountains they are cultivated on a large scale . . . in rotation with rye, and these potatoes are the ones that are never absent from our [local] markets and are of excellent quality’.56 The potato provided much-needed nourishment for Sora’s inhabitants, a resource like the annual migration of many to the malariainfested Roman Campagna as agricultural labourers. A glance back at Figure 4.3 will bear out the mountainous nature of much Italian potato production. Actually, the potato has no right to grow in a Mediterranean country like Italy. Without quickly-maturing varieties, which can ripen before the heat of summer, and without substantial irrigation, which provides the necessary humidity and also lowers soil temperatures, it would not even be possible in lowland areas. To put it simply, it is the country’s mountainous nature that was so conducive to the potato. And potatoes adore mountains, with their cooler temperatures and more frequent rains, compared to the torrid summer heat of the lowlands. Cold winters also mean fewer problems with blight and parasites. This does not mean that potatoes produced more abundant yields in the mountains than in the plains; just that in Italy they were more naturally suited to these areas. Whereas ‘in Scandinavia the potato will crop well only in the plain’, in Sicily ‘it yields well at altitudes above 1,000 metres’, according to the agronomist Ulderigo Somma.57 This was what made them a viable crop in Italy’s mountain areas, where little else could be grown commercially. As we saw in Chapters 1 and 3, this simple fact was not high in the minds of Italy’s early agronomists – so caught up were they with the potato’s universal potential. And later on, even Somma, well aware of the potato’s suitability to upland cultivation, makes no reference to its home high in the Andes. The peasants of Molise, when they started planting potatoes for their own use in the 1830s, would not have been aware of the link either. But there are some similarities (and not a few differences) with potato cultivation and consumption in the tuber’s land of origin. A brief survey will help illustrate these. ‘Nowhere on earth are greater physical contrasts compressed within such small spaces’ as in the Andes.58 Changing topography, altitude, latitude and climate determine what can be grown and where. Key to understanding the human use of resouces in the Andes and attempts by individual communities to maintain a kind of self-sufficiency is the concept of ‘verticality’. Through this eco-system elements of the native Andean economy persist despite over 400 years of European influence, testifying to the adaptibility and resourcefulness of the poor mountain populations. The climatic variety of the eastern Andes, for example, can be reduced into four major crop or resource ‘zones’, according to their vertical location.59 Individual communities will try to exploit or have access to all of these zones, or make up for the lack through trade with other

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nearby communities (although ‘nearby’, in the Andes, is a relative term). Each zone is exploited in the way seen as most suitable, with usage best adapted to the specific environment. Starting from the top, often located at over 4,000 metres above sea level, we find the zone of natural pasture (called jalka fuerte). It consists of native wild grasses and lies outside the range of cultivation because of frequent frosts. Animals pastured here include the native species of llama and alpaca, as well as the European introductions of horses, cattle and sheep. Potato cultivation begins just below this zone, in the cool tuber zone (called jalka or puna), located between 3,000 and 4,000 metres above sea level. According to native perceptions, grown higher up, and frost or late blight would kill the potato plants; grown lower down, plants would wither or be without tubers. The potato was first domesticated here, some six thousand years ago, and the potato is still the focus of subsistence activity. It is often the case that more land and labour are devoted to it than all other crops put together. Consumption is high in both quantity and quality. Potatoes may provide up to 70 per cent of caloric intake and single farming families normally cultivate a dozen or more distinct, native varieties, in addition to modern ones. When it comes to identifying and selecting potato varieties, women are the acknowledged experts. Men will defer to women when it comes to plant knowledge. Women are involved in every stage of potato production, from seed selection through to cultivation, harvesting, storage, processing and cooking.60 (Something like this was true of Sardinia, as we saw in the previous chapter, and no doubt elsewhere in Italy.) Potato varieties are differentiated according to taste, colour and texture, with some native varieties – which tend to be smaller, drier and lower yielding than modern ones – prized for ritual meals and celebrations, and others saved for gift-giving. Variety is the spice of life, and where an adult may consume 20–30 potatoes at a sitting, diversity in potato varieties makes a meal interesting.61 From the farmer’s point of view, growing mixed native varieties, generally together in the same plot, represent an important economic resource. By contrast, Italian mountain-dwellers generally specialized in one variety (and at most two or three), according to locale, as we shall see in Chapter 6. Below the jalka or tuber zone lies a temperate zone (called kichwa), devoted to cereal production. In pre-Columbian times this would have meant mainly maize, although since the Spanish conquest wheat and barley have become an increasingly important feature of the local economy. Finally, tropical crops, such as coca, plantains, manioc, sweet potatoes, citrus fruits, chilli peppers and sugar cane are grown in the lowland crop zone (called temple). The physical spacing of these four crop zones has affected settlement patterns, land ownership, economic specialization and trade networks. Thus many

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subsistence villages in the Andes, like the Peruvian village of Uchucmarca studied by Stephen Brush, are located between the lower grain-producing zones and the higher potato and pasturing zones, the better to exploit what are now the main crops.62 Uchucmarca is a post-conquest village, founded when the Spanish resettled the native population – or that small part of it which had survived the epidemics of disease that came with the Europeans – into new towns. In pre-Hispanic times, when local populations were more dependent on potatoes, quinoa and llamas, and less so on cereals, settlements were located higher up. The siting of Uchucmarca somewhat lower down (though at a still dizzying 3,000 metres above sea level) reflects the Spanish interest in cereal crops. Due to its location and the steep surrounding gradient, which ensures that the different major crop zones are located relatively close to one another, Uchucmarca has access to all zones, each located within one day’s travel. A system of community control and reciprocity ensures that Uchucmarca is largely self-sufficient. In villages located in other areas of the Andes, where the environmental gradient is less steep – with the crop zones situated further apart from one another – long migrations of people and complex market systems must make up for the lack of proximity. Italian mountain populations did not have anything quite as elaborate or as structured as the different Andean crop zones. Nor did they cultivate the hundreds of different potato varieties known to Andean populations. Yet the concept of ‘verticality’ also applies to Italy’s mountains and the potato was adapted to its particular niche here too. In Italy, a key feature of mountain economies was the close link between agricultural production and consumption. The structure of mountain production consisted of precarious family economies, always on the look-out for new occupational possibilities and resources in order to make a living, as we have seen. Families made use of all that the environment had to offer, stratified up the mountainsides. To this cultivation was now added the potato. It appealed to the mountain logic of self-sufficiency. In the Alps the potato was grown in rotation with maize and buckwheat or, more often, rye and barley at lower and middle altitudes; above the levels where these cereals not would grow, it was cultivated as an only crop. At this level, there would be chestnut plantations, forests of deciduous trees, primarily beech and oak (in the South, Turkey oak), and meadows for grazing, sometimes created by deforestation. To map the potato’s inroads, let us begin high in the Dolomites, where the mountain-dwelling peasants of Forno di Zoldo (province of Belluno) were described as ‘wretched and miserable’ in data for the Austrian cadaster of 1826–27.63 Poor they may have been, but 68 per cent of the province’s male inhabitants born between 1812 and 1816 were literate, reaching 88 per cent in the upper Bellunese town of Pieve di Cadore.64 There may have been a link

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between high literacy and temporary migration: an important local resource, for example for local artisans who might ply their trade in Venice for a time.65 By the early nineteenth century potatoes had become another significant resource in an area where, because of poor soil, harsh climate and high altitude, little else would grow, thriving in even minute pockets of better-than-average land. The diet of Forno’s peasant smallholders became a monotonous potatoes or soup for breakfast (leftover from the night before), maize polenta for lunch, and barley soup or potatoes for supper. The only variety came from whatever their kitchen gardens could provide: turnips, radishes, beans, marrows, peas and salad greens.66 In winter the potato might be both bread and its accompaniment (‘pane e companatico’) – a way of saying that that is all there was. Local needs determined a preference for potato varieties with good keeping qualities, like the roàne, with their purple skin, whose taste was best the following spring. Having a cool, dry cellar for the storage of foods was of paramount importance in Alpine areas, ensuring a supply of food between one harvest to the next. For potatoes, this meant pits dug into the cellar floor, sometimes walled with stones, or a wooden chest (canòciu) divided into sections, to separate seed potatoes from other types.67 To the west, as early as the mid-1820s, the inhabitants of the Ligurian province of Levante were eating 10 kg of potatoes per head, alongside 77 kg of wheat, 50 kg of maize, 19 kg of chestnuts and 17 kg of legumes – which gives an effective idea of their staple foods.68 In the town of Bellinzago (Piedmont), 31 kg of potatoes were consumed per head in 1852, along with 225 kg of mixed bread (pane di mistura), 27 kg of beans and 14 kg of chestnuts.69 The potato was increasingly cultivated and consumed alongside other typical mountain products. In the upper Val Tanaro (Piedmont) boiled, mashed potatoes were added to buckwheat in the making of polenta. Likewise, the symbiosis of potatoes and chestnuts – another traditional mountain staple – must have happened naturally, given the relatively harsh conditions in which they both flourish. If, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several botanists had compared the potato to the chestnut, and in the eighteenth century Giovanni Battarra had recommended them as ‘tasting like chestnuts’, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the potato joined the ancient chestnut as a basic element of the fragile mountain economy.70 (Potato production would soon overtake and eventually dwarf that of chestnuts.) In the words of one inhabitant in the Apennines between Bologna and Reggio Emilia, referring back to the ‘traditional’ economy of the late nineteenth century: As in former times, now the only harvest we have here is that of chestnuts and potatoes. We make flour from the chestnuts, for polenta, and the flour is enough to feed most of the families. . . . Potatoes and chestnuts are our sustenance. Woe to us if they should be

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wanting! Wheat and rye are grown in the odd field, but in low amounts, because up here they yield little and it makes more sense to plant potatoes.71

As an indication of this symbiosis, one way of eating chestnuts was to boil them, adding potatoes to the pot.72 The custom fell out of use when better times came in the first two decades of the twentieth century; only to return during the Second World War, when Italians were forced backed into nineteenth-century conditions and habits.

PATATE E CASTAGNE We ate so much of potatoes and chestnuts. We would crush the white chestnuts, the discards, and put them to boil in water. We would put sliced potatoes on top of the chestnuts so that the potatoes took on the chestnuts’ colour while cooking and stayed tasty. Source: Quoted in Miriam Mafai, Pane nero: donne e vita quotidiana nella seconda guerra mondiale (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1989), p. 80.

It is no coincidence that many of the main chestnut-producing areas also became, from the mid-nineteenth century, areas of large-scale potato cultivation – from Como in the north, to Pistoia in the centre, to Avellino-Benevento and Calabria in the south. This association offered a great potential for the potato: around the time Unification, chestnuts were grown for their fruit in over one third of Italian towns. Something like one-sixth to one-seventh of Italian woodland consisted of chestnut plantations.73 From the late middle ages, these plantations were always carefully managed, for the chestnut is halfway between a woodland plant and an agrarian one. It was the original ‘bread tree’ (albero del pane) for many poor mountain populations throughout Europe, offering not only its chestnuts (to be eaten fresh but mostly dried and made into flour), but timber, leaves for mattresses and pasture for pigs once the harvest was finished. Chestnut cultivation was a crucial element in the fragile and shifting mountain economy; a poor chestnut harvest meant famine. For instance, in upland Calabria chestnut production outstripped that of cereals in the midseventeenth century.74 In the late eighteenth century, in the Casentino mountains (Tuscany), ‘almost every estate has its portion of chestnut wood, which serves to feed the poor tenant farmers’, who live on ‘boiled chestnuts or chestnut flour cooked in water’, according to a 1777 report.75 In this area fully onefifth of the land was devoted to chestnut cultivation.76 But the chestnut was

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also important in towns, especially during winter months, brought down and peddled by mountain dwellers, the montanari. The Casentino would also become an important site of potato cultivation. The Casentino Forest was the largest expanse of woodland in the Italian peninsula and provided work for many people of this part of the central Apennines, either directly or indirectly (as woodworkers and pedlars of wooden goods, from fifes and cups to barrels). The managed forests also provided grazing land for livestock, which is how the potato entered the story. In 1834 the area had a much higher population density than the rest of the Grand Duchy, placing more pressure on the available cultivated land.77 Towns like Poppi and Castel San Niccolò were already on their way to becoming minor centres of potato cultivation in the late 1830s and 1840s.78 Then, during the 1850s, the Bohemian, Karl Siemon (Carlo Siemoni), head forester and factor of the granducal estate of Badia a Prataglia, turned the estate into a model farm. Siemon introduced potatoes into the existing crop rotation, primarily to provide livestock feed during the winter months, so the animals, mainly sheep, would not have to overwinter in the Maremma. But the potatoes were also ‘an excellent means of supplementing the diet of tenant families’, Siemon claimed, to say nothing of the ‘high price they fetched’ at local markets. The varieties tended to be German, Swiss and French, which would grow well at high altitudes in Italy, including perhaps the ancestor of a small globe-shaped, red-skinned variety now known as the ‘Cetica’.79

HOW TO MAKE THE PERFECT BOILED POTATO You first wash the potatoes in cold water and put them into an iron pot, or better an earthenware one, as compactly as possible, so that the top two fingers of the pot are left empty. Then you fill the pot with cold water (never hot or tepid) and you let them reach first a low boil and then a high one. As soon as you see a few tiny cracks in the potatoes, remove the pot from the fire, cover it with a perforated lid and overturn it so that the potatoes remain in place in the pot but the water quickly pours out. The boiling steam thus enclosed in the overturned pot perfectly cooks the potatoes, without allowing the water to penetrate the bulbs, which in this way stay totally dry . . . [This keeps the potatoes] hot for 30 or 40 minutes, which is very important, whether the potatoes are to be used for mascè [mashed], or for stewed dishes, and it is best not to do this until just before they are to be served at table, given that any form of moisture is harmful to keeping the good flavour of potatoes for a longer period of time. Source: Karl Siemon (Carlo Siemoni), ‘Memoria sulla cultura delle patate’, MS, 5 March 1854, Archivio Storico dell’Accademia dei Georgofili, Florence, b. 81.143.

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Just to the north, in the Apennines around Pistoia, Chiarenti would have been pleased to know that the potato had acquired an established place in the winter diet there. The evening meal, eaten at around 5.30 p.m. this time of the year, would consist of a minestra of bread and cabbage or of pasta, served with pork fat, as a first course; this would be followed by ‘potates refried in the pan and seasoned with the usual pig fat, in portions of 100 grams per peasant’, or on meatless days, salt cod with herbs and onions, or salted herrings and sardines with oil and vinegar.80 Potatoes constituted a meagre second course on their own; but at least these peasants had a second course. Further down the Apennines, in Abruzzo, it was the same story. Potato cultivation was already widespread in mountain areas by 1811, when it was reported in the Statistica Murattiana (see Chapter 3). On the eve of Italian Unification, in the province of Abruzzo Citra potatoes were already a ‘minor seconday economic activity’ in areas close to the Adriatic’ and a ‘widespread and significant economic activity for the inhabitants of mountain towns’. Indeed in the mountains there were ‘towns which pass the entire winter with this foodstuff ’.81 It was in these ‘elevated regions’ of the Abruzzo that ‘the tubers reach their greatest perfection and form the daily diet of mountaindwellers’, according to the forester Quaranta (who also bemoaned their role in deforestation).82 The railway allowed the region to develop potato production further, as noted in Chapter 4. In Calabria the production of potatoes was listed as one of the numerous ‘progresses in manufacturing, agriculture, sheep-rearing and industry’ made in southern Italy in the decade prior to Unification.83 Here, mountain areas, more than the great estates (latifondi), provided the possibility of trying out new crops, like the potato, as we saw in the previous chapter. In the province of Calabria Ultra potatoes were cultivated ‘on small plots of land . . . by the poor tenant farmer or smallholder who is also poor’. As a result, demand for seed potatoes at planting time increased their price so much that ‘they are unable to afford seed potatoes’. To come to the peasants’ aid, the charitable grain banks (monti frumentari) should be able to lend seed potatoes as well as grain, it was suggested.84 Potatoes may have been ‘progress’ in Calabria, but it was of a limited sort: during the nineteenth century consumption was almost exclusively local, given the lack of transportation links. The uplands of Sicily also provided fertile grounds for the potato, even if, as elsewhere, the process took some time. In Piana dei Greci (now Piana degli Albanesi, in the province of Palermo), at 750 metres above sea level, the first attempts to introduce the potato, in 1791, had come to nought; in 1822 the town’s mayor, Demetrio Petta, proposed introducing it again.85 The initiative seems to have had some effect if, in 1835, potatoes were described as being ‘cultivated with pleasure’ there.86 A grower from Acireale, at the foot of Mount

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Etna, Mariano Calì Fiorini, sent potatoes for display to the Florence national exhibition of 1861.87 And by 1870 potatoes were being grown ‘exclusively for cookery’, in the town of Prizzi (700 metres above sea level, province of Palermo), even if cultivation was ‘rather limited’.88 The potato’s impact on the island’s population growth was also rather limited. Despite widespread poverty, the island was rich in wheat. Much the same could be said of Sardinia, in the sense that potatoes became important as a food supplement, at least in mountain areas, as observed in some detail in the previous chapter, without contributing to overpopulation. Sardinia’s population density remained low. But these were the exceptions, as we shall see.

NUTRITION, DEMOGRAPHIC PRESSURE AND EMIGRATION In an 1878 article on Italy’s ‘unknown towns’, the illustrated newspaper L’Illustrazione italiana described the mountain town of Cadore (Belluno) with these words: ‘The meagre and limited countryside provides only some hard-earned maize, fodder and potatoes. . . . This why the Cadorini emigrate’. As emigrants, Cadore’s inhabitants were prepared to do any job and go anywhere – with the exception of America, apparently, which was too far away, ‘since they are unable to stay far away for any length of time without suffering from homesickness’.89 Eventually, however, even many Cadorini would go to the Americas. What was the impact of the potato on the diets of Italy’s upland areas? In one sense, as the researches of social scientists and agronomists at the time suggested, the diet of poor Italians was actually getting worse in the decades following Unification. It was becoming less varied and more dependent on maize and potatoes. Writing at the start of the twentieth century, the agronomist Italo Giglioli was convinced that the two staples of potatoes and maize had contributed to ‘diminishing the variety of the poor man’s foods, a variety necessary to ensure well rounded nutrition’. Of course, there had been famines in the past, Giglioli argued, but even when acute, they had passed; their affect had been ‘less harmful, because of the vigour of a people now weakened by the permanent dietary insufficiency we see around us’.90 Moreover, the market demands of an increasingly commericalized agriculture had the affect of concentrating production on a more limited range of foodstuffs, including these two plants. In fact, the situation was not as simple as Giglioli made out. The adoption of both these staples offered a contradiction: variety-poor diets had actually fuelled population growth, while at the same being a product of demographic

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expansion. Higher numbers led to increased potato cultivation, which led to higher numbers. In the words of Massimo Livi Bacci, referring to ‘new crops’ like the potato: ‘on the one hand, they led to higher productivity and more stable production and thus reduced the impact of crises . . . on the other hand, demographic expansion largely undermined the positive effects of greater availability’.91 We have a variant of the nineteenth-century paradox, well known to modern scholars, of a deterioration in the ‘biological’ standard of living during a period of economic growth and population increase.92 Let us return to Belluno. As photographed by the new kingdom’s Jacini inquiry, the province was one of Italy’s highest producers of potatoes. These were grown by the poor smallholders that typified the province’s Alpine agriculture: ‘Most of them don’t own more than some fraction of a hectare; and this land could tell a whole Illiad of suffering that man and woman have borne, just to be able to say: “this is mine” ’.93 What they managed to grow, under very difficult conditions, was primarily for their own consumption or local sale. Of the town of Pieve di Cadore it was said that ‘a thrifty person, bordering on miserliness, who eats polenta once a day, and lives on potatoes for the rest, can scrape by on 100 lire a month’.94 As registered in the nearby town of Tisoi, in the 1890s, ‘the peasants use the potato as a surrogate for maize polenta, and the poor ones have potatoes for supper many evenings during the long winters, thus saving on both polenta and the condiment for it’.95 On the plus side, the presence of potatoes in the diet mitigated the reliance on maize elsewhere in the region and was the main reason why pellagra rates in the province were low compared to the rest of the Veneto.96 The potato made enough of a difference to be one of the factors in the province’s substantial population increase. Why then did the Jacini inquiry report a widespread complaint that in the province things had got worse in the 20 years since Italian Unification?97 Mass emigration was a symptom of this decline. Belluno’s mayor identified the reasons for emigration, some of which were constants in peasant life, others more recent developments: ‘poverty, the lack of work, the low productivity of farmland, heavy taxes, high food prices, the frequent visits of the tax collector and the miller . . . hopes of good fortune, increase in population, and the exaggerated promises of emigration agents’.98 He might have added the decline of Venice to this list, no longer capable of providing the work and resources it once did. Belluno had the dubious distinction of being the province with Italy’s highest emigration rates: from 1876 to 1901, for every 1,000 of the province’s residents 195 left the country.99 In a peak year, like 1891, 15,610 people emigrated from the province, whose total population was only 175,000. They tended to stay relatively close to home, extending earlier patterns of emigration, by going to countries like France and Austria–Hungary (13,143, or 84.2%, remained

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within Europe), rather than to the Americas (the destination of 2,467 or 15.8%).100 However, in a change from the traditional pattern, emigrants from Belluno were now staying away longer, often permanently, upsetting the social and economic equilibrium which had been established by closer, temporary migration. Mass emigration became the primary source of income for a province in full economic crisis, whose population was still on the increase.101 Population increase in the Belluno province was due to a continuing high birth rate, combined with a rapidly declining mortality rate.102 Birth rates were often high in mountain areas, to make up for high mortality. At the time of Italian Unification in 1861, almost half (47%) of all children born died before their reaching their fifth birthday (by comparison, the figure for England was 25%). Italian infant and child mortality rates dropped appreciably in the four decades following Unification, as the health and living standards of Italians improved.103 Pronounced regional differences make a synthesis difficult, but overall the country began to move from a ‘traditional’ demographic pattern of high birth and death rates to a ‘modern’ industrialized one of low birth and death rates. Taken as a whole, improving sanitary, hygienic and dietary conditions contributed to falling mortality rates from the 1880s, so that even if birth rates also began (slowly) to decline, the population steadily rose – and would have risen still faster and further had it not been for emigration. Italy’s population increase, at a rate faster than the rest of Europe, was primarily due to declining mortality rates, in which Italy was finally catching up with the countries of northern Europe.104 Italy’s overall population went from just under 18 million in 1801 to just over 32 million a hundred years later. In some of the regions most affected by emigration, like Calabria, which lost 3.2 per cent of its inhabitants to emigration in the decade 1901–10 alone, a rising population the nineteenth century was a factor in this exodus, but is population continued to increase during early twentieth century.105 Determining the role of diet in this population increase is no easy matter. An improved diet can certainly affect fertility; but the final quarter century saw the beginning of a trend towards falling birth rates in Italy – even if this remained high at 33 live births per 1,000 inhabitants in 1900. When it comes to falling mortality rates, which as we have seen was the main factor behind Italy’s population increase, diet certainly has a part to play, but it is often an indirect part. Improved nutritional intake, measured in terms of food availability, was co-related to falling mortality rates during the period 1901–13, a period of industrialization and increasing prosperity, as we shall see in the next chapter. Otherwise, there would seem to be little co-relation: after all, mortality rates had also declined during the period of the agricultural crisis of the 1880s and early 1890s, when there was a sharp fall in the production and consumption of cereals.106 Improved nutritional levels can contribute to a

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decline in deaths due to infectious diseases (although here hygiene is also significant); just as they play an important role in the decline of deaths due to airborne diseases, such as tuberculosis, bronchitis and pneumonia, and measles. The positive impact of diet was not so much on how many people contracted these diseases, as on how many people died of them once they became sick. In the fifteen years following the agricultural crisis, for instance, improved diet played a significant role in reducing death rates from measles amongst those who contracted the disease.107 Whether it was fertility rates that rose, mortality rates that declined, or the ability of the potato to feed large numbers of people (so temporarily reducing pressures to emigrate), the potato made enough of a difference in overall nutrition, by providing a reliable and nourishing crop, that population went up. This is consistent with the potato’s effects elsewhere in Europe, where around a quarter of all population increase has been attributed to the potato, especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.108 The adoption of the potato in Italian mountain areas during this period, while it can be characterized as a ‘good thing’ in social and economic terms, had the negative and unforeseen consequence of contributing to overpopulation. And this demographic pressure, in relation to limited resources, was a contributing factor to mass emigration. Overpopulation meant that work was harder to obtain, and salaries lower. It meant the increased fragmentation of already small plots of land amongst siblings, or obliged younger males to find alternatives. However this alone does not explain the massive exodus of people; rather it was one of a complex of ‘push’ factors that led to mass emigration.109 To overpopulation we must add the agricultural crisis, referred to in the previous chapter, accompanied by an increased fiscal burden, and changing paterns of land ownership, uses and rights. Increasing industrialization in lowland towns competed with the traditional mountain crafts and small manufacturing that had previously made it possible for mountain-dwellers to make ends meet. Perhaps for the first time in their history, the mountains were becoming marginalized and cut-off from the larger economy. As the situation persisted, what began as temporary migration became increasingly permanent. These were all ‘push’ factors to emigration; the availability of work abroad, coupled with significantly higher salaries, was the main ‘pull’ factor. If higherthan-average numbers of Belluno’s emigrants went to Brazil during the late 1880s and early 1890s, as opposed to remaining in Europe, it was due to opportunities there and government-sponsored emigration schemes, of which unscrupulous emigration agents made the most. The American ‘myth’ no doubt played a part, but the reality was often enough. If a day’s work might pay from 1 to 1.5 lire in Cavallermaggiore in the north, and from 0.85 to 1.25 lire in Calabria in the south, in the United States salaries varied from 6 to 15

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(expressed in lire). An agricultural worker in Argentina could earn as much in a month as he would earn in a whole year in southern Italy.110 And if emigrants from the province of Belluno normally preferred France and Austria–Hungary as destinations, which were after all relatively close by, emigrants from Cosenza (Calabria), in common with the rest of the South, showed a marked preference for the Americas, especially the United States. After all, it cost a Calabrian emigrant less to reach New York by sea than northern Europe by land. By the end of the century a pattern of migration had been established. In 1901, for example, of the 16,011 emigrants from the province of Cosenza, almost all of them (15,600 or 97.4%) opted for the Americas, compared to a negligeable 411 (2.6%) who chose European destinations.111 Regardless of the distinct chains of migration that differentiated the emigrants of Belluno from those of Cosenza, what united them was a process that set in motion the long, slow decline of Italy’s upands. The decades after Unification saw a crisis in Italy’s mountain economy and population from which mountain areas would never recover. This was not immediately evident. As a result of the high numbers of return migrants – some having managed to save enough to buy land or initiate some other activity on their return – and buoyed by the remittances of the millions of emigrants who remained overseas, the full effects of this crisis would not be apparent until the 1930s.

THREE MOUNTAIN CASE STUDIES We first suggested the potato’s co-relation with population and emigration in the Preface, where we considered Giovanni Salvi’s study of the hamlet of Bertassi, in the northern Apennines.112 Here, the cultivation of the potato on newly deforested land, from the 1860s onwards, provided enough of a resource that traditional seasonal migration came to an end. Bertassi’s population rose as a result, but became poorer in an area of limited resources. ‘Push’ factors for emigration coupled with ‘pull’ factors – opportunities in the Americas – to establish a pattern of permanent emigration, halving Bertassi’s population but at least bringing in remittances, which could be quite substantial, to the people remaining. Ups and downs continued during the Fascist and post-War periods, but infrastructural improvements could not stem the movement of people out, now to the nearby city of Genoa. Today, Bertassi’s mountain terraces are crumbling and much of the farmland has reverted to woodland, with tourism providing the main source of income to the few remaining residents. The affects of potato cultivation on population and emigration were not everwhere the same, however. Having considered a case study from the northern Apennines, it might be useful to compare what the Alps and the

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southern Apennines have in common and how they differ, as a way of understanding how the potato came to form a part of Italian mountain agriculture during the nineteenth century, the nature of its impact on population, and to what extent this led to emigration. We can do this by considering two further case studies: the town and hinterland of Alagna, high in the Piedmontese Alps, and Lagonegro, in the Apennines of Basilicata, the former by the anthropologist Pier Paolo Viazzo, the latter by the environmental historian John McNeill.113 In the nineteenth century Alagna, located at the top of the Sesia Valley, was still a predominantly German-speaking Walser community. Because of its altitude, at 1,154 metres above sea level, the agricultural year began relatively late, in April, as soon as the snow began to melt.114 The first task was to clear the soil of stones and debris. Then, once the fields were dug and manured, potatoes were planted. During the summer months animals were taken up to the high alp for grazing; the cows would be brought back to the village during October. The main agricultural tasks were now the potato harvest, manuring the fields and sowing rye. Villagers also had to collect firewood, beech leaves for their mattresses, and larch needles for livestock litter. In autum an animal might be butchered, processed into sausage or salted down: to be used – along with boiled potatoes, carrots and onions – in the preparation of uberlekke, Alagna’s filling winter stew. What was particularly remarkable about this agricultural cycle was that most of it was undertaken by Alagna’s women. This was in addition to their routine activities like housekeeping, feeding and grooming the livestock, cleaning the stalls and churning butter. Many of Alagna’s men were away, having left for temporary work elsewhere. One of the options open to them was to work as plasterers in France, this occupation having become a village specialization. How did the women of Alagna cope? They were fortunate that they did not have to worry about irrigating their fields, since Alagna lies in a fairly wet area. They were also aided by the fact that the pastoral sector dominated over the agricultural one, typical of Alpine areas. Cultivable land in the district, including meadows, amounted to some 300 hectares, compared to over 4,000 hectares of pastures. Finally, when the women needed assistance, they hired day-labourers from the lowlands. By the nineteenth century the potato formed a significant part of Alagna’s ecosystem. It withstood the vagaries of Alpine summer weather, which could suffer prolonged wet and cold spells, and it could be farmed profitably on small, marginal plots of land. In sum, the potato made Alpine agriculture more flexible and increased overall productivity. And yet, compared with the ‘revolutionary change’ the potato brought about in parts of the Swiss Alps, its impact in Alagna was more limited.

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In the Swiss Alpine village of Törbel studied by Robert Netting, the introduction of the potato at the end of the eighteenth century had meant an expansion of local resources. This, in turn, led to a substantial growth in Törbel’s population. Diets improved and numbers increased, without causing a decline in living standards or a degradation of the land. In ecological terms, the potato had increased the land’s carrying capacity.115 In Alagna, by contrast, there had been nothing like the sort of crisis mortality reported in neighbouring Swiss areas before the the potato was introduced. Evidently, emigration was an important escape valve in Alagna, in a way it was not in Swiss Törbel. Moreover, while the potato did become an important crop in Alagna, it never fully supplanted rye. Far from the potato’s ‘revolutionary’ link to population increase, Alagna’s size actually decreased during the nineteenth century.116 We find some of the same features in Lagonegro, 1,000 km to the south. Located at 700 metres above sea level, this area of Basilicata is vulnerable to soil erosion and landslides due to heavy winter rains. In the nineteenth century farming plots in the area were generally small, unlike other areas of southern Italy where large estates (latifondi) were more common. Cultivated area was small in comparison with pasture land, which in Lagonegro served for small flocks of sheep and goats, though not quite to the same extent as in Alagna. Here, land gives low yields and the seasonal nature of the water supply limits what can be done. According to the Jacini inquiry, in 1879 nine-tenths of Lagonegro’s population was engaged in agriculture. The agricultural cycle began in October, when autumn rains softened the baked Mediterranean earth.117 Men prepared the ground for planting wheat and barley, and in higher areas potatoes and rye. This could take weeks if the labour had to be done with hoes instead of ploughs. From November through to January women and children would collect chestnuts, an important element of the local diet. During the slack winter time men would tend coppices, pruning for household fires. Women might go down to the Ionian coast to pick olives. Back in Lagonegro, the crops would be weeded again beginning in March and April. In some areas, where there was irrigation, garden vegetables would be planted; but in Lagonegro little irrigation was carried out, so that May was a slack month. Then harvesting began in June and lasted throughout the summer, as long as drought did not kill the crops. These were busy days, with peasants working from dawn to dusk. They often slept in makeshift huts near their fields, rather than in town, which would save them several hours’ walking each day. Thus we have the paradox that upland areas require short bursts of intensive labour, requiring many hands, but do not support large populations. As in Alagna, it was the hard labour of Lagonegro’s women that permitted the town to survive while the men were away. Male migration was seasonal

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(winter) or longer term. The area’s towns possessed a nomadic artisan class that was able to take advantage of opportunities offered elsewhere for their services – as masons (Lagonegro) or musicians (nearby Viggiano), for example. But, as in Alagna, only the better-off peasants were able to take advantage of these opportunities. None the less, because of the variety of crops grown in Lagonegro, integrated with cheese and, very occasionally, meat, these upland peasants were taller than their lowland cousins. They benefited from a varied diet, richer in protein than lowland diets (with the exception of fishing communities along the Ionian coast). The potato found a ready place in this polyculture: the Jacini inquiry found potatoes everywhere in Lagonegro.118 It was grown especially on west-facing slopes, where more rain fell. The potato helped the inhabitants of Lagonegro benefit from a balanced diet. Otherwise their living conditions remained primitive: their clothes were simple homespun and their houses one-room hovels, dark and dirty, with the little to separate them from their animals. This general situation only began to change with the mass emigration beginning in the 1880s and the remittances that soon flowed back to the town. As in Alagna, the poverty of Lagonegro’s inhabitants was not absolute; rather, it was the land that was poor. The poverty of the inhabitants varied according to other factors, the main one being population in Lagonegro’s case. If Alagna’s population declined during the nineteenth century, Lagonegro’s increased. With the end of demographic checks – plague or famine – the town had reached its carrying capacity by the 1840s. Its continued increase over the next three decades put a serious strain on finite and fragile resources. The response in Lagonegro to what ecologists call ‘overshoot’ was two-fold. The first was emigration, as what had previously been a seasonal or temporary phenomenon, increasingly became a permanent one. From the 1880s Lagonegro’s population fell steadily. Basilicata’s uplands were affected most by emigration: while towns situated at between 300 and 500 metres above sea level actually gained in population during 1881–1911, those situated at 500–700 metres lost slightly, while those at above 700 metres suffered heavy population losses. The impact was mixed. On the plus side, emigration reduced population pressure and provided additional resources in the way of remittances. On the minus side, it made agriculture more difficult for those who remained, especially the upkeep of labour-intensive mountain terracing. The second response to population pressure was the deforestation of Lagonegro’s communal woodland, made possible by a policy of the Italian government in the decades following Unification. This was a boon for the timber industry and land speculators. It also benefited agriculture, including potato cultivation, which increased substantially (just as chestnut plantations throughout Italy were being sold off and cut down119). But the gains

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for agriculture were short-lived. With little to prevent soil erosion, the newly ploughed lands soon washed away, causing lowland flooding, the silting up coastal areas and worsening the threat of malaria. What soil remained uphill was quickly impoverished. Testifying before yet another parliamentary inquiry, in 1908, a peasant smallholder explained that Lagonegro’s former demesne lands had all been abandoned because they had become completely infertile. He added that if he had been younger – he was 50 at the time – he would have gone to America.120 Lagonegro’s inhabitants had ruined the lands on which they depended for their livelihood – an environmental disaster. What deforestation and the introduction of new crops like the potato had done, over the short term, to increase resources, was undone by soil erosion over the longer term. The decline in potato yields in Lagonegro and elsewhere in Basilicata was symptomatic of this soil impoverishment. This was ironic in view of the fact that potatoes had been one of the main agricultural beneficiaries of deforestation. In the entire province of Potenza potato yields were virtually halved, falling from an already low 3.13 tonnes per hectare in 1880 to 1.67 tonnes per hectare in 1903. Overall production plummeted too, from 50,000 to 15,000 tonnes, as did the land area devoted to potato cultivation, from 16,000 hectares in 1880 to 9,000 in 1903.121 Lagonegro’s population fell steadily from the 1880s onwards as a result of emigration, but it remained large enough to continue as a viable community, as it does today. A second wave of outmigration occurred more recently, in the 1950s and 1960s, but this was accompanied by a continuing high birth rate which kept the population stable. Agriculture was mechanized to the extent that this was practicable, even if old terraces were abandoned. Today, Lagonegro’s agro-pastoral economy is kept alive by European Union subsidies and emigrant remittances. Alagna, by contrast, was able successfully to re-invent itself as a skiing resort. For a time from the 1930s, when temporary emigration to France as plasterers was no longer an option, men remained at home. Alagna’s economy reverted to a substantially agro-pastoral one. Decline in this sector began soon after, in the 1950s, when collapsing stone terraces and the disappearance of the patchwork of fields became increasingly evident. By the 1970s just 4 per cent of cultivable land was farmed, mostly planted with potatoes.122 This might have seemed like decline; but in fact it was the effect of the advent of mass tourism and the prosperity it brought. What the studies by Salvi, Viazzo and McNeill confirm is the extent to which Italian mountain areas participated in the larger economy, changing and adapting alongside it, despite their marginality. Patches of arable land were few and far between and yields were lower than in the lowlands. When it comes to population, upland areas have a finite carrying capacity: they

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can an only support so many people. The potato was welcomed as a means of increasing the resource base. It became an important element in the local ecosystem that in certain conditions could play a part in population expansion, as it did in Bertassi and Lagonegro, though not in Alagna. It would seem that the potato’s presence accompanied population trends rather than determining them; but it was an element in the economic diversity which kept all of these small towns resilient and alive. Paradoxically, it was the very marginality of these towns that paved the way, not for isolation and self-sufficiency, as one might expect, but for market integration. Due to the very fragility and vulnerability of their environment, mountain-dwellers are often dependent on contact with the outside world for their livelihood, whether in the form of seasonal or more pemanent emigration or the selling of particular goods at market, either in lowland towns or further afield. In this way upland villages could have more ‘open’ economies that those located further down.

CONCLUSION Given the potato’s importance in both population increase and population, it is strange that the tuber so rarely figures in literature and correspondence of the time relating to population movements. On a light note, the Milanese teacher and author Emilio De Marchi used the potato to send up-country hicks. In his play for children Chi non cerca trova (‘Seek not, and you shall find’), De Marchi has the well-travelled Matino exclaim, on his return to his native village, that ‘two things I wasn’t able to find in my travels around the world: our potatoes and girls like ours’.123 This attempt at humour apart, the potato would struggle to attract the same affection as other foodstuffs amongst the millions of Italians who emigrated in these years. While food was often a subject of their letters home – the absence of it, the abundance of it, the difference of it, the longing for it – they rarely wrote about missing ‘the potatoes of home’. Tomatoes, pasta and other foodstuffs gained places as symbols of ‘Italianness’ for Italians in America; but rarely the potato.124 Perhaps the potato’s entry into the Italian diet had been too recent – but then, so too was the tomato’s; perhaps the potato’s connotations remained too bestial, too wretched, and immigrants were only too happy to abandon it and all its associations. But not all of them. For the thousands of Calabrians who settled in Toronto’s ‘Little Italy’ ‘there was everything, meat, fish, cheese, vegetables, fruit’. ‘And potatoes?’, asked a concerned young Vito Teti of his father, who had emigrated there, to support his family back in Calabria. ‘ “No potatoes”, he would answer

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me, troubled, and he never explained why. And I felt a great sorrow, and I feel it now while I write, and I would have gladly run to take him where you can get some lovely ’mpacchiuse potatoes, like the ones they make in the restaurants of Cosenza and we make at home’.125 The absence of celebrations of the potato by Italians abroad is also explained by the fact that Italians often emigrated to places where the potato was even more abundant and played an even more important role in the local diet than it did at home. Take the example of the many inhabitants of the Lucchese mountain town of Barga, whom we first encountered in Chapter 1, growing potatoes for the British residents of lowland cities like Pisa and Livorno. The area had a long migratory tradition. From at least the eighteenth century specialized artisans would set out from Barga on peddling campaigns; worsening conditions from the 1880s onwards led to some Barghiani trying their fortunes in the Scottish cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, in addition to those going to France or the United States.126 Barga was typical of the central Apennines in that its economy, based on pastoralism, forestry and chestnut cultivation, had been weakened by deforestation and the closure of common lands. The Barghiani, in a typical example of chain migration, turned to the selling of roast chestnuts, ice cream or fish and chips in the United Kingdon. The latter were already a working-class staple there. Setting up shop was relatively inexpensive, especially in poorer, urban areas, even if running a ‘chippie’ was tiring, hot, dirty and smelly. Despite internment during WWII as enemy aliens, the Barghiani and their Scottish-born descendents managed to prosper. Links with Barga were retained, and some of the emigrants’ descendents have ‘returned’, so that the town can today market itself as ‘the most Scottish town in Italy’, holding a month-long ‘Sagra del pesce e patate’ (Fish and chips festival) every summer. While being grown as a cash crop for export in certain fertile lowland areas of the Italian peninsula, the potato thus found a particular niche in certain upland areas from the mid-nineteenth century. It was evident how the interaction of altitude, climate and soil fertility set upper limits for both agriculture and pastoralism. The limitations, as well as the possibilities, posed by upland geography were as evident in the Alps of northern Italy as they were in the Apennines of the far south. The potato provided an additional resource, significant enough that it contributed to or exacerbated population expansion in many areas. From the Alps in the north to the southern reaches of the Apennines in Calabria, population had often exceeded the limited resources offered by mountain areas; seasonal, temporary or life-cycle migration had long been a way of responding to such pressures. It was therefore a combination of factors that tipped the scales towards permanent emigration from the late nineteenth century onwards, of which more nutritional diets made possible by the potato

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were one. Additional ‘push’ factors include the agricultural crisis of the 1880s, a heavier tax burdern enforced by the new Italian state in need of resources, and the progressive marginalization of mountain areas in the national economy. These were accompanied by the ‘pull’ factors of employment opportunities offered in Europe and the Americas, making mass emigration possible. During the period explored in this chapter and the previous one, the mass exodus of millions of Italian overseas followed the establishment of the potato, as both agricultural crop and item of diet. Paradoxically, what began as a South American mountain plant contributed to the sort of population increase in Italy’s upland areas that forced larger numbers of people to compete for limited resources, altering previous patterns of temporary emigration, which, when combined with the possibilities opening up overseas, became increasingly permanent. Emigration, always a difficult option, nevertheless became a more attractive one, perhaps the only option available. Emigrants from Italy’s mountain areas formed a large proportion of the over 14 million people who left the country between 1876 and 1915. Up to a third of these may have returned, and large numbers undertook repeat migrations; but this was still a massive exodus for a country with 32 million inhabitants in 1901. The high numbers of returnees – in some years higher than the number of emigrants – demonstrates how this movement of people was still in some sense tied to traditional forms of migration, in which it was seen as a resource, utilized to improve conditions and opportunities ‘back home’.

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6

‘New and Broader Horizons’: The Twentieth Century

In 1931 the Touring Club Italiano, Italy’s own Automobile Association, provided a perfect snapshot of what the people of the peninsula and islands ate and drank. Well, not quite perfect perhaps; more like a family photo, unevenly focused and with the odd family member only partly in the frame. Because its ‘gastronomic guide’ relied on the replies of members to a questionnaire about local dietary habits, there was a pronounced bias towards wealthier northern regions like Lombardy and Piedmont, whereas poorer southern regions like Calabria and Basilicata hardly figured at all. Still, the aim was a valid one: to ‘remind us which foods and which wines are particular not just region by region in Italy, but also in the various provinces and, within them, the different localities’. After decades during which the Italian state had tried ‘to make Italians’ by paving over regional differences, the guide offered up a feast of Italian regionality. Local products were to be celebrated – and consumed – dialect names included. In Fascist Italy regionalism, localism, campanilismo was the new nationalism: an antidote to internationalism, a boost to autarchy. To quote the guide’s preface: helping to ‘bring about a greater and better appreciation of Italian products’ was ‘a worthy nationalistic exercize’.1 It was no accident that the preface’s author was none other than the under-secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Arturo Marescalchi, who had recently originated the country-wide ‘Festa dell’uva’: a mixture of trade fair, Fascist patriotic celebration and invented folklore in honour of the grape. Never mind that when it came to reviving gastronomic regionalism the French had got there first.2 The Italians soon caught up. At least a few of those products were potatoes. Of the Guida gastronomica’s 490 pages of text, the potatoes and potato dishes are referred to in 50 of them, from their place in Piedmontese bollito (boiled meats, p. 15) to Sardinian minestrònis (soup, p. 469). In between, there are descriptions of several main dishes featuring the potato. They take us from ‘polenta di patate’ (potato polenta), in the province of Trento, ‘made with boiled potatoes, fried wheat flour and grated cheese [and] eaten with sauces or game’ (p. 157), to Naples’s ‘gattò di patate (potato pie: ‘potatoes boiled, mashed and baked in a casserole dish with

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mozzarella, hard-boiled eggs and pieces of salami’), which also came in a more elaborate variant, the ‘gattò Santa Chiara’ (p. 367). If the Neapolitans, beginning with Corrado, had borrowed the term gattò from the French, and perhaps the recipe too, the guide was not above taking the odd pot-shot at the French. Such was ‘Venetian-style potatoes, cut into pieces and cooked in a pan with oil and butter, parsley and onion; a Venetian speciality which . . . the French appropriated and rebaptized Pommes de terre à la Lyonnaise’ (p. 115). Potatoes also figured in numerous local minestre and minestroni – a vast culinary category including soups, stews and pasta and rice dishes. Some of these owed their origins to Austrian or Slovene influence. Examples of the former were the ‘toasted-flour soup (Einbrennsuppe): wheat flour sautéed in a pan with pork fat or butter, then boiled in water or milk together with sliced boiled potatoes . . . a popular dish in all of the Alto Adige’ (p. 150), and ‘fried potatoes and meat (Gröstl): potatoes boiled and thinly slices, fried in fat with meat leftovers’. Common in the masi or small mountain inns as an evening dish’ (p. 152). The Slovene presence, in the province of Udine, came in the form of ‘zastoch, prepared with legumes (potatoes, squash, beans), seasoned with fried lard’ (p. 129). The recently annexed region of Venezia Giulia, which included Trieste, added ‘iota, made with beans and cabbage, with or without potatoes, seasoned with oil and flavoured with garlic, bay leaf and cumin seeds’ (p. 176) and ‘bobici soup, with fresh sweetcorn, beans and potatoes, with smoked ham’ (p. 178). Minestre in the rest of northern Italy ranged from the ‘soups of potatoes, barley and milk’ or ‘potatoes, millet and milk’ in the mountains of Piedmont (p. 37) to the ‘rice and potatoes with or without chicken livers of the province of Venice (p. 108). In the south, the province of Foggia contributed its ‘pancotto, made with slices of bread cooked in water with vegetables and potatoes (p. 398), and the province of Lecce, specifically the town of Alessano, its ‘lamb stew . . . made with lamb pieces cooked with courgettes, potatoes, tomatoes, celery, et cetera’ (p. 402). The Tyrrhenian side was represented with its cianfotta, in the province of Naples, which became ciambotta in Calabria: ‘sweet peppers, onions, aubergines, potatoes, courgettes, cooked in turns in the same fat, then mixed together in the reddish and fragrant sauce which has formed in the pan’ (pp. 363, 420–1). The potato was also represented as an accompaniment to meat or fish, starting with the beef roast (rosticciata) served with fried potatoes in the province of Milan (p. 63), boiled potatoes as a side-dish for goulasch in the province of Trieste (p. 170), mashed potatoes with zampone (stuffed pig’s trotter) in the province of Modena (p. 218), and ‘sliced potatoes’ with ‘Easter lamb’ in the province of Naples (p. 369). Two accompaniments to fish were listed, in the extreme north and south: San Remo’s ‘dried cod first boiled and then cooked in a pan with oil, garlic, egg yolks, lemon juice, aromatic herbs, boiled potatoes’

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(p. 192), and the province of Messina’s ‘swordfish a ghiotta, ‘that is cooked in oil and tomatoes with onion, celery, olives, capers and served with sliced potatoes’ (p. 455). Numerous areas were singled out for their potato production, like the province of Catania’s early potatoes (p. 450), and ‘its singular native varieties’. The province of Pistoia contributed ‘its mountain potatoes of Pescia, especially those of Serra (hamlet of Marliana), tender and delicate’ (p. 276). (Chiarenti would have been pleased to hear this.) The town of Carona, in Lombardy, produced ‘white, floury, good-keeping potatoes’ (p. 70); the potatoes of Cadore in the Dolomites, were ‘quite sought-after . . . large, white, floury’ (p. 117); in the province of Bolzano ‘mountain potatoes are extensively cultivated, white and large, which have an important place in the local diet’ (p. 148); in the newly acquired province of Fiume ‘the Bansizza alpine plateau provides superb white, floury, tasty potatoes’ (p. 175); and Piedmont’s Val d’Ossola was represented by ‘its lovely white and floury potatoes’. The potatoes of Val d’Ossola were used to make the area’s ‘gnocchi all’ossolana’: ‘boiled and seasoned with lightly fried butter, garlic, meat drippings and cheese’ (p. 35). No listing of Italian potato specialities would be complete without reference to gnocchi. For one thing, the dish was found throughout the centre–north of the country, in savoury forms like the one just mentioned, but also in sweet versions, as in the province of Trieste’s ‘sweet gnocchi made with potato flour, walnuts and prunes, apricots or jam, cooked in water and sprinkled with sugar’ (p. 172). More importantly perhaps, gnocchi were also evidence of the intrusion of the potato into a dish that far predated it. Invariably, gnocchi now meant potato gnocchi. This is evident in the discussion of Roman-style gnocchi (‘gnocchi alla romana’), which are ‘made with potatoes mixed with flour, then boiled and seasoned with a meat sauce and grated cheese’; not to be confused with the potato-free ‘semolina gnocchi’, which outside Rome, and especially abroad, the name Gnocchi alla Romana refers almost eclusively to’ (p. 315). More famously, the potato’s instrusion is evident in Verona’s version of gnocchi. As the Guida gastronomica proudly related, gnocchi ‘have a long history in Verona’, in the form of the ‘Festa del Gnocco’ celebrated in the district of San Zeno on the last Friday of Carnival. This was just the sort of tradition that the Fascist authorities liked, whether authentic or ‘invented’ – complete with processions of medievally dressed participants, banners and drums. The man crowned ‘Father gnocco’ would lead the procession and present the ‘traditional gnocco’ to the city authorities. And on that day, ‘according to a bequest made centuries ago by the patrician Tommaso da Vico, the city authorities provide all the poor families of the parish of San Zeno with the flour, potatoes, butter and cheese necessary to make their gnocchi’ (p. 133). A nice legend: shame

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that, at the time of da Vico’s legacy, apparently stipulated in 1531 to calm bread riots, potatoes were still unknown in Italy.3 The intrusion of the potato into the traditional flour gnocco must have taken place in the first half of the nineteenth century; it was complete by the time emperor Franz Josef and his consort visited Verona in 1856, which coincided with the annual feast and which is exactly what they were served, somewhat to the embarassment of the imperial staff.4 Gnocchi or not, the Guida gastronomica was published at a time when the majority of Italians were eating better than ever before, having enjoyed almost a decade of prosperity. The Fascist regime was riding a wave of popularity, of a shared ‘consensus’, which had another five years to run before it crested in 1936. And yet, as if in a warning of hard times to come, in that same year, 1931, the government instituted a national ‘savings day’ to encourage Italians to be thriftier, spend less and make more effective use of leftover foods.5 Indeed this final period of our exploration of the potato in Italy, from the Great War through to the 1960s, was a roller-coaster ride for Italians. It is characterized by fluctuation, as Italians alternated between the peaks of rising consumption and the troughs of scarcity. The peaks brought them to heights never reached before; the troughs returned them to the nineteenth century. Finally, there were also hints of what was to come later on, in the second half of the twentieth century: Fascism attempted to stem the tide of people leaving mountain areas, but the tide would become a flood by the 1970s. If in the nineteenth century the potato had been a precious resource in upland areas, at times leading to population increases, nothing in the twentieth century, it seems, could stop their inexorable decline. But let us start on a cheerier note.

‘SHOWY BUT INEXPENSIVE’: THE POTATO GOES BOURGEOIS By the time we leave the nineteenth century and enter the twentieth the potato had become well established in Italy, as surveyed in Chapters 4 and 5. Potatoes feature in the everyday menus of the Italian royal family, still unsure whether to adopt Italian or French: ‘costolette ai ferri con patate’ (grilled cutlets with potatoes, August 1894) and ‘pommes de terre nouvelles’ (April 1908).6 But the real change took place slightly further down the social scale, beginning with the middle classes. Pellegrino Artusi’s La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, first published in 1891, is a suggestive guide not only because middleclass families soon started using it, but because Artusi travelled extensively, especially in central and northern Italy, and had a network of middle-class correspondents providing him with recipes.

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Potatoes have a substantial and varied place in Artusi, at every stage of the meal. They appear in soups: soup with small potato dumplings, ‘minestra di bomboline di patate’ (no. 29), and his recipe for ‘minestrone’, for four or five people, has one potato (no. 47). Under ‘minestra asciutte’, they appear as just one of different ways of making gnocchi: ‘gnocchi di patate’ (no. 89), where Artusi jests that the gnocchi must contain some flour or else the gnocchi will vanish completely upon cooking. Potatoes appear as accompaniments to meat or fish dishes: ‘patate alla sauté’ (no. 441), which means, ‘in plain language, potatoes browned in butter’; ‘patate tartufate’ (truffled potatoes, no. 442), a way of taking potatoes up-market; ‘passato di patate’ (mashed potatoes, no. 443), Artusi’s attempt to avoid Gallicisms like purée, given that ‘nowadays in Italy, if you do not talk like a foreigner, especially in matters of fashion or food, no one understands you’. There are two fried accompaniments: ‘crocchette di patate’ (potato croquettes, no. 200) and ‘pallottole di patate ripiene’ (filled potato balls, no. 201), which he calls ‘a showy dish, good but inexpensive’: a description that seems to sum up bourgeois aspirations and values perfectly. There are two different recipes for ‘tortino di patate’ (potato pie, nos, 446 and 447), the second of which makes additional use of a béchamel sauce, which Artusi calls balsamella. There is an ‘insalata di patate’ (potato salad, no. 444), about which Artusi remarks: ‘even though this is a potato dish I may tell you that, in its own modest way, it is worthy of praise’, while admitting that ‘it is not for all stomachs’. And for dessert: ‘soufflet di farina di patate’ (potato flour soufflé, no. 705), where Artusi cannot avoid the Gallicism, containing potato flour, sugar, milk, eggs, vanilla essence and lemon peel.7 The diet of most Italians improved considerably with rising standards of living during the first 15 years of the twentieth century – until slowed by the Great War, which Italy entered in 1915. This was a boom period brought on by industrialization. Italians were healthier and lived longer. They also ate better – including more wheat and meat. Purchasing power increased, with the result that potatoes had never been cheaper (see Figure 4.2, previous chapter). Urban and rural labourers saw improvements in their daily fare. Maize consumption declined thoughout Italy, and cases of pellagra declined with it. In the south, maize bread was replaced by wheat bread; in the centre, maize polenta gave way to minestre (soup, stew or pasta); and in the north, there was less maize and more meat. Rome’s working classes were still eating potatoes, but they were eating them with pasta, rice, in soups.8 The bread was certainly better. In the mid-nineteenth century it was still acceptable for a treatise on bread-making to recommend the use of inferior cereals and raw or cooked potatoes in the making ‘of bread suitable for food consumption’.9 But 50 years later, in 1904, the agronomist Somma, in a book all about increasing potato consumption, was reluctant to encourage the potato’s

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place in bread-making. Only when used in the proportions of four parts wheat flour to one part potato starch (fecola) was the result acceptable: ‘a loaf quite like that made from wheat, from a nutritional point of view, but lighter and very nice tasting’.10 To take advantage of rising Italian incomes and aspirations, in 1906 the publisher Sonzogno launched a series of simple cookery books called Cento maniere di. . . . The Milanese publisher had already launched a successful series of inexpensive editions of literary classics, the ‘Biblioteca Universale’. Each book in Sonzogno’s ‘Biblioteca Casalinga’ (housewives’ library) series dealt with a different foodstuff or theme, and each was around one hundred pages long, with a pale blue cover adorned with a simple image (Figure 6.1). They were cheap (50 centesimi), with straightforward easy-to-understand recipes. Readers were able to buy just the title they needed: chicken, sauces, cold dishes, game, leftovers. The series reached an entirely new audience of housewives, for whom Artusi may have been just out of reach. In the following two years 32 different titles were published, to say nothing of the other publishers who imitated the highly successful format over the next few decades. Sonzogno continued publishing and reissuing titles through the mid1930s, although by then austerity required fewer pages (smaller type) and a simpler cover.11 The potato book was one of the first, and at 96 pages it was quite an honour for the humble tuber.12 It was aimed at ‘gourmands and housewives’, or perhaps at the latter trying their best to pass themselves off as the former. The book reflects aspirations and a desire to try new things. Dishes have imaginative names like ‘Arlecchinata’ (Harlequinade). If the other books in the series eschewed French culinary terms, this one positively wallowed in them. From purée to ragoût, gratin to croquettes, and not forgetting vol-au-vent, the French language lent refinement to Italian potatoes. Indeed many of the recipes were French, from ‘patate alla Barigoule’ (with artichokes) to ‘patate Soubise’ (with onions), to say nothing of various French regional dishes: ‘patate normanne’ (with cream), ‘all’alsaziana’ (with leaks, butter and sausage), ‘lionesi’ (with onions and hard-boiled eggs), ‘alla Perigueux’ (with truffles), ‘limosine’ (with chestnuts), ‘bordolesi’ (with lard and onions), ‘alla baionese’ (with Bayon ham), ‘alla marsigliese’ (with sea eels), ‘alla provenzale’ (with herbs, small onions, garlic and lemon juice). If the Sonzogno book borrowed from Alfred Suzanne’s Cent manières d’accommoder et de manger les pommes de terre, it certainly did not acknowledge it.13 Indeed, aside from the obligatory recipe for potato gnocchi, the only explicitly Italian dish was a pudding, ‘patate alla Milanese’.

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Figure 6.1 Detail from the cover of Cento maniere di preparare le patate (Milan: Sonzogno, 1906, 1927).

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TWO DISHES FROM THE POTATO BOOK Arlecchinata (Harlequinade) Take some truffles: gently wash and clean them, remove the skins, dry them and cut them into cubes and place into a salad bowl. Cut the tubers, which have been steam cooked, into cubes and when they have chilled mix them with the truffles, seasoning with mayonnaise

Patate alla Milanese (Milanese-style Potatoes) Cook a large quantity of rice in milk; mash the tubers cooked in the oven, together with butter; mix together with the rice and three whole eggs; sweeten with sugar and flavour with vanilla, lemon and cinnamon. Allow to brown slightly in the oven. Source: Cento maniere di prepare le patate (Milan: Sonzogno, 1906), pp. 56, 74.

The new century witnessed the recovery of the Italian agricultural sector. This was partly due to public initiatives like agricultural institutes, the encouragement of technical innovation, the lowering of fiscal pressures on farmers and the enaction of protectionist measures on grain production, and partly due to the establishment of cooperatives, especially in the centrenorth, for the purchase of seeds, fertilizers, machinery and storage and sale of produce. In the period 1909–14 Italian potato production reached its highest point hitherto (Figure 6.2), averaging 1,656,200 tonnes per year, or over twice the production of 1874 (which was 704,987.9 tonnes). The potato crop was worth 115,843,000 lire.14 (This might sound like a lot but it was only one-sixtieth of the approximate value of Italy’s total agricultural production.15) Some demand came from countries like Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but potato exports were quite small, around 0.6 per cent of production; otherwise demand was internal. Part of the increased internal demand came from livestock breeders. During the period from 1881 to 1908 there was a 30 per cent rise in cattle numbers, mostly in the north of Italy, in part coinciding with a rise in dairy production and cheese-making, and an over 50 per cent rise in pig numbers. Animal numbers continued to rise till the outbreak of World War I.16 Not everyone was affected by this novel prosperity. At the bottom of the social scale the potato could not shed its negative associations, especially amongst the poor. This is how Alfredo Panzini described the wretched lunch

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4000000 3500000 3000000 2500000 2000000 1500000

Land area devoted to potato cultivation (hectares) Potato production (tonnes)

1000000 500000

18

60 18 (a 74 ) 1 ( 19 89 b) 09 7 ( 19 –1 c) 15 4 ( 19 –1 a) 19 8 ( 19 –2 a) 21 0 ( –2 a) 3 19 (a 19 34 ) 36 (d –9 ) 19 (e 45 ) 19 (e 46 ) 19 (e 19 47 ) 60 (e 19 –6 ) 77 2 ( –7 f) 9 (f 20 ) 07

0

Figure 6.2 Italian potato cultivation and production, 1860–2007. Notes: (a) Riccardo Bachi, L’alimentazione e la politica annonaria in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1926; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of Economics and History), pp. 39, 123. The 1860 figure is an estimate based on a volume-to-weight conversion of 1 litre=0.714 kg. (b) Ministero dell’Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Relazione intorno alle condizioni dell’agricoltura nel quinquennio 1870–1874 (Roma: Barbera, 1875–78, 4 vols), 1, pp. 317 (c) Ulderigo Somma, La coltivazione della patata (Asti: Tip. Cooperativa, 1904), p. 118. (d) Atti del primo convegno nazionale per l’incremento della produzione delle patate (Como: A. Noseda, 1935), plate facing p. 64. (e) Pietro Venino, La patata (Milan: Antonio Vallardi, 1950 edition), p. 8. (f) L. Giardini, et al., ‘L’irrigazione della patata nella pianura veneta ed emiliano romagnola’, Atti dell’incontro nazionale sulla patata (1983) (Bologna: Tipostampa Bolognese, 1985), p. 31. (However, another article in the same volume gives significantly higher production figures for the years 1977–79, averaging 2,943,667 tonnes, instead of the 2,644,300 given by Giardini. Cf. Eduardo Capuano, ‘Situazione odierna del settore della patata nella Comunità Economica Europea’, ibid., p. 6.) (g) United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation ‘International Year of the Potato’ website: www.potato2008.org/en/world/index.html.

of a family of field hands (braccianti) in his 1907 story, ‘I martiri dello stomaco’ (The stomach martyrs): This what we eat here, look she said, and she took up some of the soupy liquid with her ladle, and allowed it to drip down, spattering: tomato skins, potatoes leftover from the pigs, rough homemade pasta made with the bran, beans, and seawater, to save on salt.17

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Panzini’s braccianti are just one step above from the pigs they are raising and the figure of Giovanna alone retains a small scrap of dignity. The link between potatoes and animals was simply too strong. ‘In many regions’, according to the agronomist Somma, ‘our farmers put a pot of potatoes on the fire, but not for their own use; they will eat one or two, sometimes seasoned with oil, but especially to feed them to the pigs’.18

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF WARTIME AND THE INTERWAR YEARS In Mario Rigoni Stern’s novel Storia di Tönle (Tönle’s story), set in a village in the Dolomites, the autumn preceding Italy’s entry into World War I is recorded as one of a bumper harvest: ‘the potatoes abundant and healthy, the rye and barley good and heavy, the hayloft stuffed with sweet-smelling hay’. But the village, located right on the front line between Italy and Austria, is the site of bombing and its inhabitants are forced to leave, just when ‘the food was now more abundant than it had ever been in the past, because inside the wide-open houses you could see potatoes, lard, wedges of cheese, barley and lentils, even the odd piece of smoked meat’. The following May, the now abandoned mountainside terraces fruit as they rarely had in the past, ‘as if it was all the revenge of nature for the war of men’.19 The diets of Italians had indeed begun to improve during the early years of the twentieth century. This improvement continued, rather paradoxically, during the Great War, when Italy abandoned laissez-faire policies in favour of greater coordination and regulation of food production, distribution and consumption. Italy massively increased wheat imports, even before it entered the war. The country then fixed prices, first on bread, and later on flour, pasta, olive oil and milk. As a result of this policy of fixing prices on staple goods – in effect, subsidising prices – Italians found they could spend more money on non-essential items. Italians smoked more tobacco and drank more wine; coffee consumption went up by 12 times. At the home front there was nearly full employment and wages were high. Italians wanted more and could afford more, to the extent that social scientists started to worry about ‘the dietary sensualism’ of Italians, who, they felt, should have been spending their money on more meat, dairy products and vegetables.20 As for the battle front, upon Unification the potato had accompanied the evolution of the Piedmontese army into the Italian one, as part of the ordinary soldier’s weekly ration – 250 grams of potatoes or legumes per week, used in soups, for meat days (di grasso), and an additional 400 grams of potatoes for the two meatless days (di magro).21 Despite a haphazard provisioning system,

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the soldier’s diet continued to improve over the following decades; until, that is, it was tested by the Great War. Wartime saw army rations decline substantially – beginning with meat (tinned, in any case), bread and coffee – and food reserves near the front decline to just a few days. Even potatoes were in short supply. From 10 December 1916 the potato ration went down to 150 grams every three days, from the 350 grams it had been at the start of the War.22 Potatoes were considered expendable; not a staple, but one of several ‘complementary foods’, classed in a group of ‘vegetables, legumes and condiments’. Things took a turn for the worse in 1917, as food supplies suffered the adverse effects of submarine warfare. Italy was now waging a gruelling war against Austria – with 10,000 dead and 30,000 injured at the battle of Caporetto alone. As of 21 February 1917, potatoes had to be obtained via the Ministry of Agriculture, and its General Commissariate for Consumption (Commissariato generale per i consumi), which was also responsible for supplying them to the civilian population. The Commissariate aimed to centralize food initiatives, such as the establishment of consortia, cooperatives and provisioning stores for many foods. Attempts were made to stimulate production. But even so the army would not buy potatoes above a set price (14–20 lire), which limited their purchasing power at a time when the potato supply was at its lowest point in years. ‘All said, there can only be one conclusion’, wrote Gaetano Zingali: ‘in the table of dietary treatment our soldier has always maintained the last place’.23 Even so, many of the soldiers serving at the front had never eaten better in their lives. At home, of all the Allied countries, Italians had the lowest average daily caloric intake.24 A potato consortium was meant to regulate the supply and price of potatoes. However, ‘it had no success’ in practice, the result of ‘a remarkable ineptitude on the part of those responsible’.25 For example, the lack of adequate transport meant that potatoes arrived at their destination already ‘spoiled, with not indifferent losses’. As a result, prices continued to climb, especially on the black market (Figure 4.2). The situation improved in 1918 when the Allies awarded Italy most favoured nation status and doubled the amount of wheat they provided. Sporadic shortages still occurred but at war’s end Italians were not in danger of starvation or malnutrition. This all came undone in 1919. The cost of Italy’s food policy had been great: Italy’s wheat imports increased 900 per cent during the course of the war, meat imports by 1,300 per cent and sugar imports by 600 per cent. As a proportion of all Italy’s imports, food went up from 19 per cent in 1913 to 32 per cent in 1922.26 Government spending had gone from 2.5 billion lire in 1913–14 to 20.9 billion in 1918–19. The bread subsidy accounted for something like half the state deficit.27 By 1919 the rapid increase in prices was wreaking havoc with household budgets. Italians, accustomed to seeing cheap bread as a right, took the streets in protest.

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To put it simply, despite increased standards of living, Italy could not produce enough food to feed its citizens – during normal times, let alone during wartime. What was the answer? Proposals ranged from increasing imports still further, to modernizing the distribution sector and boosting agricultural production. The latter met with the most widespread political support, and was the one the Fascist Party, in power from 1922, favoured. And yet the 1920s were good times for most Italians, as prosperity returned to the country following the hiatus of the Great War. An expanding middle class benefited most. This is evident in the dramatic increase in the publication of cookery books and home economics manuals during the decade. These provided information on food preparation, budgeting and etiquette to a whole new class of consumers. Lidia Morelli wrote detailed and practical manuals with titles like Dalla cucina al salotto: enciclopedia di vita domestica (From the kitchen to the sitting room: encyclopaedia of domestic life; new edition 1927), La casa che vorrei avere (The house I would like, 1931) and Mani alacri: libro di lavori femminili (Active hands: book of female tasks, 1933), which all went through numerous editions. Ada Boni’s Taslimano della felicità (Talisman of happiness), a cookery book, was first published in 1927 and has never been out of print since. The decade also saw the birth of a new periodical, La cucina italiana, in 1929, a highbrow publication, with the subtitle ‘Giornale di gastronomia per le famiglie e per i buongustai’ (Journal of gastronomy for families and gourmands). Amongst its regular contributors was Amedeo Pettini, head chef to the royal family, and the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who used it to launch his infamous campaign against pasta.28 Unusually for the period, there are also women contributors, like the poet and novelist Ada Negri and the journalist Margherita Sarfatti, author of a very successful biography of Benito Mussolini, whose collaborator and lover she was for a time. From 1922 the Fascist regime continued with the policy of price controls, until it initiated the ‘campaign for grain’ (battaglia del grano) in 1925 and revalued the lira the following year. Both were intended as a way of asserting Italy’s independence via increased self-sufficiency. The campaign for grain may not have been cost-effective, at a time when the international price of wheat was falling; but it demonstrated the regime’s resolve to tackle the problems of food supply, beginning with the most basic staple of all, wheat. Wheat production did go up over the next fifteen years, as land area given over to its cultivation increased to 35 per cent of Italy’s arable land. The country paid the price of this policy in decreased meat production, as grazing land was sacrificed, as well as a fall in vegetable cultivation. Potatoes, generally grown on land where wheat did not grow, or in rotation with wheat, were unaffected. Indeed potato cultivation continued to increase.

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Nationally, land area devoted to potatoes rose from 68,524 hectares in 1874 to 292,300 hectares in 1913, and again to 299,000 hectares in 1918, although there was a fall in production during the war years, not surprisingly. Five years later, in 1923, land area devoted to potato cultivation was 316,800 hectares, due in part to the addition of two formerly Austrian regions to the Kingdom of Italy following World War I.29 Peasants in one of these, the rocky Karst region around Trieste, had gone from planting potatoes on 5 per cent of their fields in 1875 to 20 per cent some 50 years later.30 The Italian expansion of potato cultivation was in part at the expense of crops like rye, barley, oats and maize, which all declined during this period. The export of ‘early’ potatoes from temperate areas of lowland Italy to northern Europe became a real business during the 1920s. Florence had engaged in this trade from the nineteenth century, as we saw in the previous chapter; by the mid 1930s production had increased three-fold. Even more astonishing was the rise in the cultivation of early potatoes in the province of Naples, which went from a mere 7,261 tonnes in 1874 to 34 times that (247,661 tonnes) in 1934. This was intensive production: the province was responsible for almost 10 per cent of Italy’s total production on just 5 per cent of the land.31 Likewise Salerno, just to the south of Naples, increased production from 4,707 tonnes by 19-fold, to 91,463 tonnes, during the same period (1874–1934). Potatoes even attracted royal attention during this period. In May 1925, on an official visit to the Casentino (Tuscany), prince Umberto of Savoy stopped at the town of Castel San Niccolò. During his visit the prince was served the local ‘Cetica’ potatoes in different ways, a variety named after a hamlet located a few kilometres outside the town. When the prince seemed to have had his fill of the ‘Cetica’ potato, a local chirped up and invited him not to stand on ceremony since there was plenty: ‘Sir prince, eat them and don’t be silly, we have enough for the pigs, too’. The story is too good to be true, and probably is not, invented by the townspeople to poke fun at their rural neighbours, the Ceticatti.32 We can document historically another meal offered to the prince, this time by his fellow army officers from his Turinese regiment. In the summer of 1930, at the ‘Grande Albergo delle Poste’ in the mountain village of Lemie (Piedmont), Umberto was offered a truly Italian dinner, with a range of dishes and wines from around the country. As befitted the location, in the same Lanzo Valley which gives us our earliest Italian potato references, potatoes were on the menu. They appeared as a first course of ‘gnocchi alla romana’ (not here in their semolina version) and as one of three vegetable side-dishes, ‘patatine alla maitre d’hotel’, to go with the trout and steak.33 The potato dish consists of thinly sliced boiled potatoes, covered with broth, seasoned, and then reduced and served with butter.

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GNOCCHI DI PATATE ALLA ROMANA (ROMAN-STYLE POTATO GNOCCHI) Steam cook 2 kg of potatoes, mash them and mix them together with 50 grams of butter, 4 egg yolks, 150 grams of flour, 100 grams of grated cheese, salt and pepper. Shape then into little dumplings which you will lightly press onto a small grater. Then cook the gnocchi in boiling salted water; remove after two minutes, drain and season with butter, cheese and Neapolitan tomato sauce with a sprinkling of powdered cinnamon. Source: Amedeo Pettini, Manuale di cucina e di pasticceria (Casale Monferrato: Fratelli Marescalchi, 1914 and 1923), no page, in Domenico Musci, Abbuffate reali. La storia d’Italia attraverso i menu di Casa Savoia (Turin: Ananke, 2007), p. 153.

Not everyone in Italy benefited from this new-found prosperity. The worldwide crash of 1929 had an immediate impact, even if at first it appeared that Italians would be less affected than the rest of Europe. The fall in food prices returned some peasants, especially the landless braccianti (field hands) of the South, to destitution. The prefect of Salerno described the local population, ‘forced to feed themselves on boiled plants and bran bread’ – words that could have come straight out of the Statistica Murattiana of 1811 of the Jacini inquiry of the early 1880s.34 By the early 1930s the situation had improved again, but the prosperity had brought inflation with it. Fernanda Momigliano’s 1933 manual on ‘living well in difficult times’, was directed at the housewife as manager and saver. It offered basic, affordable and nutritious recipes, including ‘thirty ways of preparing good and inexpensive soups’, such as potato soup, bean soup and so on.35 The working classes, for their part, had no need of such advice. They were accustomed to making minestre out of little, using potatoes if there were no beans, for instance. The Fascist regime had reacted to the depression by doubling its efforts to increase Italy’s food production. On the practical side, these are the years of huge land reclamation projects throughout Italy, to turn marshland into farmland, with new towns and villages to populate them. On the propaganda side, the regime looked to the country’s rural past, even if through rose-tinted spectacles. Italians were presented with a barrage of pictures of Mussolini in various bucolic settings, invariably stripped to the waist: with a sickle in his hands, driving a tractor, inaugurating a drainage project, surrounded by children at a rural school. The drainage projects were real, but they could not stem the increase in the proportion of Italians living in cities, which rose

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from 45 per cent in 1921 to 55 per cent in 1936.36 Mussolini’s exhortation to mountain-dwellers – ‘be proud of your montains, love your mountain lives, and do not be seduced by life in the so-called big cities’ – coincides with the first signs of serious mountain depopulation and the breakup of the traditional and fragile mountain economy.37 The Geographical Committee of Italy’s National Research Council was in no doubt. Relating findings on the effects of emigration from the Piedmontese and Ligurian Alps in 1937, A. R. Toniolo wrote: ‘The upper limit of permanent habitation and cultivated fields is moving down the mountain sides; the buildings left behind are falling into ruins; abandoned fields are becoming choked with weeds; and intensive methods of farming are giving place to extensive and irregular practices’. As historians have more recently shown, by the 1930s only ten per cent of land in Alpine areas was farmed, compared with 80 per cent in the rich Po Valley. The percentage of Alpine land farmed would have been higher 50 years earlier; but the trend towards marginalization and depopulation had already had its effects.38 Toniolo’s more general conclusion was that depopulation was the result of overcrowding, ‘for which no radical internal remedies can ever be fully effective – neither the colossal works of land reclamation now being carried out nor the internal migrations that appear to be producing such impressive results’.39 This was at a time when the Fascist government had all but prohibited emigration, with the exception of Italy’s African colonies. Despite all of this, there was a slight economic upswing during the mid1930s. And when it came to potatoes, the Italian consumer ‘has become more demanding and prefers the newly introduced varieties’, according to a speaker at a conference on potato production held in 1935.40 By the 1930s the potato had reached a significant place in the diet of Italians, as we have seen, with production figures to match – even considering the tendency of Fascist government statistics to err on the optimistic side. Italy’s potato production had never been higher, reaching 2,706,649 tonnes in 1934, an increase of over a million tonnes from the period preceding World War I. Land area devoted to potato cultivation was also higher than ever before, 400,270 hectares, an increase of over 100,000 hectares from 1914. Admittedly, as we have seen, some of this increase was due to the acquisition of the previously Austrian regions of Venezia Tridentina and Venezia Giulia, in 1918 and 1924, respectively, which included the potato-producing provinces of Trento, Bolzano, Trieste, Gorizia and Pola. Venezia Tridentina added 15,882 hectares, producing 162,489 tonnes of potatoes; Venezia Giulia another 23,621 hectares, producing 195,452 tonnes.41 The two regions accounted for under a third of the overall increase; the rest was due to an increase in cultivation in the remaining parts of Italy. In general terms, Italian agriculture benefited from increased investment; it was no accident

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that Fascism achieved mass support in the countryside. More specifically, we have already seen how cultivation of early potatoes in lowland areas had increased to meet northern European demands. Production also increased in areas where the demand was more localized, particularly in mountain areas. For example, in the north, potato production in the province of Cuneo rose three-fold over the 60 years from 1874; in the centre, Perugia experienced a similar rise; and in the south, production increased ten-fold in the province of Campobasso, to 109,182 tonnes.42 In all these cases, however, rising production masked seriously diminishing yields. Italy’s production could not keep pace with its own domestic requirements, necessitating the importation of 87,766 tonnes of potatoes.43 Decreasing yields and the need to import were both worrying problems when a conference was held in Como, in September 1935. The stated aim of the ‘First National Conference on Increased Potato Production’ was the doubling of Italy’s production. These potatoes would: (i) serve as food: ‘and we must not forget that our country has privileged conditions for the production of early potatoes’; (ii) in the making of bread, thereby taking pressure off of wheat supplies: ‘we have all enjoyed the bread bread made with a high percentage of potatoes which graces the tables of Molise’s rural inhabitants’; (iii) for animal feed, but only ‘with scrap potatoes and waste products’; and, (iv) in the production of starch and alcohol, not to mention the ‘the thousands of tonnes of fuel that the doubled potato productions would provide’. All that remained was to choose the varieties, study the diseases, provide the seed and improve trade. As a result of the conference, the organizer reported, the potato’s problems ‘are now on the carpet’, although how literally he meant this is unreported.44 The agriculture minister’s representative realized that even ‘up to a few years ago’ a conference on the production of potatoes ‘would have caused laughter amongst idlers, and all of us would have been ridiculed as good people with nothing better to do with their time’. The change in the potato’s importance was a result of the ‘miracle that Fascism has brought about in every area of agricultural production’. The other opening speeches were pure potato patriotism. The prefect of the province of Como, where the conference was being held, argued that the conference would attract the attention of ‘He who can achieve all by means of his stirring and incentifying words’ (meaning Mussolini, of course). But it was Como’s podestà who supplied the conference’s rallying cry: ‘To all of you, the Duce, who knows the value of real work, has assigned newer and broader horizions; he will call you to redeem and cultivate new lands which are now feeling the pressure of our militia’s arms and tomorrow will experience the deep furrows made by the Fascist plough!’45 In a stance that strangely pre-figures Slow Food’s support of biodiversity and locally-poduced food, the Como conference lauded Italian potato varieties, as the equals of Dutch, German and British varieties. Forty-four of Italy’s provinces

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Figure 6.3 Potatoes proudly on display at the ‘First National Conference on Increased Potato Production’, under the watchful eyes of king Vittorio Emanuele III and the ‘Duce’, Benito Mussolini (Como, September 1935).

had sent in samples of their potato production – 290 potato samples in all – all of which were proudly put on display (Figure 6.3). Campobasso alone had sent samples of the 11 different main varieties it produced, seven indigenous and four foreign, with names like ‘Quarantina’, ‘Greca’, ‘Riccia’ and ‘Turchesca’. The indigenous varietal names refer to peculiar features and characteristics – like shape, colour or place of origin – in a lyrical celebration of local culture. The vivacity and diversity of local names throughout Italy calls to mind traditions in the potato’s Andean homeland.46 Como’s display gave pride of place to the numerous varieties of its ‘Biancona’ from the Alpine valleys (Figure 6.4); Cuneo presented its ‘Piatellina’, Belluno its ‘Sappada’, Udine its ‘Slava’, Trieste its ‘Caporettana’ and ‘Precoce d’Albona’, Trento its ‘Trivellino’, Treviso its ‘Vergato celeste’, Venice its ‘Rosa di Chioggia’, Modena its ‘Nostrana di Faeto’, La Spezia its ‘Calice’ varieties, Lucca its ‘Porrettana’, Pistoia its ‘Bianca del melo’, Pisa its ‘Primaticcia’, Arezzo its ‘Monterchiese’, Macerata its ‘Viola di Colfiorito’, Naples its ‘Ricciona’, Catanzaro its ‘Braciola’, Agrigento its ‘Nostrale di Sciacca’, Nuoro its ‘Gavoi’, to name but a few. The potato united Italy: Basilicata displayed its ‘Milanese’ variety, while Lombard provinces brought

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Figure 6.4 The province of Como’s display gave pride of place to its ‘Biancona’ variety

their ‘Basilicata’. (Some of these varieties are the ‘heirlooms’ of today, which local producers have sought to re-introduce, a topic we shall return to in the Epilogue.) Pavia’s ‘Berlinese’, Pescara’s ‘Germanese’, L’Aquila’s ‘Olandese’ and Sassari’s ‘Francese’ remind us of the ultimate international origins of many Italian varieties, even the most ‘traditional’. Notable among the newer foreign varieties were the German ‘Tondo di Berlino’ (‘Böhms Allerfrueheste Gelbe’), the Dutch ‘Bintje’ and the British ‘Majestic’.47 The bewildering variety of names suggests some of the problems facing the industry. There was a lack of classification, for a start, so that the multitude of local names often hid similarities, if not identical varieties. The storing capacity of Italian varieties had to be improved, as did the quality and quantity of seed. The best, in terms of productivity and disease resistance, came from ‘high localities in the Alps and Apennines’;48 this production needed to be encouraged and protected. More attention needed to be paid to the choice of varieties, the better to suit local conditions, especially where imported varieties were concerned (since they were often developed with very different conditions in mind). The degeneration of older varieties had to be overcome. New, hybrid varieties should be attempted. In all of this the State, ‘which today stimulates every aspect of cultural life’, should lead the way, directing and coordinating improvements.49 By the time the Minister of Agriculture wrote a letter of support for the published proceedings of the Como conference, a month after it was held, they

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had acquired an increased urgency. In his letter of 17 October 1935 minister Edmondo Rossoni commented on the ‘importance of the subject, especially in the current economic circumstances’.50 In fact Italy had just invaded Ethiopia two weeks earlier. Retaliation by the League of Nations had not yet come, but it would: on 18 November 1935, it declared sanctions on Italy. The minister, formerly undersecretary to the Fascist Grand Council, must have sensed what was looming when he wrote to the organizers in Como. Increasing agricultural production, including that of the potato, would become more important than ever. In March of the following year Mussolini declared the goal of ‘autarchy’: the economic autonomy of the country.

THE SLOW DESCENT INTO WAR The next four years, from 1936 until Italy’s entry declaration of war in 1940, are ones of contradictions. Autarchy had positive effects during the late 1930s, strengthening internal demand and increasing production, but once Italy entered World War II, the weaknesses of the policy soon became apparent. On the face of it, the Como conference seems to have born fruit; over the next five years potato production increased still further, to 2,893,406 tonnes. However this was achieved by increasing land area under cultivation still further – up to 425,032 hectares – rather than by increasing yields.51 In any case, it was a long way short of the doubling of production which the conference had sought. Ensuring a reliable supply of seed-potatoes remained the most pressing problem if production was to be truly ‘autarchic’.52 The immediate impact of sanctions and the policy of autarchy was not traumatic. Italians were told they would have to cut back on some of the luxuries to which they had become accustomed, like coffee and sugar, in the name of thrift and austerity. But they could do so without abandoning the pursuit of leisure, elegance and good taste which for many had characterized the 1920s. Lidia Morelli encouraged her ‘housewives against sanctions’ – in a book published on the very day sanctions were declared – to buy Italian, make things go further, save money. One suggestion for her readers was that they accompany their servants when they did the daily shopping, offering advice on what to buy.53 This was not a desperate need, then. Hoarding food was unnecessary, indeed Morelli considered it unpatriotic, but making preserves at home was a good idea. So was making a hearty potato dish (‘patate alla pizzaiola’) – and using the leftover potato peels as a cockroach repellent (‘burnt potato peelings ground to an ash and sprinked in areas where cockroaches go’). Another book published the following year, and also directed at housewives, displays the same contradiction between comfort and austerity. As part of its policy of empowering rural Italy, the Fascist Party founded an association for

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‘farmwives’ (massaie rurali), with the aim of making them more economically self-sufficient. The book Seminare e raccogliere (Sowing and reaping, 1936) by Laura Gambetta, provided ‘brief notions for the farmwife who wants to “keep to the straight and narrow” ’.54 Rallied on by the Duce’s slogan ‘Whoever does not sow, will reap neither a little nor a lot’ – undoubtedly true, but not one of Mussolini’s best – the manual advised women on how to maintain a kitchen garden (including potatoes), raise hens and rabbits, keep bees and cultivate silkworms. The detailed and practical information provided by a range of authorities was interspersed with adverts. Some were quite consistent with the tone of the book: ‘Sgaravatti Seeds’, ‘Fratelli Grana Farm Machinery’, ‘Emilio Grosso Chicken Coops’. But the adverts for ‘Enrico Lupo, specialist suppliers of tailors, furriers and milliners’ and the ‘FIAT 500, the car for work and savings’, told quite a different story. The FIAT ‘500’ may have been marketed as a small utility car, and it was certainly small; but at a cost of just under 9,000 lire, it was still two years’ salary for the average factory worker.55 Just the thing for the rural housewife to take her potatoes to market; or maybe she would need the potato-fuel to power it. The declining quality and availability of bread can be used as a measure of the falling standard of living immediately prior to and then during the war years. It began gently enough, with propaganda in favour of whole wheat bread. This went further than the refined variety, thus saving on limited wheat supplies. In 1937, however, the government mandated the sale of coarse ‘single type’ bread.56 The new standard loaf was allowed to contain up to 30 per cent non-wheat content. Back came the use of the lesser cereals in bread-making. The substitution of potatoes for wheat was now patriotic.57 The situation precipitated after Italy declared war, on 10 June 1940, invading Greece a few months later. Unlike during the Great War, when Italy had been on the Allied side, this time round the country did not have access to cheap wheat. Italy’s alliance with Germany brought much-needed coal, and a ready market for food exports, but no food imports. The closest Italians came to seeing German potatoes was when they went to work in German fields and in German industries, under bilateral agreements between the two countries. By the end of 1940 pasta, rice, oil, coffee and sugar had all been rationed in Italy. The authorities resisted rationing bread until the following year, on 1 October 1941, by which time food shortages were becoming common and the effects of the war were now seriously felt. In March 1942 the standard bread ration was reduced from 200 grams per person to 150 grams. Bread rationing pushed up the price of flour, hardly available in any case, except – sporadically – on the black market, where it cost ten times the official price.58 In the summer of 1942 Sicilian peasants refused to hand over their grain and women threatened the requisitioning officers: dangerous, since, with a war on, any act of sabotage was deemed treasonous.59 By 1943 consumers were complaining that the bread was inedible. They swore that bakers were

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even using wood pulp in the dough.60 Bakers did add chick pea and maize flour to the wheat, saving the wheat for the black market. By this time the black market was where urban housewives spent much of their day, searching for what little food was available. Eventually, an estimated 70 per cent of all food purchases were made there. With rationing came discontent. Not open protests or rioting, at least not at first. The inhabitants of Genoa were the first to complain, in 1940, about the woeful distribution of food. Perhaps because their port had been bombed by the Allied forces, in retaliation for Italy’s declaration of war, the Genoese felt themselves to be on the front line. A confidential report noted that: ‘Those people who have the chance to frequent markets and retail shops soon realize that . . . the most pressing problem is that of food.. . . The people direct their anger at the profiteers who exist within the Fascist ranks, that is, among those who wear the Fascist Party pin’.61 Preferential treatment of party members and of the rich, who could afford to buy at any price, was the main complaint of women queuing with their ration cards. Party members, like this party secretary in Naples, blamed the police, who constantly create disputes in food queues for the uncivil and insolent profiteering which they undertake for their bosses, of whatever rank, and for themselves. . . . Sacks of potatoes make their way to the homes of commissioners and chiefs of police; likewise, sacks of beans and coal.62

Even the king was lucky to get a decent meal. A year before the war Vittorio Emanuele III – just crowned ‘king of Albania’, in addition to being ‘emperor of Ethiopia’ – was already reduced to eating ‘minestra di pasta e patate’ as a first course. This was a dish his head chef Pettini had classified as ‘home cooking’ (cucina casalinga) in his cookery book of a few years earlier. The recipe is basic, characterized by the word ‘small’, with even water as a possible standin for broth. This course was followed by spinach and sliced fried brain and ‘Polish-style meatballs’ and salad, and a sweet pastry.63 Even the menu card was shabby: unadorned and typewritten.

MINESTRA DI PASTA E PATATE (PASTA AND POTATO SOUP) Dice 300 grams of potatoes, finely chop an onion and a small sprig of parsley, put everything into a casserole dish or pot to gently fry with a small piece of butter and, if you like, a little [olive] oil. Lastly, add a few slices or cubes of sausage,

Ö

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already cooked, and two cloves of garlic. When it has started to brown slightly add meat or vegetable broth, or water, and when it has come to a boil pour in 300 grams of cut pasta or broken-up spaghetti. Mix in a handful of grated cheese and serve. Source: Amedeo Pettini, Manuale di cucina e di pasticceria (Casale Monferrato: Fratelli Marescalchi, 1914 and 1923), no page, in Domenico Musci, Abbuffate reali. La storia d’Italia attraverso i menu di Casa Savoia (Turin: Ananke, 2007), p. 173.

At around this time the first ‘orti di guerra’ (war gardens) appear, with potatoes, cabbages, courgettes and even grain taking the place of flowers and grass in public parks. Potatoes came into their own again. Giorgio Hermann’s vegetarian cookery book made a virtue of necessity. It advocated a vegetable diet as a means of creating a ‘stronger and healthier race’, fed on potatoes, spinach, nettles, beets, cauliflower and maize cobs. Evidently the 70 recipes of the 1941 edition were not deemed sufficient for this purpose and were increased to 100 in 1943.64 ‘You have no white flour, no rice milk, you can’t get any Vegetina, and your baker or grocer don’t have any potato starch?’, Petronilla asked her women readers in 1943.65 Not to worry, you could make your own potato starch, ‘since at least you’ve been able to get potatoes’. Making potato starch is not as easy as it sounds, it turns out (and as we saw in Chapter 1). Petronilla admits as much, her ellipses increasing in frequency the tougher things got: ‘A lot of work but . . . in these times, in order to get something one must adapt . . . and work hard’.

FECOLA DI PATATE (POTATO STARCH) Wash and lightly peel some floury potatoes; grate them into a basin; add plenty of water; then remove the pulp, pass the densest part through a sieve, keeping the water that runs through and that will be the off-white starch; rinse what is left in the sieve another three or four times, and then leave it to rest in the basin until all the whitish powder has formed a deposit at the bottom. Drain the water, add some more, mix it again, and again leave it to form a deposit of starch, and drain again [. . .] Repeat this process until the water is clear. And then . . . now is the moment to assemble the starch. This should be put onto sheets of absorbant paper, brought to the stove to dry, and once it has dried put into jars, and . . . now it’s ready for your dainty dishes. Source: Petronilla [Amalia Moretti Foggia], 200 suggerimenti per . . . questi tempi (Milan: Sonzogno, 1943), no page, in Mafai, Pane nero, p. 241.

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It might have been easier just to cook and eat the potatoes, rather than prepare them for bread- or pastry-making; but anything must have been preferable to the bakers’ ‘Vegetina’: a flour substitute made from ingredients like lupins, chickpeas, acorns and chestnuts. The various uses to which potatoes could be put recall the agronomical treatises of previous centuries; with the important difference that on this occasion the subsistence crisis that brought these suggestions about was manmade. A shame, then, that potatoes were also rationed, as of 1941: 800 grams per person every 15 days.66 By the end of World War II potato production would fall to half of what it had been just five years before, wiping out the gains in production made during the 1920s and 1930s.67 The above-mentioned protesting housewives had a point, though; it seemed that the wealthy could escape the full brunt of rationing and shortages. Restaurants and hotels flouted the regulations, as long as the price was right. In March 1944 one satisfied Roman gentleman telephoned his fiancée to tell her of a restaurant meal he had just eaten. It consisted of a first course of spaghetti, followed by beef and potatoes, cheese and wine. Not much, perhaps, but most Italians could only dream of such fare at the time. We only know about it because the young man’s phone was being tapped.68 When it came to living standards, all of Italy’s progress since the turn of the century was undone in a matter of months. In his emotive study of the Žužek family, James Davis describes the slow ‘rise from want’ of this Slovenespeaking family of the Karst region, first under Austrian and later Italian rule (in Venezia Giulia). He relates their terrible experience of World War II, how ‘the war did not merely check their progress; it threw them back into the historical past’.69 ‘How far back?’, Davis asks. Perhaps to the Middle Ages, to ‘a society where the ruler was harsh and alien, where raiders torched whole villages, where armed men forced the population to work for them, and where old enemies settled their scores at night and left bodies by the roadside’. In terms of economic life the family was returned to the mid-nineteenth century. ‘Once again the Žužeks lived in the same cramped conditions that their ancestors had known . . . Once again they had almost no clothes but those on their backs. Once again food was not merely limited in kind but actually scarce, and there were times when they went to bed hungry’. The experience of the Žužek family was typical of families throughout Italy as the war sent them back in a flash 50 years or more in terms of living standards. Rural families were probably better able to cope than urban ones; at least they could grow some of their own produce, as they had always done. There was real hardship, especially in the latter years of the war and in the immediate post-war period. Yet for many Italians the better living conditions had been a relatively recent acquisition. They had the consolation – if consolation

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it was – of being able to return to the past. For the Žužeks, ‘it was no hardship not to be able to drive a car when they had never owned one . . . It was no sacrifice to trade their cigarette rations for food when smoking was a luxury they had never been able to afford’. As if to confirm this, a study of 273 town-dwelling families in the region of Venezia Giulia, mostly in Trieste, was carried out in 1942–43. It revealed that poor families with an income of 400 lire could only afford, per family member per month: 5.6 kg of potatoes, 2.6 kg of flour, 4 ½ eggs, 700 grams of fat and 677 grams of sugar. An income of over 1,600 lire was necessary in order to eat passably well, the study concluded, and only the rich had that much.70

FROM POST-WAR POVERTY TO THE ECONOMIC BOOM The war did not end for Italians when Italy surrendered to Anglo-American forces on 8 September 1943. The country’s former ally, Germany, immediately occupied the centre and north of the country and propped up Mussolini’s Salò government. The German military quickly disarmed now leaderless Italian soldiers in Italy and elsewhere in Europe and offered them the choice of fighting alongside Germany or deportation to prisoner of war camps in the Third Reich. Of the just over one million Italian soldiers captured, one hundred thousand chose the former option; while the majority, some 650,000, fed up with fighting, chose the second option and were forcibly interned. For these Italian military internees, there was a close association between their German captors, the terrible living and working conditions in the camps, and potatoes. According to the internee Antonio Reviglio, ‘rations are always extremely miserly’, always the same ‘foul soup’ of ‘revolting leftover dishwater’.71 Only potatoes, stolen at great risk, offer some relief: I taste the potatoes as if sipping ambrosia, I keep the soft pulp in my mouth for a while, full of fragrance, touching my palate, I let it dissolve on my tongue into a sweet, watery cream. But they taste of risk, they smell of death, and above all they give off a scent of bravery.72

Potatoes come to represent hope and plenty, ‘they become fetishes, pagan symbols of a superior, providential design’.73 More longed for rather than real, potatoes figure prominently in two memoirs published soon after the war, beginning with the titles of both. In 1943 the Italian soldier Aldo Rizzi was taken prisoner by the Germans and taken to the infamous Luckenwalde camp. Here all Rizzi and his fellow soldiers got to eat was ‘a ladleful of slop, consisting more often than not of some beet leaves soaked in hot water’.74 If it was a good day, the ‘soup’ ladled out to them might

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just contain a tiny piece of potato; if it was a bad day the peace of potato might appear in the ladle only to fall back into the pot before it reached your mess tin, ‘and that was was a horrible day, because on top of the hunger there was the cheat’. On one occasion Rizzi received a severe beating after he and his unit were sent out to lift potatoes and he had hidden a couple, an event which gives the title to his memoir: ‘A sackful of blows for two potatoes’. Rizzi’s memoir was a harsh condemnation of German cruelty. He was lucky to have survived. Some five thousand internees at Luckenwalde were not so fortunate, dying of hunger and disease, before the camp was liberated by the Russians in 1945.75 Less condemnatory of the Germans was Enzo De Bernart’s novellized memoir, Italiani e patate (Italians and potatoes, 1949). But the descriptions of hunger are nevertheless very real. Hunger is ‘tiresome’, the protagonist writes, in a letter he knows he will never send; but worse than hunger is ‘that sadness of having finished when something edible is all one can desire . . . And the faces of one’s companions, all so absent, alien. . .’76 Potatoes figure as a leitmotif in the account, from the two potatoes the Italian soldierprotagonist Mario Mauri manages to eat on his way to the prisoner of war camp at Wietzendorf to the potatoes he will regularly get if he pledges to work for the German authorities and support the fascist Republic of Salò. As the Italian soldiers are threatened with being shot if they do not sign the pledge, Mauri tells the German camp leader his reasons for refusing to sign. The camp leader, a colonel named von Maur, evidently considers Mauri an equal – note the similarity of name – and two days later orders ‘all the potatoes you want’ for all the prisoners of war. After months of real hunger, an imagined end, with potatoes as the height of luxury: ‘it was an immense, joyous, white smoke that drifted up from the Wietzendorf camp as if for a solemn thanksgiving ceremony’.77 The next day, the Germans gone, the English arrive and liberate the camp. Recorded oral histories tell of similar experiences amidst the hunger and cold of the camps. Like ‘VR’, interviewed in December of 2005, who told of the frequent beatings he received. On one occasion it was for gathering up potato skins. ‘I had gone to pick up some potato skins from the rubbish pile’, VR recounted, ‘because in the evenings, I would cook them on the stove, in my mess tin’. Otherwise, ‘meals were a slop that you didn’t know what went into, beats or greens, I don’t know what’.78 Meanwhile, in occupied areas of Italy the German military authorities requisitioned food, holding the ‘traitorous’ country in contempt. Living conditions reached their lowest ebb. The average daily caloric intake of Italians, from close to 3,000 calories throughout the 1920s, precipitated to 1,865 in 1944 and to 1,747 in 1945. (It would take a long time for the country to recover. Pre-war caloric levels were only regained in the 1960s.79) During 1943–45, the black

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market, which had begun as a parallel source of supply for Italian families, was now how most food purchases were carried out. In Genoa, by 1944, black market potatoes cost six times their official price.80 Urban residents took to the countryside to purchase food, and peasants brought their produce into the cities, leading to exchanges that might take the form of barter rather than cash. Food was so scarce that when one producer brought potatoes to market in Milan in July of 1945, the event was considered extraordinary, and welcome, enough to grace the back cover of that city’s Sunday magazine (Figure 6.5). The front cover of the same issue depicted the first boatloads of goods to be unloaded at Genoa’s harbour since the liberation of northern Italy from Nazi control. Conditions in Italy did not immediately improve following the end of the fighting. In many mountain communities of the central Apennines 70–90 per cent of houses had been destroyed. The passage of the war front through the area had resulted in the loss of herds of cattle, sheep and pigs.81 Food shortages continued everywhere in Italy; indeed they continued well into the 1950s. A study carried out by the Organization for European Co-operation in 1951 ranked Italy alongside Greece as having the lowest consumption of meat, fats, milk, sugar and potatoes of European countries.82 The study was biased in favour of northern European ideas of abundance, whereas the Italian diet privileged pasta, bread and rice, eaten with vegetables and legumes. But even so, according to a Parliamentary inquiry held in 1953, living conditions in certain parts of the country were little changed from the Jacini report in the nineteenth century. Some peasant families were still spending close to threequarters of their incomes on food, much as they would have done in the nineteenth century. Potato flour continued to be used in bread-making, in regions like Abruzzo and Molise, where it was baked, often in primitive conditions, in quantities to last an entire week.83 This was particularly scandalous given that by the 1950s, average household expenditure on food was going below 50 per cent for the first time. This was a dramatic reversal. Italians were able to spend less money on food, while eating more and better than ever before. Yet post-war Italians did not adopt the high-protein, high-fat diet prevalent in northern Europe. Rather, they responded to the new-found prosperity of the ‘boom’ years by buying more of the same food they ate prior to the war, without changing either the content or the structure of their meals very much. According to ‘CS’, recounting her 1950s childhood in the Marche, ‘My mother was good at cooking anything whatever, even a piece of second- or third-hand meat. . . But we only ate meat on Sundays, the other days we ate soup with potatoes’.84 Potatoes had the virtue of being cheap, having finally regained the price-towage ratio they had had back in the mid-1930s (Figure 4.2). But they were

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Figure 6.5. ‘Welcome surprise in a Milanese market. A producer arrives from the countryside with a load of potatoes to sell to the consumer at a fair price’. The price was 23 lire a kilogram. Colour illustration by Rino Ferrari, back cover of La Domenica degli Italiani, 1 July 1945, vol. 1, no. 6. The magazine was the Sunday colour supplement to Milan’s Corriere d’Informazione, which had just replaced the suspended Corriere della Sera.

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also a sign that for a country brought to its knees by the war, kept alive by Marshall Plan dollars, and just beginning to undergo industrialization, prosperity was relative. Agricultural recovery was slow. None the less, two years after the end of the war potato production was close to pre-war levels. Most of this was for domestic consumption; exports were still quite low.85 In certain areas, like Leonessa in the south or Belluno in the north, cultivation was still primarily for local consumption, either for the peasant’s own table or for small-scale trade. And it was still grown in traditional ways: intercropped with cauliflowers or carrots in the Como province, with aubergines or peppers along the Veneto coast, or amongst the grape-vines in the province of Catania and in the Cinque Terre (La Spezia).86 Only in Italy’s lowlands were potatoes cultivated for mass consumption or for export, using heavy cropping varieties. Decent seed-potatoes were only becoming available again during the 1950s, thanks to the activities of the ‘Centro Moltiplicazione Patate’, originally founded in 1940 and re-instituted after World War II. One of these lowland areas was the the productive plain outside of Naples, where the fertile soil, sufficient rainfall and temperate climate meant that two or are three crops could be grown in succession. ‘Early’ potatoes had been one of them since at least the previous century. During the 1950s the Italian government began encouraging exports as a path towards economic modernization. Exports increased by 245 per cent during the decade (and imports almost as much).87 Markets were liberalized and, in 1957, Italy became part of the nascent European Economic Community. It would bring Italy a long-awaited boom, but it was not without its difficulties as markets adapted. Industry was the main beneficiary, especially that of consumer goods; agriculture ceased to be a real concern of government and was allowed to stagnate. Moreover, the gap between north and south widened, as most the industry was located in the north. An incident in 1959 suggests how even in this fertile southern region the country’s agriculture was in serious difficulty. The whole decade had witnessed widespread peasant protests, but one brought the town of Marigliano (province of Naples) to the attention of the national press. Marigliano’s potato-producers were peasant smallholders who had previously cultivated potatoes amongst a wide variety of crops, mostly vegetables, but also grain, maize and hemp. Holdings were small even by Italian standards, averaging just 1.3 hectares: enough to support a family, although recourse to debt in bad years was also common, and the work was backbreaking, still done mostly by hand, the hoe being the most common implement. Nationally, 65 per cent of farms were either ‘non productive’ or bordered on subsistence agriculture, and most were under five hectares in size.88 No other member of the EEC was comparable. Some

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limited land reform was undertaken, but the underlying structures remained unchanged. Government policy echoed that of the Coltivatori Diretti (Coldiretti), the farmers’ organization allied with the Christian Democrats, whose idea of furthering peasants’ interests was limited to support of traditional farming practices and calls for price protection. The Coldiretti did encourage Marigliano’s peasants to focus on potato cultivation, as a result of Italy’s membership of the EEC, with the traditional markets of Germany, the Netherlands and France in mind. Seed potatoes were made available to Marigliano’s smallholders on credit. However little was done to change the way potatoes were bought and sold: by a series of middlemen, given the absence of peasant cooperatives in the area, who needless to say made most of the money. As the newsmagazine L’Espresso put it in 1959: ‘The producer sells them [the potatoes] at 6 lire [a kg]; the consumer pays 35 lire; the exporter sells them at 60’.89 When the peasants harvested their potatoes in May 1959, having been blessed with a bumper crop, they found there was no market for them. The price had plummeted. On the morning of 8 June 1959 a thousand smallholders gathered to protest in Marigliano that their ‘new potatoes’ would rot in the fields unless buyers were found for them at a reasonable price. The peasants sought to meet with the authorities of the town, especially the mayor, to press home their demands for an extension of credit, suspension of duties and a fixed price of 15 lire a kg for their potatoes. The mayor refused to meet with the peasants. It was a market day, protesting peasants mixing with stallholders and shoppers. The local police force was ill equipped to deal with the disgruntled peasants and so called for reinforcements from the nearby city of Nola. An attempt to dispel protesters from Marigliano’s main square led to looting and rioting, including the destruction of the hated tax office and the local post office. Meanwhile, the ‘Celere’, a special police unit set up in 1950 to deal with strikes and protests, arrived from Naples. Ninety-five peasants were rounded up, arrested and sent first to Nola and then to Poggioreale, Naples’s main prison, to await trial. More arrests followed, the right-wing leaders of the provincial government suspecting a conspiracy led and organized by the Communists. The same line was adopted by most of the nation’s press, which praised the ‘heroic’ actions of the police in avoiding a bloodbath. The Communist Party was later found innocent of any involvement; but some thirty peasants were found guilty and charged for damages. The issue of potato prices and marketing was raised in Parliament, but the only concrete measure taken was the setting aside of one hundred million lire for the purchase of potatoes, to be donated to the religious institutions. The national centre-led government was not prepared to take radical structural measures to ensure a fair price; and, for their part, Marigliano’s smallholders,

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suspicious of institutions and authority at the best of times, were more reluctant than ever to consider the possibility of forming peasant cooperatives. As it was, most of 1959’s potato crop rotted in the fields. Despite poor infrastructure, the lack of government involvment and the continuing role of intermediaries in the buying and selling, food production doubled in the two decades following the end of WWII. Italy’s ‘new and broader horizons’ were finally reached in the early 1960s, when potato production peaked, averaging 3.7 million tonnes, on 377,876 hectares. The anthropologist Vito Teti recalls that during his childhood in the small hill town of San Nicola da Crissa, in Calabria, during the 1950s and early 1960s, he and his playmates were the patatari, ‘the children who ate almost exclusively potatoes, fried if possible’. These were children who, ‘when called to come home by the womenfolk (their fathers being almost all in Canada or Germany, or Milan or Rome) dropped everything and, sweaty and dirty, ran home to eat fried potatoes, cut in large, thick slices, that swam in oil until they became golden and crisp’. Teti’s bittersweet childhood reminiscences continue: We shared our food. Hunger had not disappeared and people emigrated to escape it. I ate so many potatoes, sometimes alone as a single course, and I still remember how they tasted. Potatoes fried in oil or less often in pork fat; potatoes roasted in the fireplace, in the brazier or in the flames of the olive residues at the olive mills, where my mother would take me in winter to help press olives; potatoes cooked in tomato sauce and with boiled beef; potatoes prepared in all kinds of ways, in all seasons, at all times of the day, initiated me into a cuisine at once ancient and modern, Mediterranean and American.90

Teti makes clear that the potato, as much as the chilli pepper (which is the real subject of his book), is the key to understanding the diet and culture of this impoverished and emigration-torn region. During the same period, Italian potatoes and their ways of preparing them attracted the attention of foreign food writers. For Elizabeth David, ‘the Italians, who do not idolize the potato as we [British] do, cook it far better’. She approved of the ‘lovely creamy purées of potatoes and excellent croquettes flavoured with Parmesan cheese, and their roast and fried potatoes are always delicious’. This was partly due to the ‘good quality’ of the potatoes themselves and partly due to the fact that they were always cooked in ‘oil or butter, never a vegetable substitute’, so that they ‘emerge from the oven golden and tasting of herbs’.91 A few years later the US food writer Waverly Root wrote enthusiastically of Ravenna’s ‘mashed potatoes mixed with butter and aromatic herbs from

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the pine woods beyond the beaches, lapped in béchamel sauce, thickly powdered with grated cheese, and finished in the oven’; the linseed oil used in the seasoning of Lombardy potato salad; the ‘small, tortuously shaped and floury, but tasty’ potatoes of the Valle d’Aosta; Genoese tripe with sliced potatoes; Belluno’s ‘rustic potatoes and cabbage, cooked together in oil, onions, and tomato juice’; Abruzzo’s ‘ghiotta, strips of peppers and slices of potatoes, tomatoes, and zucchini baked together in the oven and eaten lukewarm or cold’; Bari’s tiella di cozze, baked black mussels, distantly related to Spanish paella but with potatoes instead of rice; and Nuoro’s culurjones, ravioli filled with mashed potatoes, butter, eggs and pecorino cheese.92 Not bad going for a country whose inhabitants, ‘even today [1971]’, ‘have not really taken the potato to their bosoms’.93

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Epilogue: The Post-Modern Italian

During the winters of 1998–99 Massimo Angelini went around the mountains behind Genoa with three potatoes in his pockets. The reason: to help resurrect three traditional local potato varieties that had all but vanished, victims to the success of newer international hybrids. Angelini knew it would not be easy. First, he had to find the few elderly men who were still growing them in their kitchen gardens, facing diffidence if not ridicule. Angelini would approach the mountain farmhouses and introduce himself with the words ‘I’m a researcher’, knowing full well that ‘it’s never very clear what a researcher does exactly . . . nor is it easy to explain why you’re interested in old potatoes’. To break down the men’s reserve and suspicion Angelini would ask them to show him how ‘they “eye” their potatoes’, how they cut the tubers prior to planting, and then he would show them how he did it. Once the discussion started, ‘like a magician’ he would pull his three potatoes out of his pockets, and ask them if they recognized any of them and, if so, what they called them.1 Angelini’s interests in traditional potato varieties had started some fifteen years earlier. The mid-1980s were a time of concern for the decline of Italy’s mountain areas and the disappearance of a unique way of life: language, agriculture and, yes, seed potatoes. It was at this time that people first began to worry about ‘genetic erosion, the impoverishment of the germoplasm, the seed-potato market monopolized by sterile hybrids’. Angelini began a quest to see what remained of the ‘Quarantina’, which had existed ‘from time immemorial’ according to local farmers and which, until the 1950s, was the most common potato variety in the Genoese hinterland. Then, beginning in the 1960s newer, heavier-cropping varieties from the Netherlands and the United States took its place. By the time Angelini returned to the scene in 1998, only a few local people were cultivating old varieties like the ‘Quarantina’. It was then that he launched a campaign to ‘recover, restore and give value’ to the old varieties, with the intention of reintroducing them into the area’s economy and diet. The publication from which we are quoting was a part of that campaign. Angelini was right to be worried. A cheerful, illustrated book of potato recipes, published in 1989, demonstrates the prevalence of international varieties. A short section illustrates the main potato varieties available to Italian shoppers. The list seems long enough: yellow-fleshed varieties like

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the ‘Bea’, ‘Bintje’, ‘Desirée’, ‘Jaerla’, ‘Monna Lisa’, ‘Primura’, ‘Sieglinde’, ‘Sirtema’, ‘Spunta’ and ‘Tonda di Berlino’, and the white-fleshed ‘Kennebec’, (used for chips and crisps, the book points out).2 And yet none of the varieties was local or even Italian. Several of them had been around in Italy for some time, it’s true: like the ‘Bintje’, developed in the Netherlands in 1910, and the ‘Tonda di Berlino’ and ‘Sieglinde’, both developed in Germany during the interwar period. All the others were new, Dutch varieties, with the exception of the US ‘Kennebec’.3 At the same time as Angelini was going about with withered old potatoes in his pockets, talking to equally withered old farmers, a team of scientists in lab-coats was applying the latest medical knowledge to improve the health-giving properties of their sleek new potato. In the late 1990s, under the direction of Piergiorgio Pifferi, the University of Bologna’s Department of Industrial Chemistry and Materials was on its way to developing a vitamin-enriched potato, which would eventually be marketed as the ‘Selenella’. Its development came hot on the heels of findings that the trace mineral selenium was not only essential to good health but that it had antidioxant properties. It could prevent cellular damage from free radicals, which could contribute to the development of chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease.4 In other words, selenium is good for you. Never mind that only small amounts of selenium are necessary, and never mind that most soils contain adequate amounts of the mineral for it to be found in a range of plant foods (maize, wheat, soy), meats and nuts. The fact that some soils in the world are deficient in selenium (in Finland and China for example), combined with selenium’s positive health associations, made adding it to food seem like a brilliant marketing tool. What better than the humble potato, in need of a good image boost? In research funded by the Consorzio della Patata Tipica Bolognese, an association of area producers, cooperatives and merchants, Pifferi and his team investigated how best to introduce selenium into potatoes, using the Dutch variety ‘Primura’ – grown long enough in the area to be considered a Bolognese variety. Spraying the leaves of the growing plants with a solution containing the mineral seemed the most effective method.5 Only a year after publishing these findings, the ‘Selenella’ potato was already being sold. The re-named ‘Consorzio delle Buone Idee’ (Good Ideas Consortium) was launched in 2001 to undertake this. The target was large supermarket chains, and younger more health-conscious consumers. Successful media campaigns followed. By 2008, ‘Selenella: a boost from nature’ (according to the packaging), had achieved an annual production of 30,000 tonnes, producing a year-round supply, thanks to farms in both EmiliaRomagna and Sicily.6 And to think that only a few years before the research had been undertaken, the academic Marco Riva had written that the Japanese- or US-style ‘pharmacy-foods’, did not have much of a future in Italy.7

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A third case history might be that of ‘McCain Italia’. McCain is the world’s largest producer of frozen chips (french fries), with processing plants in countries throughout the world. It might seem that a company begun and based in a place called Florenceville (in the Canadian maritime province of New Brunswick) was destined to set up shop in Italy. In fact the ‘Florence’ in Florenceville is actually in honour of the indefatigable Crimean-war nurse Florence Nightingale; and indeed McCain branched out to Italy only some thirty years ago. Its Italian success is on a much smaller scale than elsewhere in Europe, given the relatively low level of demand for frozen potatoes in Italy; yet McCain now supplies around half of these. Farmers who sign contracts to produce potatoes for McCain are part of an uninterrupted supply chain linking farmer to consumer. They use designated seed potatoes, like McCain’s own ‘Innovator’, as well as the trusty ‘Bintje’, and standard fertilizers, irrigation equipment and farming methods. The goal is to produce the same standardized high-yielding potatoes as elsewhere in the world, for local processing plants. The resulting frozen chips will be sold under the McCain label and supplied to fast food outlets like McDonald’s. The downsides of this method of intensive, industrialized farming are the mechanization of production, the increasing dependence on irrigation, chemical fertilizers and disease control. It leads to an increased exercize of control over agricultural production by multinationals like McCain, on the one hand, as well as the loss of biodiversity, on the other, as traditional polyculture gives way to monoculture, and the range of different varieties cultivated is narrowed down to a handful. The number of producers contracted to McCain in Italy is still relatively small, although rising: 343 in 2006 (compared to 1,271 in the United Kingdom).8 We thus have three very different case studies illustrating the curious state of the potato in Italy today. And if they paint a confusing and contradictory picture, there is still more. Because to this we must add the fact that most potatoes cultivated in Europe are not even destined to be eaten – at least not by people. A mere one of every four potatoes produced end up on our tables. Two out of every four potatoes produced are destined for animal feed, an important role which the potato has never lost. A final potato out of every four is destined for industrial uses, which include the production of alchohol and starch (the latter finding its way into paper, cosmetics, and textiles). Such is the great potential of industrial uses that in March of 2010 the European Union permitted the marketing and cultivation of a genetically modified potato, the ‘Amflora’, developed by the chemical giant BASF, not after a protracted battle in the courts.9 In Italy, politicians of every stripe were opposed

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to the decision, in a controversy which had as much to do with sentiment as with science. In the years leading up to the decision, open-field trials of the ‘Amflora’ had never been allowed to go ahead in Italy. Despite guarantees from the industry that the ‘Amflora’ is perfectly safe, that it will never end up on our tables, that it will be cultivated apart from other potatoes, and that, in any case, the genetic modification is in line with others already present in animal feed, the attitude of the Italian public towards genetic modification is one of suspicion and hostility. In any case, the decision is unlikely to affect Italy very much, since most potato production for industry in based in northern Europe. However it does illustrate the extent to which the post-modern potato is a fragmented thing, travelling in different directions, affecting producers and consumers alike. It is a commodity. This is no bad thing in and of itself, for it means a livelihood to thousands of Italians; but only if they can find a buyer for their potatoes. Given that Italian per capita potato consumption has remained more or less stagnant for the past three decades, this means finding or developing new markets or new ways of marketing the potatoes they produce. The difficulty is exacerbated by the recent entry into the EU of countries like Poland, which produce potatoes on a far larger scale and far more cheaply than Italy. Regions that in the nineteenth century were Italy’s top producers, such as Lombardy, are now amongst its lowest. With the exception of Emilia-Romagna, the top five potato-producing regions are all in the south – Campania, Sicily, Abruzzo and Calabria.10 The first marketing strategy is to form local co-operatives or consortia of producers. That done, they can then go the route of ‘tradition’, growing local varieties; or they can opt for novelty, developing a different kind of potato, such as the mineral-enriched; or they can sell to the fast food and frozen food giants. The different strategic options are not without their small ironies. Take the ‘Patata rossa di Cetica’, the Cetica red potato. It has been redeveloped recently and, since 2005 has been the subject of a disciplinare which strictly regulates where (a handful of towns above 500 metres in Casentino mountains in the province of Arezzo) and how (three-year crop rotation, after cereals and legumes) it can be grown. Growers must be members of the consortium, the ‘Consorzio Patata Rossa di Cetica’, which has carefully nurtured this variety’s reintroduction and ensures quality and ‘authenticity’ of this ‘traditional’ product, now marketed for its gourmet qualities. Given all of this, it is ironic that the immediate parent of what is a niche potato in Italy is (probably) the ‘King Edward’, now a mainstream supermarket potato in the United Kingdom, arguably that country’s best known variety, never out of favour since it was first developed in 1902.11

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MODERNIZING THE TRADITIONAL WAY How did the potato get here? Following the privations of the immediate postwar years, food production in Italy more than doubled between 1950 and 1970. In a period of fifteen years potato yields almost doubled: from 6.7 tonnes per hectare in 1947 to 10.0 in the period 1960–62. They continued to increase dramatically over the following decades, to the point that today the average Italian yield is close to 30 tonnes per hectare.12 This success – not without grave social and economic difficulties, as we noted in the previous chapter – was partly due to the massive use of new international varieties, which were more productive and more disease resistant. Increased mechanization also played a part. The creation of the European Economic Community in 1957 meant ready markets for Italian potatoes, especially its early season potatoes, as well as ready access to the newest technology. Italian potato production had never been higher – and never would be again – reaching close to 4 million tonnes (3.77) in the early 1960s (Figure 6.2, previous chapter).13 There was a price to pay, of course. The introducation of new varieties came at the expense of traditional local ones, which were increasingly relegated to kitchen gardens, a development not appreciated until later. Modernization took a different route in Italy (and more broadly in Europe) than it did in the Andes. In the Andean highlands, agricultural modernization has not eliminated diversity. Here, modern potato varieties were first released in the 1950s. Bred to be higher yielding, more responsive to fertilizer, and more resistant to drought and disease, as well as being encouraged by government policies, they spread rapidly throughout the highlands. Despite this, they have not displaced native commercial varieties or mixed native varieties (which are the main source of diversity of Andean potatoes). Single families will grow varieties from each of these three groups, because they have different markets, different cultivation niches, and different forms of consumption. In the Andean ecosystem, agricultural diversity is regarded as quite natural, taken as a given, and this is reflected in potato cultivation. Andean farmers have perceived no advantage in eliminating this diversity. Added to which, their native varieties can command premium prices, perceived as an ‘artisan crop’. And just as indigenous and modern potato varieties exist side-by-side, so traditional indigenous agricultural technologies and imported modern ones have been ‘combined into a single mosaic’.14 This did not happen in Italy. In additional to the loss of traditional, loweryielding varieties, the rapid modernization of agriculture, via mechanization, made mountain and hill farming in Italy less profitable than farming in lowlying areas. The machinery, like tractors and combine harvesters, developed for relatively flat terrain, could not be used as effectively in areas with an

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incline. The effect was to concentrate agriculture into low-lying areas, contributing the decline of upland agriculture. Intensification encouraged monoculture at the expense of the polyculture traditionally practised. And, finally, there is the potato’s environmental impact.15 The vast quantities of pesticides and fertilizers required to cultivate potatoes on a large scale – the potato is one of our most sprayed crops – leach through the soil, polluting the water table. On top of this there is the waste generated by industrial-scale potato processing: peeling, blanching, and so on. While some of the peelings, for example, may find their way into livestock feed, the water used in all phases of processing becomes heavily contaminated and the resulting sludge has to be treated. This same period, the 1950s to the 1970s, saw the beginnings of the largest labour migration in Italy’s history. Over 2.5 million Italians left the countryside for the cities of central and northern Italy, Western Europe and overseas. The mass migration from the poor South was combined with the progressive depopulation of mountains towns and villages throughout the country. Mountain areas had always been affected by migration; indeed seasonal and temporary out-migration represented an important contribution to fragile local economies, as we saw in Chapter 5. But when the migratory flow became one-way – that is, permanent – and when birth rates no loner made up for the difference, the impact was disastrous. Moreover, the perennially harsh living conditions, made worse by the war, collided with the rapidly-increasing expectations of the 1950s. Mountain areas became depopulated. Let us take as an example the number of farms (poderi) abandoned in the Tuscan–Emilian Apennines. During the 1930s the number had been low (226) and climbed only slightly during the 1940s, to 792. However, by the period 1951–55 the number of poderi abandoned stood at 3,379, rising to an estimated 12,000 by 1967.16 This represented one-third of all poderi farmed by tenant farmers (mezzadri). The exodus from Italy’s other mountain areas was even greater, from the Alps to the southern Apennines. This was a Europewide phenomenon: a similar exodus was taking place from mountain areas of France and Germany. People left Italian mountain areas because of restrictive land tenancies and the relative lack of opportunity – as well as the poverty and isolation of these areas, which had the effect of further increasing their poverty and isolation. The poverty was certainly real, in comparsion to hill and lowland areas, if we consider indicators like the provision of water, electricity, paved roads and telephone lines – that is, the relative lack thereof.17 The very survival of whole communities, from north to south, was threatened, as thousands of farms were abandoned by their tenants and towns depopulated. Agricultural

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infrastructure such as terracing and drainage canals, already damaged by World War II, fell into further disrepair; once carefully tended and managed vegetable plots, fields, vineyards and meadows reverted to wilderness. The national government acknowledged the problem with a law passed in 1971, which recognized the unique needs of ‘mountain communities’, with special powers devolved to the regional governments; but it was powerless to stem the flow of people out. Collective and individual identity, ‘the sense of place’, was shattered, perhaps irrevocably.18 Rural Italy, more generally, was becoming progressively less important. Agricultural employment dropped from 8 to 2 million people and the place of agricultural production as a proportion of the gross domestic product fell from 23 per cent to 5 per cent by 1982.19 It now hovers around 2 per cent. Agriculture was never a priority for post-war Italian governments, aside from minor land reforms, and in 1977 responsibility for agriculture passed to the new regional governments. Nevertheless, for a brief time in the 1970s Italy had the luxury of a falling land area devoted to potato cultivation – to low levels not seen since one hundred years earlier – alongside remaining high production figures, thanks to new higher cropping varieties. At the same time, however, some of the European Economic Community countries supplying these new varieties were also providing cheaper, northern European potatoes. This exacerbated the decline both in land area devoted to potatoes and in overall production in Italy, which have fallen sharply since the 1970s. Imports had to make up the shortfall between production and demand, as they still do today. Throughout these shifts Italian potato consumption remained high, at least high for Italy. Consumption reached a peak in the late 1960s at 44.2 kg per capita, declining to 38.9 kg during the early 1970s, and then to 38 kg, at which level it has remained ever since. Relative to income, potatoes fell in price from the post-war period onwards. The potato somehow resisted its association with poverty to find a place in the diet of Italians, even as they were prosperous as never before. Italians retained an interested in ‘traditional’ cookery, but reinterpreted in terms of the plenty of the present. As part of this prosperity Italians were developing a taste for snack foods (crisps/chips) and frozen foods (chips/french fries). Italy was introduced to US-style potato crisps in the 1950s, sold in cafés, bars and family-run food shops. It has to be said however that compared to their northern European counterparts, potato crisps have never really taken off, except among young Italians. Figures from 1998 reveal that the most common daytime snack was still fruit.20 Or, perhaps Italian dietary habits were simply evolving at a slower pace. Savoury snacks have made inroads, but their use has been adapted to fit local habits; Italians are ‘traditional’ in their snacking. Thus potato crisps tend

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to be consumed during certain occasions, like birthday parties, or taken alongside aperitifs at a bar. Even the company name most associated with crisps in Italy, ‘San Carlo’, is that particularly Italian contradiction: a multinational that is also a family business. Started by the Milanese Vitaloni family at their rosticceria in 1936 and still run by a member of the family (Alberto Vitaloni), ‘San Carlo’ has the lion’s share of the Italian crisps market (mostly in northern Italy), which even the recent entry of Pringles, amidst a barrage of publicity, could not dent. ‘San Carlo’ sources the potatoes themselves from a range of places, not all of them Italian, according to the time of year: during the summer months, from Campania; during the late summer and autumn months, from Veneto, Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont; during winter and spring, from France, Germany and Belgium.21 During the 1960s frozen potatoes, mainly in the form of chips/french fries, also made their appearance. Their take-up was slow, at a time when Italians bought hardly any frozen and packaged foods, compared to its European neighbours. In 1964 Italians purchased only 0.11 kg of frozen foods per capita, although this rose to just under 0.5 kg in 1969; still relatively low, but a fourfold increase over five years.22 It has continued to rise since, but still remains low relative to the rest of Europe: 12.4 kg per capita in 2001. In that year Italians ate 94,200 tonnes of frozen potato products, almost half of this in the form of chips served in restaurants (48,100 tonnes). By way of comparison, Britain – with the largest frozen food market in the European Union but a population similar to Italy’s – consumed over ten times as many frozen potatoes (952,700 tonnes).23 Put another way, of the 38 kg of potatoes Italians eat per capita, only 1.6 kg are eaten frozen. In the United States, by contrast, inventor of convenience and snack foods, of the 54 kg of potatoes consumed per capita, 38 kg are eaten frozen and only 16 kg are eaten fresh. The post-modern Italian potato exhibits a range of contradictory identities: at once traditional and futuristic, mountain-rural and urbane, local and global, healthy comfort food and fast food snack. At the ‘traditional’ end, the paradoxes of the post-modern potato can be seen in the rise, fall, and rise again of potato bread. It was for a century or more a staple of mountain areas, as we have seen in the previous chapters. Bread made with a mixture of wheat flour and boiled, mashed potatoes had an intense flavour and remained soft for longer. This was important when bread was baked in batches once every week or two. Inevitably associated with poverty and backwardness in the fast modernizing Italy of the ‘boom’ years, potato bread was outlawed in 1967. A food standards law of that year prohibited the use of potatoes in the making of bread for sale; it was eventually rescinded, but not before the damage was done.24 But potato bread is with us once again, this time with government support and sponsorship. The national list of ‘traditional foods and agricultural

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products’, which relates to composition of means of production, includes potato bread (labelled ‘pane di patate’ or ‘pane con le patate’) from the regions of Abruzzo, Calabria, Lazio, Liguria and Tuscany.25 It also figures in some of the ‘Sagre di patate’ (potato festivals) held in towns throughout Italy each year. Gavoi’s ‘Sagra Ospitalità’ (Hospitality fair), held every autumn for the last decade or so, is typical. As described by the Sardinian anthropologist Alessandra Guigoni: ‘the tables and chairs of wood or plastic set for hundreds of people, the rounding up of members of local associations to serve tables, women first of all, overseeing the hidden direction of the performance, the children’s cheerful chaos, the composure of the elderly sitting apart to enjoy the scene’.26 Here, the preparation of potato bread is done the traditional way: shaped into loaves that are put onto cabbage leaves and baked in wood-burning ovens. For the elderly of the small mountain town the event reminds them of what was formerly a daily foodstuff, at least during certain times of the year; for the young it serves as a tangible reminder of a vanishing way of life. In many cases the potato sagre were (and are) a mixture of community event and advertising: a means of publicizing and stimulating interest in a local variety of potato that producers either wished to protect or revive. This kind of culinary tourism makes sense in a country where tourism contributes five times more to the GDP than agriculture (10% compared to agriculture’s 2%). By the 1990s – a time of stagnant consumer demand, combined with the impact of new hybrid varieties and the threat of genetically modified potatoes – campaigns like Angelini’s were being waged throughout Italy, aimed at saving local varieties in the face of extinction. ‘Potato festivals’ were started to help raise awareness and appreciation in local varieties. No potato-producing area can now afford to be without one. Marigliano (Campania), famous as the site of the 1959 ‘potato revolt’, now has its own sagra dedicated to new potatoes, held in May every year, to coincide with the time they are ready for lifting. These festivals were (and continue to be) most important for depopulated mountain areas, where they might bring in thousands of much-needed visitors. For some places, this culminated in the awarding of ‘protected designation of origin’, ‘protected geographical indication’, or ‘traditional speciality guaranteed’ – the three levels of EU recognition under the protected food name scheme, promoted by national governments. Such status is at once a trademark and quality standard for food products, of the kind first developed for the wine industry. The diversity of traditional potatoes so labelled may pale in comparison with those of the Andes, but they are just as important to the local economies of which they are a part. Typical was the experience of potato producers in Calabria’s mountainous Sila area. From 1978 the small town of Camigliatello Silano had been

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holding an annual sagra in early October to celebrate the local potato. With the entry of countries like Poland into the EU, Italy’s mountain producers faced stiff competition. Unlike the producers of potatoes in Italy’s plains, especially in the south, who are able to sell their early potatoes to northern Europeans in the late winter and early spring, the potatoes cultivated in Italy’s mountain areas mature at the same time as the potatoes produced in northern Europe (late summer and autumn) – only theirs are one-fifth the price. Facing economic disaster, Sila’s producers decided that the only way to survive was to have their potato specially recognized, via ‘protected geographical indication’ status, enabling them to market the potato effectively.27 As a result of their campaign, PGI recognition came in 2008 for the ‘Patata della Sila’. This is a fairly loose definition, it has to be said, for which the product must be closely linked to the geographical area: at least one of the stages of production, processing or preparation takes place in the area. The ‘Patata della Sila’ refers to the area of production, rather than a specific variety. Today, only the ‘Patata di Bologna’ has PDO status and only the ‘Patata della Sila’ PGI status. However 41 types, varieties or areas of production, including these two, have so far achieved the status of ‘traditional specialities’ in Italy: 9 in the Veneto, 8 in Liguria, 5 each in Piedmont and Tuscany, 3 in Emilia-Romagna, 2 each in Abruzzo, Friuli, Lazio, Puglia, Sicily, and 1 each in Lombardy, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Trentino–Alto Adige and Umbria. The reintroduction of these varieties, together with the culinary uses associated with them, is one of the success stories of the first decade of the new millennium. Sponsorship by Slow Food as a ‘presidium’ has also come to one traditional product: the potato bread of Garfagnana (province of Lucca).

HOW CHANGE HAPPENS The very slow adoption of the potato by Italians, as well as its decline in recent decades – from curiosity to staple, and back again – contrasts with the Chinese experience. In the space of thirty years China has gone from ‘insignificant grower to the world’s leading producer’,28 and growth in production has been matched by an increase in consumption. The Chinese have adopted the potato quickly, more enthusiastically and on a far larger scale than has ever happened before. Certainly, state planning his its role to play, as does the need to feed an ever-expanding population. It may also be that the Chinese are more receptive to dietary novelties than the Italians. How does dietary and agricultural change happen? What can the Italian reaction to the potato, as examined in this book, tell us? As Sidney Mintz

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has suggested, we need, first of all, to understand the circumstances in which people accept new foods and change established food habits. This accomodation of new foods is not always for reasons of their own choosing. Following this, we need to study the means people use to create their own new ‘consumption situations’ and new meanings for these foods.29 To explore these issues, Mintz suggests adopting what he calls an insider–outsider perspective. ‘Outsider’ dimensions in the adoption of new foodstuffs include politicaleconomical, environmental, commercial and biological forces which are beyond the control of any individual, household or community. These are often seen as by scholars in terms of demographic imperatives or political– economic exploitation. ‘Insider’ dimensions refer to the decisions people take in terms of what and how they eat. They concern issues such as habit and taste, relative prestige or status, and economic value. Major changes in consumption habits, Mintz suggests, are usually the result of major disruptions in ordinary routines: war, migration, agricultural or industrial change. Change only happens under certain ecological and political conditions or social rupture, which create an opening for a new food or nutritional pattern and a reason for abandoning the old. How helpful is this model in understanding the adoption of the potato in Italy? After all, despite centuries of foreign domination, Italy does not offer the complete transformation visible in other social and political realites, such as colonial Ireland (coinciding with the adoption of the potato) or the Andes region of South America (coinciding with the adoption of European crops like wheat). Not surprisingly, a mixture of outsider and insider forces were involved in Italy. The gradual acceptance – and three hundred years is very gradual – of the potato in Italy took place as a result of a combination of outsider dimensions: from the changing biology of the potato itself to changing agricultural practices, from economic necessity brought about by food crises (themselves due to climatic pressures) to government promotion and coercion. Historical changes like the development of new trade routes, the progress (or not) of agricultural reform, industrial development, demographic expansion and the growth of cities, all had their part to play. They all ‘helped to provoke or accelerate the pace of dietary change among resistant European populations’, in the words of Ellen Messer.30 But there were insider dimensions too, like food identity: from animal-fodder and famine associations to refined vegetable of the elites, from food of mountain-dwelling peasants and the urban poor to the pride of local culinary traditions. In Europe, the potato’s spread was part of the ‘delocalization’ of food from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards.31 Food varieties, production methods and consumption patterns have been disseminated throughout the world, in an increasingly dense network of exchange and inter-dependency.

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New varieties of plants and animals were disseminated, new food producing and processing methods and distribution channels were developed, and the movement of people from country to town or across the world facilitated this dramatic transformation. Local conditions and changes also had their part to play. Essential developments in the Italian adoption of the potato in both agriculture and diet were and understanding of the potato’s climatic requirements, the provision of varieties suited to the climate, and its insertion into local crop rotation traditions. This was due to the work of generations of agronomists; but just as important were the decisions of the peasants and landowners themselves. Potatoes were suited to areas of high altitude agriculture, to niches where few crops will grow. Lower down, they were accepted as a protective food against famine. Peasants would eat this crop out of necessity, in times of dearth, while still considering it (and using it as) ‘animal food’. The introduction of potatoes into ‘normal’ peasant diets – that is, outside of crisis years and conditions – happened initially in minor ways in Italy. Indeed each culture in Europe fit the potato to its own necessities and traditions. For instance, it was used in bread-making, as a flour extender, much as chestnuts were. But it was not welcomed as a substitute to bread; bread consumption remained the ideal in Italy. By contrast, where bread had less of a role, as in England or Ireland, the potato made inroads sooner and on a much larger scale. Or it found its ways in vegetable soups, or else previously-existing dishes were reconstructed using the potato. It also became a staple of the urban poor, who increased in numbers throughout the nineteenth century, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Whether rural migrants brought the custom with them, the urban potato was cheap and could be purchased ready-cooked. But the real leap in the potato’s fortunes occurred only when the elites began to consider the potato worthy of their attention. This meant the acceptance of suitable ways of preparing it, refined or rich, that distanced it from its animal and peasant associations. While the potato was assimilated to fit existing habits it added substantially to the Italian diet in the process. Throughout all of this, Europeans were exploring and adapting different varieties of the potato according to preferred uses and practices. Most successful were the more blight-tolerant varieties developed in the early years of the twentieth century, like the Dutch ‘Bintje’ and the English ‘King Edward’. They flourished too because they were able to provide the large, uniform and heavy cropping varieties the market demanded, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. This continues today, especially in response to the needs of the fast food, convenience food and snack food industries. Italian consumption of the potato has shifted again: away from the staple it became for a hundred years in many parts of the country, and towards an accompaniment to other foods or

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as a snack, or as a niche product, the perfect ingredient in piatti tipici. The fact that a variety like the ‘King Edward’ is most likely the ancestor of the ‘Cetica’ variety also points us to another trend: that of the resurgence of traditional varieties, now marketed for their gourmet qualities. These are marketed on the basis of their rustic and traditional associations, even while they are sold at premium prices. They are the subject of ‘invented’ traditions, even while the role of agriculture in the Italian economy, if not in the popular imagination, continues to decline.

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Notes

Notes to Preface and Acknowledgements 1 Giovanni Salvi, ‘Continuità e cambiamento in una comunità dell’Appennino: Bertassi nei secoli XIX e XX’, Quaderni storici, 16 (1981), pp. 130–52. 2 Figures are for 2007 and come from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation ‘International Year of the Potato’. Available online at: www.potato2008.org/en/world/index. html. The figures include potatoes for industrial use, including spirits. Indeed a substantial amount of potato consumption in countries like Belarus and Poland is drunk rather then eaten, in the form of vodka. 3 Paolo Conti, La leggenda del buon cibo italiano e altri miti alimentari contemporanei (Rome: Fazi, 2008), p. 70. 4 ISTAT (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica) data relative to 2009. Available online at: http:// agri.istat.it/. 5 Maria Antonietta Visceglia, ‘I consumi in Italia in età moderna’, in Ruggiero Romano (ed.), Storia dell’economia italiana, vol. 3, L’età contemporanea: un paese nuovo (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), p. 228. 6 Alessandra Guigoni, Alla scoperta dell’America in Sardegna. Vegetali americani nell’alimentazione sarda (Cagliari: AM&D Edizioni, 2009), pp. 63–4.

Notes to Chapter 1: The ‘Perverse Strangeness of the Seasons’: 1816–17 1 Donatella Lippi, ‘Al tempo dei Lorena. Dalla fine delle carestie al trionfo della sobrietà’, in Zeffiro Ciuffolletti and Giuliano Pinto (eds), Desinari nostrali. Storia dell’alimentazione a Firenze e in Toscana (Florence: Polistampa, 2005), p. 140; Renzo Paci, ‘La patata “dono prezioso della Provvidenza”, dal Perù alle Marche’, in Paci, Cittadini e campagnoli nelle Marche di età moderna (Pisa-Rome: IEPI, 2002), p. 345. 2 As reported in the National Intelligencer (17 May 1816), p. 2, cit. in John Post, The last great subsistence crisis in the Western world (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 25. 3 Pietro Zorzi, Della coltivazione dei pomi di terra eseguita alla Giudecca l’anno 1816 e di alcune esperienze sopra queste radici (Venice: Andrea Santini, 1817), cit. in Giovanni Panjek, ‘In margine alla storia dell’alimentazione: un dibattito settecentesco sull’introduzione della patata nel Veneto’, AA. VV., Raccolta di scritti per il cinquantesimo anniversario, 1924–1974 (Udine: Del Bianco, 1976), p. 579. 4 Inclement weather in the spring and summer of 1813, including hailstorms and early frosts, had resulted in harvest failure in Austrian-ruled Lombardy–Venetia. The following year was no better, the maize and wheat crops failing completely. There was a lull in 1815. Although the summer wheat crop was poor, crops harvested later – like maize, millet and rice – did rather better. Hopes for a good harvest in 1816 were soon dashed. John Rath,

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‘The Hapsburgs and the great depression in Lombardy–Venetia, 1814–18’, The Journal of Modern History, xiii (1941), pp. 308–9. So wrote Antonio Ciamarro, estate factor of Salcito (Molise), to the landowner Prince Ambrogio Caracciolo, in August 1816, cit. in Angelo Massafra, Campagne e territorio nel Mezzogiorno fra Settecento e Ottocento (Bari: Dedalo, 1984), p. 82, n. 56. Niles’ Weekly Register (1 February 1817), p. 379, cit in Post, Subsistence crisis, p. 24. According to a letter to the Central Organisation Commission in Vienna (7 February 1815), cit in Rath, ‘Great depression’, p. 311. Pasquale Coppin, Pensieri che riguardano la situazione antica e presente della provincia padovana (Padua, 1817), pp. 10–12, cit in Giulio Monteleone, ‘La carestia del 1816–1817 nelle province venete’, Archivio Veneto, lxxxvi–lxxxvii (1969), p. 28. Fiscal pressure actually increased, the argument being that the revenue was needed by Vienna to pay for assistance to towns and provinces. Lombardy–Venetia was, after all, the most lucrative part of the Austrian empire. Monteleone, ‘Carestia’, p. 48. As communicated to the authorities in Trieste in 1816, Biblioteca Civica, Trieste, Archivio Storico del Comune di Trieste, Atti Presidiali, 1814–30, F1-L6, cit. in Anna Gonnella, ‘L’assistenza pubblica a Trieste: l’alimentazione nell’Istituto dei poveri (1818–1918)’, in Paola Carucci (ed.), Gli archivi per la storia dell’alimentazione (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1995), vol. 3, p. 1595. Archivio di Stato, Venice, Presidio del Governo (29 November 1816), fasc. XIV, 2/1, cit. in Monteleone, ‘Carestia’, p. 66. Archivio di Stato, Venice, Presidio del Governo (1815–16), fasc. XIV, 2/11, cit. in Monteleone, ‘Carestia’, p. 41. According from a memorandum from the Hapsburg emperor to his chancellor, Metternich, written in August 1816, cit. in Post, Subsistence crisis, p. 127. Unnamed source, cit. in Paolo Sorcinelli, ‘Condizioni igieniche e sanitarie: dalla peste alla pellagra’, in Sergio Anselmi (ed.), Economia e società. Le Marche tra XV e XX secolo (Bologna: il Mulino, 1978) p. 187. Monteleone, ‘Carestia’, p. 43. Post, Subsistence crisis, p. 71. The Times (10 June 1816), p. 2 (online archive). Francesco Zannetti, La carestia nella provincia di Arezzo (1815–1818), Abele Morena (e.d.), (Arezzo: Tip. Cooperativa operaio, 1896), p. 12. Ercole Sori, ‘Malattia e demografia’, in Franco Della Peruta (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 7. Malattia e medicina (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), pp. 551, 558. Massafra, Campagne e territorio, p. 56. Lino Chini, Storia antica e moderna del Mugello (1876) (Rome: Multigrafica, 1969), vol. 4, pp. 85–6, cit. in Adriano Boncompagni, ‘L’ultima grande crisi di sussistenza nel comprensorio mugellano: appunti d’archivio sull’epidemia di tifo petecchiale del 1816–1817’, Rassegna storica toscana, 41(1) (1995), pp. 95–6. Monteleone, ‘Carestia’, p. 75. Henry Holland, ‘On the pellagra, a disease prevailing in Lombardy’, Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, 8 (1817), p. 336.

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25 Vitangelo Morea, Storia della peste di Noja (Naples: Angelo Trani, 1817). 26 Plague had already raged though the Ottoman lands, especially Bosnia, having originated in India in 1812. Post, Subsistence crisis, pp. 134, 139. 27 For his biography, see Veronica Campinoti, ‘Francesco Chiarenti, medico e politico montaionese fra Illuminismo e Restaurazione’, introduction to Francesco Chiarenti, Riflessioni e osservazioni sull’agricoltura Toscana e particolarmente sull’istituzione de’ fattori (Florence: Polistampa, 2007), pp. vii–xl. 28 Letter to Gian Pietro Vieusseux, 24 June 1828, in Carteggio Lambruschini-Vieusseux (1826–1834) (Florence: Le Monnier, 1998), vol. 1, p. 148, cit. in Daniele Vergari, ‘Francesco Chiarenti fra agronomia, istruzione e governo del territorio’, in Chiarenti, Riflessioni p.lix. 29 Francesco Chiarenti, Riflessioni e osservazioni sull’agricoltura Toscana e particolarmente sull’istituzione de’ fattori (Pistoia: Manfredini, 1819; photograhic reprint Florence: Polistampa, 2007), pp. 12–13 30 Luigi Ubaldi, ‘Aspetti dell’agricoltura pistoiese nei secoli XVII-XVIII-XIX’, Bullettino storico pistoiese, 3rd series, iii (1968), pp. 83–92. 31 Filippo Re, Dizionario ragionato di libri di agricoltura (Venice: Vitarelli, 1808–9), vol. I, pp. 128–9. 32 Chiarenti, Riflessioni, p. 16. The construction of earthworks is really the subject of the book. 33 Ibid., p. 186. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 187. 36 Ibid., p. 190. 37 Elsa Luttazzi Gregori, ‘Fattori e fattorie nella pubblicistica Toscana fra settecento e ottocento’, in G. Cherubini (ed.), Contadini e proprietari nella Toscana moderna (Florence: Olschki, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 37–8. 38 Marco Lastri, Lezioni di agricoltura [1787] (Florence: Gioacchino Pagani, 1819–21), vol. 1, p. 59. Lastri’s ‘agriculture course’ contains a potato treatise by an anonymous ‘amateur agriculturalist from Pistoia’, which Chiarenti may have known: Quesiti fatti a un dilettante d’agricoltura pistojese, sulla coltivazione ed uso delle patate e risposte ai medesimi. 39 On the concept of ‘escape agriculture’ and the plants often used for cultivation in this strategy, including the potato, see James Scott, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland southeast Asia (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 178–87. 40 In 1827 the town physician of Penig would warn the government of Saxony that the higher alcoholic content of spirits made from potato mash, as opposed to grain, was leading to excessive consumption and drunkenness. An Italian marquis, Cosimo Ridolfi, first proposed the use of potatoes in acquavite there in 1817, but it does not seem to have taken off: the fact that Ridolfi proposed using the berries probably did not help. For Saxony, see Rudolph Weinhold, ‘Potato spirits in the early days’, in Alexander Fenton and Eszter Kisbán (eds), Food in change: eating habits from the Middle Ages to the present day (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), p. 69. Ridolfi’s proposal is in his pamphlet, Memoria sopra un nuovo metodo per ottenere la farina di patate (Florence: Piatti, 1817). 41 Ellen Messer, ‘Three centuries of changing European tastes for the potato’, in Helen Macbeth (ed.), Food preferences and taste: continuity and change (Oxford: Berghahn, 1997), p. 103.

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42 Chiarenti, Riflessioni, p. 186. 43 Ranieri Barbacciani, Per la più estesa coltivazione delle patate (Pistoia: Manfredini, 1818), p. 12. 44 Giovanni Arduino, ‘Dissertazione epistolare sopra le pietre obsidiane’, Giornale d’Italia spettante alla scienza naturale (46) (18 May 1765), p. 31. 45 Joseph Baretti, An account of the manners and customs of Italy (London: T. Davies and L. Davis, 1769), vol. 1, p. 202. 46 Henry Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies . . . in the years 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780 (London: J. Nichols, 1790), vol. 4, p. 216. 47 Johann Gottfried Seume, A stroll to Syracuse [Spaziergang nach Syrakus], trans. Alexander and Elizabeth Henderson (London: Oswald Wolff, 1964), p. 116. Seume can be forgiven for being a bit uncharitable, since he was undertaking a nine-month’s ‘stroll’ to from Leipzig to Syracuse (Sicily) and food was clearly an important concern. 48 Filippo Re, Saggio sulla coltivazione e su gli usi del pomo di terra e specialmente come valga a migliorare i terreni (Milan: Giovanni Silvestri, 1817), p. 9. 49 Giuseppe Di Martino, ‘Sull’uso e coltivazione de’ pomi di terra’, Giornale di scienze, lettere e arti per la Sicilia (Palermo), vi (1824), pp. 260–79, cit. in Carmelo Trasselli, ‘Su la prima introduzione delle patate in Sicilia’, in Rivista di storia dell’agricoltura, ii (1962), p. 54. 50 Evgenij Tarle, La vita economica in Italia nell’età napoleonica, trans. I. Santachiara (Turin: Einaudi, 1950), p. 118. In Milan, potatoes were sold at the city’s market from at least 1810, no doubt partly to meet the demand of the city’s French overlords. 51 Archivio di Stato, Udine, Archivio Comunale Antico di Udine: limitazioni, ‘Elenco delli prezzi mercuriali generali dell’anno 1815’, b. 137, no. 181, cit. in Panjek, ‘Dibattito’, p. 578. 52 Mario Zannoni, A tavola con Maria Luigia: il servizio di bocca della duchessa di Parma dal 1815 al 1847 (Parma: Artegrafica Siera, 1991), pp. 143, 198. 53 Alvise Zorzi, Venezia austriaca, 1798–1866 (Bari: Laterza, 1985), p. 36. 54 Chiarenti, Riflessioni, p. 186. 55 Carlo Amoretti, Della coltivazione delle patate e loro uso, col discorso sul medesimo del sig. Vincenzo Dandolo e col giudizio sulle due opere dell’I. e R. Accademia dei Georgofili (Florence: Ciardetti, 1817). Sarchiani himself read it as a paper before the Georgofili on 30 December 1816. 56 Anon., Memoria letta alla Società Agraria del dipartimento del Panaro nella di lei convocazione del 26 giugno 1806 da un socio ordinario (Modena: Vincenzi, 1816). 57 In order of appearance: Domenico Mazzoni, Il mulino raspa ossia macchina per ottenere prontamente la separazione della fecula dalle patate, e degli usi di essa nel pane (Pistoia: Manfredini, 1817); Antonio Giannelli, Dei più utili risultamenti sui pomi di terra (Pistoia: Manfredini, 1818); and Barbacciani, Coltivazione. 58 My calculations are largely based on the extensive bibliography in Giovanni Biadene, Storia della patata in Italia dagli scritti dei Georgici (1625–1900) (Bologna: Avenue Media, 1996), pp. 185–207. 59 Gianpiero Fumi (ed.), Fonti per la storia dell’agricoltura italiana (1800–1849) (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2003), editor’s introduction, p. xxix. 60 Bartolomei’s letter and the enclosure survives in the Archivio Pre-Unitario, Vicchio, Gonfaloniere di Vicchio, lettere ed affari, b. 43, in Boncompagni, ‘Ultima crisi’, p. 88–9. It may have been sent to all towns in the Grand-Duchy.

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61 Fumi, Fonti, editor’s introduction, p. xxxi–xxxii. Vincenzo Dandolo’s Sulla coltivazione dei pomi di terra was first published in 1806 (Milan: Pirotta e Maspero). 62 Circular from the governor of Friuli dated 21 October 1816, Archivio di Stato, Udine, Archivio Comunale Antico di Udine: Periodo Napoleonico: Agricoltura, b. 7, cit. in Panjek, ‘Dibattito’, p. 581. 63 Zorzi, Della coltivazione. 64 The large and prolific ‘Ox Noble’, in existence from at least 1787, was used for stock-feed, as its name suggests. Redcliffe Salaman, The history and social influence of the potato (Cambridge: University Press, 1985), p. 162. 65 Circular from the governor of Friuli dated 25 November 1816, Archivio di Stato, Udine, Archivio Comunale Antico di Udine: Periodo Napoleonico: Agricoltura, b. 7, cit. in Panjek, ‘Dibattito’, p. 581. 66 Monteleone, ‘Carestia’, p. 59. 67 Circular of 9 October 1816, in Walter Palmieri (ed.), Il Mezzogiorno agli inizi della Restaurazione (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993), pp. 167–8. 68 Walter Palmieri, ‘L’“offerta di stato” nell’agricoltura meridionale del primo ottocento: trasformazioni e vincoli’, Meridiana, IX (1996), pp. 133–66, at pp. 144–5. 69 Monteleone, ‘Carestia’, p. 58, n. 61. 70 Dandolo, Sulla coltivazione, cit. in Biadene, Storia della patata, p. 87. 71 Antonio Romano, Istruzione pratica della Società Economica di Terra d’Otranto sulla coltivazione dei pomi di terra ossia patate (Lecce: Marino, 1817), cit. in Biadene, Storia, p. 104. 72 Anon., Istruzioni per la coltivazione delle patate pubblicate dalla Reale società economica di Aquila per uso della provincia (Aquila: Tip. Rietelliana, 1817); reprinted in Franco Cercone, Storia della coltivazione della patata in Abruzzo (Torre dei Nolfi: Qualevita, 2000), p. 70. 73 Ingvar Svanberg and Marie Nelson, ‘Bone meal porridge, lichen soup or mushroom bread: acceptance or rejection of food propaganda in Northern Sweden in the 1860s’, in Ingvar Sanberg and Marie Nelson (eds), Just a sack of potatoes? Crisis experiences in European societies, past and present (Helsinki: Societas Historicae Finlandiae, 1988), pp. 119–47. 74 Barbacciani, Coltivazione, p. 31. 75 One of them is Nicola Onorati, who gives a detailed description of the pot and its uses. Nicola Onorati, ‘Della coltura e dell’uso economico de’ pomi di terra detti volgarmente patate’, in Collezione di quanto si è scritto di più importante e di più adatto intorno alla coltivazione ed uso delle patate (Naples: Stamperia Simoniana, 1803), pp. 256–8. Onorati’s short treatise was variously reprinted during the crisis, in Milan (Giovanni Silvestri, 1816 and 1817), Ancona (Tip. Sartori, 1816) and Foligno (Giovanni Tomassini, 1817). 76 Jean-Pierre Clément, ‘Parmentier, las patatas y las ollas americanas’, Asclepio, 47 (1995), pp. 221–40. 77 Raffaele Crovi, La valle dei cavalieri (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2008), p. 164. 78 Vito Teti, ‘Le culture alimentari del Mezzogiorno continentale in età contemporanea’, in A. Capatti, A. De Bernardi, A. Varni (eds), Storia d’Italia. Annali 13. L’alimentazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), p. 86. 79 Pietro Zorzi, Della coltivazione, p. 15. 80 Giovanni Levi, ‘Innovazione tecnica e resistenza contadina: il mais nel Piemonte del ’600’, Quaderni Storici (42) (1979), pp. 1092–100.

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81 Daniel Gade, ‘Landscape, system, and identity in the post-Conquest Andes’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82(3) (1992), pp. 460–77. 82 The podestà of Montagnana, Gennari, to the prefect of the Este district, Burger (2 October 1815), cit. in Biadene, Storia della patata, pp. 110–11. 83 According to the Tuscan cadaster of 1817–34, analysed in Fabio Bettoni and Alberto Grohmann, ‘La montagna appenninica: paesaggi ed economie’, in Piero Bevilacqua (ed.), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, vol. 1, Spazi e paesaggi (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), pp. 591, 598–9. 84 Chiarenti, Riflessioni, p. 188. The Florentine libbra was 0.3395 kg. 85 Ibid. 86 The pastoral letter is reprinted in Giovanni Contri, Istruzione agli agricoltori della provincia di Bologna sul coltivamento ed uso dei pomi di terra (Bologna: Gamberini, 1817), p. 10. 87 Ibid. 88 Amministrazione della provincia di Bari, Le relazioni alla Società economica di Terra di Bari (Molfetta: Istituto Apicella, 1959), vol. 1, 1810–22, pp. 126–31. 89 Printed circular from the governor of Friuli to the parish priests of the province (10 July 1816), Archivio di Stato, Udine, Archivio Comunale Antico di Udine: Periodo Napoleonico: Agricoltura, b. 7, cit. in Panjek, ‘Dibattito’, p. 581. 90 Claudio Tartari (ed.), Dalla fame all’abbondanza. Profilo storico dell’alimentazione nel Milanese (Milan: Provincia di Milano, 2007), p. 71. Likewise, priests in Kefalonia (Greece) apparently ‘labour[ed] to convince the peasants that the potato was the very apple with which the serpent seduced Adam and Eve in Paradise’, according the British physician and traveller Henry Holland, Travels in the Ionian Islands, Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia, etc. during the years 1812 and 1813 (London: Longman, 1815), p. 41, cit. in Christos Papadopoulos, ‘The Greek world and medical tradition: healers and healing on the eve of the Greek revival (1700–1821)’, unpublished PhD thesis, University College London, 2008. 91 Michael Drake, Population and society in Norway, 1735–1865 (Cambridge: University Press, 1969), pp. 54, 64, cit. in John Reader, Propitious esculent: the potato in world history (London: William Heinemann, 2008), p. 127. 92 Luigi Dalla Bella, La coltivazione, gli usi ed i vantaggi delle patate (Verona: Bisesti, 1816), which he based on a locally printed anonymous work, A’ villici (Verona, 1768), according to Biadene, Storia della patata, p. 167. 93 Chiarenti, Riflessioni, pp. 189–90. A staiata is the land area required to produce a bushel (staio) of grain. 94 Chiarenti, Riflessioni, p. 190. 95 Chiarenti, Riflessioni, pp. 194, 197, 205. 96 Chiarenti, Riflessioni, p. 201. It is unclear which famines, in which parts of Europe, Chiarenti is referring to here. The economic historian John Komlos has suggested that the subsistence crisis of 1816 would have been far worse in Europe, but for the potato. Overall, mortality rates were attenuated when compared to previous crises. Indeed, in places like England and Bohemia, population growth continued unchecked. (John Komlos, ‘The New World’s contribution to food consumption during the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of European Economic History, 27 (1998), p. 76. We shall return to the role of the potato in demographic expansion in Chapter 5).

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97 98 99 100 101 102

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Monteleone, ‘Carestia’, p. 77. Chiarenti, Riflessioni, p. 206. Chiarenti, Riflessioni, p. 207. Emanuele Repetti, Il dizionario geografico fisico della Toscana (Florence: Tofani, 1833–43), vol. 3, pp. 195–200. Paolo Giampaolo, Lezioni di agricoltura (Naples: De Bonis, 1819–20), vol. 2, p. 136. G. W. Tighe, ‘Memorie intorno ad una nuova varietà di patata’, Giornale Agrario Toscano (9) (1829), p. 343, cit. in Boncompagni, ‘Ultima crisi’, p. 89. The year is 1829, not 1819 as given by Boncompagni. Carlo Siemoni (Karl Siemon), ‘Memoria sulla cultura delle patate’, paper read before the Accademia dei Georgofili on 5 March 1854, Archivio Storico dell’Accademia dei Georgofili, Florence, b. 81.143, fols. 4v-5r. Raffaele Pepe, in the Giornale economico rustico del Molise (1823), p. 34, cit. in Massafra, Campagne, p. 59. A. Zuccagni Orlandini, Atlante geografico fisico e storico del Granducato di Toscana (Florence: Stamperia Granducale, 1832), plate at p. viii. Anon., Calendario casentinese del 1837 (Arezzo: Bellotti, 1836), p. 81. Riccardo Bacchelli, Il mulino del Po (1938–41, Mondadori: Milan, 1997), vol. 1, Dio ti salvi, p. 173.

Notes to Chapter 2: An Exotic American in Italy: 1573 1 Vitale Magazzini, Coltivazione in Toscana (Venezia: Deuchino, 1625), p. 33. 2 Giovanni Biadene, Storia della patata in Italia dagli scritti dei Georgici (1625–1900) (Bologna: Avenue Media, 1996), p. 18. 3 Pietro Antonio Michiel, I cinque libri di piante, Libro Giallo no. 62, Ettore De Toni (e.d.), (Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1940), p. 143. 4 Only a few of the 40 or so New World plants in the herbal were drawn from life, the rest arriving in his collection as dried samples or illustrations. José Pardo-Tomàs, ‘Tra “oppinioni” e “dispareri”: la flora Americana nell’erbario di Pier’Antonio Michiel’, in G. Olmi and G. Papagno (eds), La natura e il corpo: studi in memoria di Attilio Zanca (Florence: Olschki, 2006), pp. 73–98. 5 Letter of 19 November 1580, no. 1772 in Christl Karnehm (ed.), Die Korrespondenz Hans Fuggers von 1566 bis 1594. Regesten der Kopierbücher aus dem Fuggerarchiv (München: Kommission für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 2003), 2(1), pp. 772–3. 6 Carolus Clusius, Rariorum plantarum historia (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1601), book iv, p. 79, and Clusius, Exoticorum libri decem quibus animalium, plantarum, aromatum, aliorumque peregrinorum fructuum historiae describuntur (Leiden: Officina Plantiniana, 1605). 7 ‘Aardappelplant’, water-colour, 1588, Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus: Prentenkabinet. 8 Giacomo Antonio Cortuso, L’horto de i semplici di Padova (Venice: Girolamo Porro, 1591), cit. in Elsa Cappelletti, ‘Le collezioni viventi nell’orto botanico ai tempi di Cortuso (1591)’, in Alessandro Minelli (ed.), L’orto botanico di Padova, 1545–1995 (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), p. 203.

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9 Gaspard Bauhin, Podromos theatri botanici (Frankfurt, 1620), passage translated in Salaman, History, pp. 91–3. 10 Redcliffe Salaman, Potato varieties (Cambridge: University Press, 1926), pp. 3–6. John Gerard famously describes the ‘Virginian potato’ in his Historie of plants of 1597, the frontispiece of which shows Gerard holding a flowering shoot of the plant. Glendinning suggests that Salaman forces his point concerning the parentage of European potato varieties, noting that additional varieties could easily have found their way into Europe from South America, particularly Chile, as ships’ stores, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (D. R. Glendinning, ‘Potato introductions and breeding up to the early 20th century’, The New Phytologist, 94 (1983), pp. 485–6). Recent genetic research has supported the Chilean contribution: David Spooner and Wilbert Hetterscheid, ‘Origins, evolution, and group classification of cultivated potatoes’, in Timothy Motley, Nyree Zerega and Hugh Cross (eds), Darwin’s harvest: new approaches to the origins, evolution, and conservation of crops (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 285–307. 11 Glendinning, ‘Potato introductions’, pp. 479–81; Stephen Brush, ‘Ethnoecology, biodiversity, and modernization in Andean potato agriculture’, Journal of Ethnobiology, 12(2) (1992), pp. 161–85. 12 Pedro Cieza de León, Parte primera de la chronica del Perú (Seville, 1553). The book is available online at the University of Valencia’s ‘Parnaseo’ site: http://lubna.uv.es:83/. Italian trans.: Pietro di Cieca di Lione, Cronica del gran regno del Peru (Venice: Pietro Bosello, 1560). 13 José Pardo-Tomàs, ‘La difusión en la Italia del siglo XVI de las obras españolas sobre historia natural y materia médica americanas’, in José M. López Piñero (ed.), Viejo y nuevo continente: la medicina en el encuentro de dos mundos (Madrid: SANED, 1992), pp. 309–24. 14 Cieza, Chronica del Perú, chapters xl and cix. 15 Lodovico Bertonio, Vocabulario de la lengua Aymara [1612] (La Paz, Bolivia: Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Económica y Social, 1984), discussed in Brush, ‘Ethnoecology’, pp. 162, 164, 165. 16 Salaman, History, pp. 145–6; Glendinning, ‘Potato introductions’, p. 485. 17 E. Hamilton, ‘American treasure and the price revolution in Spain, 1501–1650’, Harvard Economic Studies, xliii(2) (1962), cit. in Salaman, History, p. 143; J. G. Hawkes and J. Francisco-Ortega, ‘The potato in Spain during the late 16th century’, Economic Botany, 46 (1992), pp. 86–97. 18 It is a rare thing to have to disagree with Salaman, but he has got this (admittedly minor) point wrong, assigning the first Italian mention of the potato to Durante, in his Herbario nuovo, as well as the first usage of the label tartufo for it. However it is evident from the footnote that Salaman has not consulted Durante himself but has relied on a secondary source, which moreover gets the date of publication wrong, 1584 instead of 1585 (Salaman, History, p. 129, n. 3). In fact, there are no potatoes lurking anywhere amongst Durante’s truffles, however hard one looks. 19 Salaman, History, p. 102; Biadene, Storia, p. 14. 20 At http://documents.medici.org/.

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21 Rengenier Rittersma, ‘A culinary captatio benevolentiae: the use of the truffle as a promotional gift by the Savoy dynasty in the 18th century’, in Danielle de Vooght (ed.), Royal taste: food, power and status at the European courts after 1789 (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2011), pp. 31–55. 22 Costanzo Felici, in his letter to Ulisse Aldrovandi, ‘Del’insalata e piante che in qualunque modo vengono per cibo dell’homo’, 10 Marche 1572, in Emilio Faccioli (ed.), L’arte della cucina in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), p. 488. 23 Felici, ‘Del’insalata e piante’, p. 487. 24 As retold by Giacomo Castelvestro, ‘Brieve racconto di tutte le radici, di tutte l’erbe e di tutti i frutti che crudi o cotti in Italia si mangiano’ (MS London, 1614), trans. Gillian Riley, The fruit, herbs and vegetables of Italy (London: Viking, 1989), p. 145. 25 Baldassare Pisanelli, Trattato de’ cibi et del bere (Carmagnola: Marc’Antonio Bellone, 1589), pp. 179–81. 26 Messer, ‘Changing European tastes’, p. 104. 27 Pisanelli, Trattato de’ cibi, pp. 178–9. 28 Giovanni Domenico Sala, De alimentis et eorum recta administratione (Padua: Giovanni Battista Martino, 1628), p. 12. 29 Sala, De alimentis, pp. 54, 65, 77. 30 Ministero dell’Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Relazione intorno alle condizioni dell’agricoltura nel quinquennio 1870–1874 (Rome: Barbera, 1875–8), vol. 4, p. 197. 31 Panjek, ‘Dibattito’, p. 576. 32 Elisabetta Mosena, ‘Famiglia, territorio, emigrazione e risorse a Forno in Val di Zoldo (Belluno)’, La Ricerca Folklorica (April 1994), pp. 63–4. 33 Mario Rigoni Stern, Storia di Tönle (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), p. 27. 34 Giuseppe Bayle-Barelle, announcing his plans for a university orto agrario on 14 June 1804, Archivio di Stato, Milan, Autografi, scatola 111, cit. in Maristella La Rosa, ‘Orti agrari e piante alimentari nelle carte napoleoniche dell’Archivio di Stato di Milano’, in Paola Carucci (ed.), Gli archivi per la storia dell’alimentazione (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1995), vol. 3, p. 1032. 35 Paul Ginsborg, ‘Peasants and revolutionaries in Venice and the Veneto, 1848’, The Historical Journal, xvii (1974), p. 514. 36 Ferdinando Altieri, A dictionary Italian and English containing all the words of the vocabulary della Crusca and several hundred more taken from the most approved authors (London: Innys, 1726–7), vol. 2, sub voce. When Giuseppe Baretti revised Altieri’s dictionary to produce his own, the Italian term was left unchanged. Giuseppe Baretti, A dictionary of the Italian and English languages (London: C. Hitch, 1760), vol. 2, sub voce. 37 John Florio, World of words, or most copious and exact dictionarie in Italian and English (London: John Blunt, 1598), sub voce. The possibility that Florio may be referring to sweet potatoes, or even Jesusalem artichokes, is an indication of the prevailing confusion in terminology, until the eighteenth century. 38 Alessandra Guigoni, Alla scoperta dell’America in Sardegna. Vegetali americani nell’alimentazione sarda (Cagliari: AM&D Edizioni, 2009), p. 129, no. 20.

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39 Agostino Coltellini, ‘Nuovo metodo per ridurre in farina il pantubero detto impropriamente patata’, Archivio Storico dell’Accademia dei Georgofili, Florence, undated MS [but 18th century], b. 91.54. 40 Ministero dell’Agricoltura, Relazione, IV, p. 218. 41 Ministero dell’Agricoltura, Relazione, IV, p. 246. 42 Luigi Messedaglia, ‘I nomi del mais’, in idem, La gloria del mais e altri scritti sull’alimentazione veneta, Corrado Barberis and Ulderico Bernardi (eds) (Vicenza: Angelo Colla, 2008), pp. 41–5. 43 It was the signature tune for her television series ‘Rita e io’ for the RAI, the Italian public broadcaster. Thirty years later, McCain Bros. Italy, used a cover version of the song in a commercial for its frozen french fries, complete with psychedelic 1970s-style animation. 44 Günter Grass, The Flounder [Der Butt, 1977] (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), especially the chapter entitled ‘The fifth month’, pp. 287–341. 45 Raffaella Zanderigo Rosolo, ‘La patata’, La Stua: periodico di cultura popolare (15) (2002), pp. 22–5. Available online at: www.comelicocultura.it/italiano/italiano. 46 Giorgio Qualizza, ‘Proverbi e detti sloveni nelle Valli del Natisone: raccolti e analizzati secondo il lessico e la struttura’, unpublished undergaduate thesis,, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Trieste, 1978–79. Available online at: www.lintver.it/ cultura-tradizioni-proverbi. 47 Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Florence, 1866), vol. 2, p. 645, under castagno. Previous editions had given the chestnut tree only positive attributes. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Venice: Giovanni Alberti, 1612), p. 162. 48 The English usage dates from the 1840s. Most expressions in English are similarly negative – ‘small potatoes’, ‘couch potato’, ‘potato head’ – although Australian English does have ‘clean potato’, referring to someone beyond reproach. 49 Alessandra Guigoni, ‘L’introduzione del Solanum tuberosum in Sardegna. Due documenti editi dalla Reale società agraria ed economica di Cagliari’, Archivio di etnografia, n.s. II. (2007), p. 104 n. 47. 50 Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, ‘La fijja sposa’ (1832), in Marcello Teodino (ed.), Tutti i sonetti romaneschi (Rome: Newton, 1998, 2 vols), p. 314. Available online at: www.liberliber.it 51 Vincenzo Padula, Calabria prima e dopo l’Unità, in Attilio Marinari (ed.), (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 302, 310. 52 In a unpublished preface to his Rime, written in 1857, Carducci remarks: ‘My little book cannot be sold at so much a yard, nor have I found a way of substituting potatoes for wheat, the machine for man’. Giosuè Carducci, Opere (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1936), vol. 5, Prose giovanili), p. 208.

Notes to Chapter 3: The Potato Apostles, 1764–67 1 Giuseppe Baretti, An account of the manners and customs of Italy (London: T. Davies and L. Davis, 1769, 2 vols), vol. 2, pp. 202–3. 2 The letter is quoted and the correct identification made in Giovanni Biadene, Storia della patata in Italia dagli scritti dei Georgici (1625–1900) (Bologna: Avenue Media, 1996), pp. 16–17.

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3 ‘The white truffle is what we call several roots similar to those of canes, which are eaten in various ways during winter, and are taken from a plant called in Latin Aster Peruanus Tuberosas’, Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Firenze: Domenico Maria Manni, 1729–38), vol. 5, pp. 18–19. 4 Ferdinando Altieri, A dictionary Italian and English containing all the words of the vocabulary della Crusca and several hundred more taken from the most approved authors (London: Innys, 1726–7, 2 vols), vol. 2, sub voce; Giuseppe Baretti, A dictionary of the Italian and English languages (London: C. Hitch, 1760, 2 vols), vol. 2, sub voce. 5 In 1677 the Tuscan grand-duke Ferdinand II received some potatoes as a gift from Spain and had them planted in the botanic gardens and the Boboli gardens, both in Florence. Marco Doria, ‘Le colture del Nuovo Mondo’, in Giuliano Pinto, Carlo Poni and Ugo Tucci (eds), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana, vol. 2, Il medioevo e l’età moderna (Florence: Polistampa, 2002), p. 573. For Bologna, see Giacinto Ambrosini, Hortus studiosorum sive catalogus arborum, fruticum, suffruticum, stirpium et plantarum omnium (Bologna: Giovanni Battista Ferroni, 1657), p. 59. The potato is absent from the extensive and detailed work of the Bolognese agronomist, Vincenzo Tanara, first published a few years earlier. Vincenzo Tanara, Economia del cittadino in villa (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1644). 6 Teofilo Pons, ‘Brevi cenni sulla “patata” in Europa dal XVI al XX secolo’, Bollettino della Società di studi valdesi, 1985, no. 156, pp. 31–50. Pons suggests that it was these Waldensian refugees who first brought the potato to German-speaking areas. 7 Antonio Campini, Saggi d’agricoltura . . . col trattato sulla coltivazione delle patate (Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1774), p. 272; and Nicolò Dalle Piane, De’ pomi di terra ossia patate. La Società Patria a’ M. Revv. Parochi Rurali del dominio della serenissima repubblica di Genova (Genova: Adamo Scionico, 1793), reprinted in Salvatore Marchese, Benedetta patata (Padua: Muzzio, 1999), pp. 27–60, at pp. 48, n. 10 and 50, n. 18. 8 Enthusiastic about the potato’s influence is Christian Vandenbroeke, ‘Cultivation and consumption of the potato in the 17th and 18th century’, Acta Historiae Neerlandica, v (1971), pp. 15–39; more earth-bound in his evaluation is Michel Morineau, ‘The potato in the eighteenth century’, in R. Forster and O. Ranum (eds), Food and drink in history: selections from the Annales (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 17–36 [originally in French in the Annales. E.S.C, no. 25, 1970, pp. 1767–84]. 9 Pietro Maria Bignami, Le patate (Bologna: Lelio della Volpe, 1773), p. 20. 10 Alessandro De Humboldt [Alexander von Humboldt], Viaggio al Messico, alla Nuova Granata ed al Peru, ossia saggio politico sul Regno della Nuova Spagna (Naples: Nuovo Gabinetto Letterario, 1832), vol. 1, p. 91, cit. in Maurizio Sentieri and Guido Zazzu, I semi dell’Eldorado. L’alimentazione in Europa dopo la scoperta dell’America (Bari: Dedalo, 1992), pp. 235–6. 11 Nazzareno Diodato, ‘Climatic fluctuations in southern Italy since the 17th century: reconstruction with precipitation records at Benevento’, Climatic Change (2007), p. 421 n. 80. 12 Tommaso Fasano, Della febbre epidemica sofferta in Napoli l’anno 1764 (Naples: Giuseppe Raimondi, 1765), p. 1. 13 ‘Rapporto generale sulla carestia e sull’epidemia’, in Salvatore De Renzi, Napoli nell’anno 1764, ossia documenti della carestia e dell’epidemia che desolarono Napoli nel 1764 (Naples: G. Nobile, 1868), p. 200.

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14 V. Florio, ‘Memorie storiche ossiano Annali napoletani dal 1759 in avanti’, Archivio Storico per le Province Napoletane, xxx (1905), p. 525. 15 Franco Venturi, ‘1764–1767: Roma negli anni della fame’, Rivista Storica Italiana, lxxxv (1973), pp. 515, 537. 16 Mario Tosti, ‘Poveri, carestia e strutture assistenziali nello Stato della Chiesa: il caso di Perugia (1764–1767)’, Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia, 37 (1983), p. 159. 17 Archivio di Stato, Naples, Archivio Borbone: Carte Tanucci, b. iv, fol. 51v., letter to the duke of Losada, 7 February 1764, cit. in Franco Venturi, ‘1764: Napoli nell’anno della fame’, Rivista Storica Italiana, lxxxv (1973), p. 416. 18 Bernardo Tanucci, Lettere a Ferdinando Galiani, Fausto Nicolini (e.d.), (Bari: Laterza, 1914), vol. 1, p. 134, letter of 14 April 1764, cit. in Venturi, ‘Napoli nell’anno della fame’, p. 416. 19 Paolo Mattia Doria, ‘Del commercio del Regno di Napoli’ (1740)’, cit. in Brigitte Marin, ‘Organisation annonaire, crise alimentaire et riforme du système d’approvisionnement cérélier à Naples dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, in B. Marin and C. Virlouvet (eds), Nourrir les cités de Méditerranée (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2004), p. 395. 20 Antonio Pepe, Il medico di letto o sia dissertazione storico-medica su l’epidemica costituzione dell’anno 1764 in questa città di Napoli accaduta (Naples: Giuseppe Severino Boezio, 1766), p. 18. 21 Libro della parrocchia del S.S. Salvatore in Casalciprano del 1764, redatto dall’arciprete D. Tommaso Perna, cit. in Pasqualino Battista, ‘La terribile carestia del 1764 a Casalciprano (Campbasso)’. Available online at: www.meteomolise.com. 22 Ferdinando Galiani, Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds [1770], Luigi De Rosa (ed.), (Naples: Banco di Napoli, 1987), p. 4. 23 Franco Venturi, ‘Church and reform in Enlightenment Italy: the sixties of the eighteenth century’, The Journal of Modern History, 48 (1976), pp. 215–32, at p. 220. 24 Pepe, Medico di letto, p. 17. 25 Nicola Columella Onorati, Delle cose rustiche, ovvero dell’agricoltura teorica trattata secondo i principi della chimica moderna (Naples: Stamperia Flautina, 1803–6, 6 vols), vol. 3, p. 178, [the first edition in 1791–3] cit. in Massafra, Campagne e territorio, p. 54. 26 Luigi De Rosa, introduction to Galiani, Dialogues, p. xviii. 27 Mario Mirri, La lotta politica in Toscana e le ‘riforme annonarie’ (1766-1775) (Pisa: Pacini, 1972); Giovanni Zalin, ‘La politica annonaria veneta tra conservazione e libertà, Rivista di storia dell’agricoltura, xii (1972), pp. 389–424; Jacques Revel, ‘Le grain de Rome et la crise de l’annone dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIme siècle’, Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome, no. 84 (1972), pp. 201–81; Paolo Macry, Mercato e società nel Regno di Napoli. Commercio del grano e politica economica nel ’700 (Naples: Guida, 1974). 28 William McNeill, ‘How the potato changed the world’s history’, Social Research, 66 (1999), p. 77; William McNeill, ‘Frederick the Great and the propagation of potatoes’, in Byron Hollinshead and Theodore K. Rabb (eds), I wish I’d been there: Twenty historians revisit key moments in history (London: PanMacmillan, 2007), pp.176–89. 29 Günter Grass, The Flounder [Der Butt, 1977] (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 293, 308. 30 Gretel Pelto and Pertti Pelto, ‘Diet and delocalization: dietary changes since 1750’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xiv (1983), p. 512.

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31 Francesco Griselini, ‘Della coltura e degli usi che anno varie nazioni d’Europa della patata, o pomi di terra, e di quelli che far ne potrebbero con molto loro utile gl’Italiani’, Giornale d’Italia spettante alla scienza naturale e principalmente all’agricoltura, alle arti ed al commercio, 30 March 1765, pp. 305–9. 32 Saverio Manetti, Delle specie diverse di frumento e di pane siccome della panizzazione (Florence: Moucke, 1765), p. 1. 33 Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, Breve istruzione circ’ ai modi di accrescere il pane col mescuglio d’alcune sostanze vegetabili alla quale si sono aggiunte certe nuove e più sicure regole, per ben scegliere i semi del grano da seminarsi nel corrente autunno del 1766 (no publisher, no place, 1766). It is discussed in Franco Venturi, ‘Scienza e riforma nella Toscana del Settecento: Targioni Tozzetti, Lapi, Montelatici, Fontana e Pagnini’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 89 (1977), especially pp. 82–4. 34 Targioni Tozzetti, Breve istruzione, pp. iii–iv. 35 Targioni Tozzetti, Breve istruzione, p. x. 36 Anton Filippo Adami, Delle necessità di accrescere e migliorare l’agricoltura nella Toscana. Discorso letto in una adunanza dell’Accademia dei Georgofili (Florence: Stamperia Bonducciana, 1768). 37 Archivio dell’Accademia dei Georgofili, Florence, b. 56.32, Canon count Guasco, ‘Supplemento per la coltivazione delle patate’, 2 September 1767; Archivio dell’Accademia dei Georgofili, Florence, b. 91.54. Agostino Coltellini, ‘Nuovo metodo per ridurre in farina il pantubero detto impropriamente patata’, undated, discussed in Lippi, ‘Tempo dei Lorena’, pp. 140–1. 38 Ubaldo Montelatici, Estratto da’ più celebri autori, si editi come inediti, che hanno trattato della diversa coltivazione ed usi varii delle patate (Florence: Gaetano Albizzini, 1767). 39 Antonio Zanon, Della coltivazione e dell’uso delle patate e d’altre piante commestibili (Venice: Modesto Fenzo, 1767). 40 Tito Maniacco, La patata non è un fiore. Vivere e morire da contadini (Pordenone: Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 1997), p. 114. 41 Zanon, Coltivazione, p. 69. 42 ‘Giudizio di NN sull’opera del Sig. Antonio Zanon sopra la coltura delle patate ed intorno all’utilità che si pretende poter derivare dall’introduzione ed uso economico di questo vegetale’, Giornale d’Italia (8 August 1767); cit. in Panjek, ‘Dibattito’ p. 584. 43 Edizione completa degli scritti di agricoltura, arti e commercio (Udine: Fratelli Mattiuzzi, 1828–31, 10 vols), no vol. or p. ref., cit. in Maniacco, Patata non è un fiore, p. 131. 44 Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, Examen chimique des pommes de terre, dans lequel on traite des parties constituantes du bled (1773), Traité sur la culture et les usages des pommes de terre, de la patate et du topinambour (1789), Instruction sommaire sur la culture des pommes de terre (1794). 45 Charles Gillispie, Science and polity in France at the end of the old regime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 374–5. 46 Anne Muratori-Philip, Parmentier (Paris: Plon, 1994), especially chapters 1 and 7. 47 For example, Del pane e della economia e coltura de’ grani dissertazione del signor Tissot . . . con altri trattati sulla panizzazione e sul pane di pomi di terra (Venice: Giacomo Carcani, 1792). 48 Gillispie, Science and polity, p. 551.

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49 Dalle Piane, De’ pomi di terra, p. 39. Dalle Piane’s endnotes are invariably more interesting than his text. 50 Campini, Saggi d’agricoltura, p. 271. 51 Bignami, Le patate, pp. 12–13. 52 Agostino Bignardi, ‘L’introduzione della patata nel Bolognese’, Rivista di storia dell’agricoltura, V (1965), p. 424. 53 Bignami, Le patate, p. 21. 54 Dalle Piane, De’ pomi di terra, pp. 45–6 n. 1. There were in fact considerably more. In France, around 1780, Parmentier selected a dozen varieties from the over 60 sent to him by his numerous correspondents and contacts (Muratori-Philip, Parmentier, p. 132). And in 1817 another French apothecary-chemist, Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, analysed 47 varieties sent to him by the Agricultural Society, classifying them according to their starch content (Madeleine Ferrières, Sacred cow, mad cow: a history of food fears, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 104). 55 Dalle Piane, Pomi di terra, p. 50 n. 17. 56 Baldini, Ragionamento, pp. 7–8. 57 Gillispie, Science and polity, ix. 58 Re, Dizionario ragionato, I,, p. 139. 59 Giovanni Battista Occhiolini, Memorie sopra il meraviglioso frutto americano chiamato volgarmente patata ossia pomo di terra con la descrizione della maniera di piantarlo, coltivarlo, del di lui vantaggio, del modo di ridurlo a farina, ed a pane, di cavarne amido, cipria, di farne salde, bosima &c. (Rome: Giunchi, 1784). 60 Dalle Piane, Pomi di terra, pp. 27–60. 61 Dalle Piane, Pomi di terra, p. 52, n. 1. 62 Dalle Piane, Pomi di terra, pp. 29 and 49, n. 14. 63 Massimo Angelini (ed.), Le patate tradizionali della montagna genovese (Rapallo: Tipografia Emiliani, 1999), p. 18. Available online at: www.caprifico.it/scritti/scritti_massimo/1999_ le_patate_tradizionali_libro.pdf. 64 Archivio di Stato, Palermo, Real Segreteria, b. 5251, fasc. Piana dei Greci, fols. 795 and 805, in Trasselli, ‘Patate in Sicilia’, p. 48. 65 Teodoro Monticelli, Catechismo di agricoltura pratica e di pastorizia per la pubblica istruzione de’ contadini del regno di Napoli (1792), . Michele Mainardi (e.d.), (Galatina: Panico, 2002), pp. 210, 213. 66 Giovan Battista Gagliardo, Catechismo agrario per uso de’ curati di campagna e de’ fattori delle ville (1793; Lecce: Grifo, 1990). 67 Giovanni Battarra, Pratica agraria distribuita in varj dialoghi, in Diario economico, no. 32 (10 August 1776. (Republished: Rome: no publisher), 1778; Cesena: Biasini, 1782; Faenza: Archi, 1794; Rimini: Ercolani, 1854). 68 Battarra, Pratica agraria (Cesena: Biasini, 1782), pp. 131–8. 69 Giovanni Faicchio, Sulla coltivazione e sull’uso delle patate (Naples: G. M. Porcelli, 1783). 70 Filippo Baldini, De’ pomi di terra. Ragionamento (Naples: Raimondi, 1783). It was reprinted 13 years later with a new preface and a ‘sexier’ title, along the lines of Parmentier’s strategy: Maniera di non far provar più la fame al minuto popolo ovvero trattato con cui s’insegna la cultura e l’uso utilissimo delle patate (Fermo: Pallade, 1796). 71 Baldini, Ragionamento, pp. 3–4.

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72 Brigitte Marin, ‘Les traités d’hygiène publique (1784–1797) de Filippo Baldini, médecin à la cour de Naples: culture médicale et service du roi, Nuncius, viii (1993), pp. 456–87. 73 Baldini, Ragionamento, pp. 13–14. 74 Baldini, Ragionamento, pp. 15–17. 75 Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1765), vol. 13, p. 14. 76 Dalle Piane, Pomi di terra, p. 47, n. 7 and 8. 77 Occhiolini, Memorie, pp. 18–19. 78 Piero Camporesi (ed.), La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene: Pellegrino Artusi (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), xxxiv. 79 Swinburne, Travels, p. 249. 80 Discussed in David Gentilcore, Pomodoro! A history of the tomato in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 55–7, 60–2. 81 Vincenzo Corrado, Del cibo pitagorico ovvero erbaceo per uso de nobili, e de letterati (Naples: Raimondi, 1781). 82 Vincenzo Corrado, Trattato delle patate per uso di cibo e lettera sul giulebbe d’uva (Naples: Vicenzo Orsino, 1798). 83 The list appears in the second edition of Leonardo De Vegni’s Dizionario universale economico rustico, il quale contiene diversi modi di conservare ed aumentare le sue sostanze, cioe molte maniere per allevare, nodrire, propagare, guarire, rendere profittevoli diverse sorti d’animali domestici (Rome: Michele Puccinelli, 1793–7, 23 vols), vol. 16 (1795), pp. 145–212, which itself refers to a contribution by De Vegni’s to the Antologia Romana, vol. 18 (1792). De Vegni must have been a great fan of the potato, because the Dizionario’s editor claims to have tasted many of the dishes ‘at his house’. The Dizionario’s entire entry regarding the potato was later reprinted, alongside Corrado’s recipes and various other works, in the government-sponsored Collezione di quanto si è scritto di più importante e di più adatto intorno alla coltivazione ed uso delle patate (Naples: Stamperia Simoniana, 1803), pp. 103–68. 84 Lippi, ‘Tempo dei Lorena’, p. 141. 85 Vincenzo Corrado, Trattato delle patate (1798), in Tullio Gregory (ed.), Del cibo pitagorico (Rome: Donzelli, 2001), pp. 115–18. 86 Adamo Fabbroni, L’agricoltore, no. 8, Perugia, 26 March 1784, pp. 2–4, in Renzo Paci, ‘La patata “dono prezioso della Provvidenza”, dal Perù alle Marche’, in Renzo Paci, Cittadini e campagnoli nelle Marche di età moderna (Pisa-Rome: IEPI, 2002), p. 339. 87 Dalle Piane, Pomi di terra, pp. 48, n. 10, 48 n. 11, 54 n. 27. 88 Marco Lastri, Corso di agricoltura di un Accademico Georgofilo (Florence: Pagani, 1787), in Biadene, Storia, p. 52. 89 Vincenzo Corrado, Notiziario delle produzioni particolari del Regno di Napoli e delle cacce riserbate al real divertimento (1792) (Bra: Slow Food Editore, 2005), pp. 55, 59, 109. 90 Giuseppe Maria Galanti, Giornale di viaggio in Calabria (1792), seguito dalle relazioni e memorie scritte nell’occasione, in A. Placanica (ed.), (Naples: Società Editrice Napoletana, 1981), p. 262. 91 Karl von Salis-Marschlins, Travels through various provinces of the Kingdom of Naples in 1789 (London: Cadell, 1795), p. 311. The potato was also grown near Teramo by the physician baron Alessio Tullij, on his estate at Villa di Rose. This was according to the local agronomist Gianfrancesco Nardi, writing on the founding of the local Società Patriotica,

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who thought the potato should be promoted much more amongst mountain-dwellers. Gianfrancesco Nardi, Saggi su l’agricoltura, arti e commercio della provincia di Teramo (Teramo: Bonolis, 1789), cit. in Cercone, Patata in Abruzzo, p. 24. Prefect De Gregori quoted in Riccardo Baldi, ‘La patata a Cuneo’. Available online at: www. vallidicuneo.net/patata Archivio di Stato, Milan, Autografi, scatola 111, ‘Primo rendiconto’, 25 January 1810, in La Rosa, ‘Orti agrari e piante alimentari’, p. 1040. Carlo Amoretti, Della coltivazione delle patate e loro uso. Istruzione (1801; Rome: no publisher, 1802), p. 6. Giovanni Vincenzo Virginio, Trattato di coltivazione delle patate ossia pomi di terra volgarmente dette tartiffle (Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1801). Calendario istorico ossia diario della storia del Piemonte (Turin: Morano, 1817–18). The author’s point is that, by the time of writing, in 1817, attitudes towards the potato had changed; in Biadene, Storia, p. 77. Archivio di Stato, Arezzo, Archivio Albergotti, MS. 42, ‘Collezione di buoni ed eruditi sentimenti, indovinelli e memorie, con più diversi segreti, ricette e ricordi. . .’ (1809), recipes 193 (‘Delle patate o pomi di terra’), 697 (‘Modo di fare la farina di patate’), and 738 (‘Coltivazione delle patate secondo il Baccelli). Archivio di Stato, Arezzo, Archivio Albergotti, MS. 82, ‘Raccolta di ricordi diversi scritti per proprio uso. Cav.re Giov. Batt.a Albergotti’, undated and unpaginated, entries 34 and 100. Re’s survey is surveyed by Biadene, Storia, pp. 88-92. Domenico Demarco (ed.), La “Statistica” del Regno di Napoli nel 1811 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1988), I, pp. 16, 73, 300. Statistica, II, p. 430. Statistica, IV, p. 237. Statistica, I, p. 73. Corrado, Notiziario delle produzioni, p. 31. ‘Real dispaccio di 20 ottobre 1802 relativo alle sovvenzioni economiche de’ poveri’, in Collezione (1803), pp. 1–13. Ibid., p. ii. Ibid., pp. 204–5. Morina, a Piedmontese resident in Naples, operated the royal dye works at San Leucio. Pelto and Pelto, ‘Diet and delocalization’, p. 512. Larry Zuckerman, The potato: how the humble spud rescued the western world (New York: North Point Press, 1998), pp. 85, 173. Walter Palmieri, ‘L’“offerta di stato” nell’agricoltura meridionale del primo Ottocento: trasformazioni e vincoli’, Meridiana, IX (1996), p. 144. Archivio di Stato, Chieti, Società economica: atti amministrativi, b. 1, no. 7, ‘Notizie statistiche per l’anno 1812’, fol. 16, in Mauro Gentile, ‘La situazione delle campagne nel distretto di Chieti dal decennio francese alla Restaurazione (1806–1860), in Paola Carucci (ed.), Gli archivi per la storia dell’alimentazione (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1995), vol. 3, p. 1022. Istruzioni per la coltivazione delle patate (1817), reprinted in Cercone, Patata in Abruzzo, pp. 73–4.

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113 Cercone, Patata in Abruzzo, p. 30. The other competition the society sponsored may have generated more interest: ‘a prize of 10 ducats to whoever best makes red wine without the addition of cooked grape must’. 114 Gabriele Silvagni, Istruzione pratica sulla coltura ed usi de’ pomi di terra redatta dal segretario perpetuo della Società Economica Citra (Cosenza: A. Migliaccio, 1817), no page, cit. in Biadene, Storia, p. 120. 115 Oreste Parise, ‘Ci vuole proprio una bella patata’, Mezzoeuro: settimanale di informazione regionale (Cosenza), III,(30) (15 May 2004). Available online at: www.oresteparise.it/ articoli04/mezzo2004_20 116 Giuseppe Cossu, Instruzione per la coltivazione e per l’uso delle patate in Sardegna / Instruzioni po’ sa coltura e po s’usu de is patatas in Sardigna (Cagliari: Stamperia Reale, 1805), discussed in Alessandra Guigoni, ‘L’introduzione del Solanum tuberosum in Sardegna. Due documenti editi dalla Reale società agraria ed economica di Cagliari’, Archivio di etnografia, n.s. II (2007), pp. 77–108. 117 Pietro Maurandi (ed.), Memorie della Reale Società Agraria (Rome: Carocci, 2001), p. 238, cit. in Alessandra Guigoni, ‘Rassegna delle fonti storiche sull’introduzione di alcune piante americane in Sardegna’, Quaderni Bolotanesi, 31 (2005), pp. 245–66. 118 Archivio di Stato, Udine, Archivio Comunale Antico: Agricoltura, b. 5, no. 46, ‘La Società d’Agricoltura in riguardo ad agricoltura’, 8 January 1808, in Panjek, ‘Dibattito’, p. 578.

Notes to Chapter 4: ‘Substituting Potatoes for Wheat’: The Late Nineteenth Century 1 Carlo Berti Pichat, Istituzioni scientifiche e tecniche ossia corso teorico e pratico d’agricoltura (Turin: UTET, 1851–70), vol. 5 [1866], p. 115. 2 No author, ‘Riassunto del prodotto dei seguenti articoli in misura e pesi bolognesi, raccolti in tutto il territorio della provincia di Bologna nelle sottonotate annate’, Il propagatore agricolo [Bologna], III (1853), pp. 464–5, cit. in Bignardi, ‘L’introduzione della patata nel Bolognese’, Rivista di storia dell’agricoltura, V (1965), at p. 431. One Bolognese pound (libbra bolognese) equalled 0.362 kg. 3 Ministero dell’Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Relazione intorno alle condizioni dell’agricoltura nel quinquennio 1870–1874 (Roma: Barbera, 1875–8), vol. 1, p. 316. 4 Vittorio Augius and Goffredo Casalis, Dizionario geografico-statistico-commerciale degli stati di S.M. il re di Sardegna (Turin, 1833–7; reprinted Bologna: Forni, 1971), pp. 530–2, cit. in Alessandra Guigoni, Alla scoperta dell’America in Sardegna. Vegetali americani nell’alimentazione sarda (Cagliari: AM&D Edizioni, 2009), p. 193. 5 Angelo Massafra, Campagne e territorio nel Mezzogiorno fra Settecento e Ottocento (Bari: Dedalo, 1984), pp. 37–61. 6 Report of the intendent of Molise, Archivio di Stato, Naples, Ministero dell’Interno, I, inventario 2192 (November 1833), in Massafra, Campagne, p. 58. 7 Outlined in Eric Vanhaute, ‘Agrarian labour and food production in a peripheral region: agricultural dynamics in the Antwerp Campine in the “long” nineteenth century’, Histoire & Mesure, 12 (1997), pp. 150–1. More than half of this work was done by women (and children), responsible for much of the manuring, dibbling and harvesting.

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8 Vera Zamagni, The Economic history of Italy, 1860–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 58–9; and Massafra, Campagne e territorio, pp. 92–9. 9 Gino Massullo, ‘Mobilità territoriale e quadri ambientali in Molise tra Otto e Novecento’, in Dionigi Albera and Paola Corti (eds), La montagna mediterranea: una fabbrica di uomini? Mobilità e migrazioni in una prospettiva comparata (secoli XV–XX) (Cavallermaggiore: Gribaudo, 2000), p. 142. 10 G. Del Re, Descrizione topografica, fisica, economica, politica de’ reali domini di qua dal faro (Naples, 1830–36, 3 vols), vol. 3, p. 99, cit. in Massafra, Campagne e territorio, p. 98. 11 Joan Thirsk, Alternative agriculture: a history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 256. 12 Ester Boserup, The conditions of agricultural growth: the economics of agrarian change under population pressure (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965). 13 According to the Giornale economico rustico del Molise, 1833, p. 123, in Massafra, Campagne, p. 60. 14 Raffaele Pepe, Annali civili del Regno delle Due Sicilie, vii (1835), fasc. xiii, p. 44, in Massafra, Campagne, p. 60, n. 30. 15 Ibid. 16 Massafra, Campagne, p. 60. At this time one Neapolitan tomolo, a measure of volume for cereals and other solids, was equivalent to 0.55 hectolitres. 17 Massafra, Campagne, p. 96 n. 70. 18 Conversion of volume to weight can only be approximate, given that potatoes vary greatly in size and moisture content. One study gives a rate of 1 litre to 0.714 kg, which is the figure I have used: H. Messer, R. Lindsay, M. Neale, ‘The space requirement of potatoes in pallet boxes and the weight loss of such potatoes during storage’, Potato Research, 13, 3 (September 1970), pp. 175–9. 19 Massafra, Campagne, p. 61. 20 France’s potato production was 117,000,000 hectolitres in 1840. William McNeill, ‘How the potato changed the world’s history’, Social Research, 66 (1999), p. 78. (Since France’s population was then around 35 millions, that works out to some 3.3 hectolitres of potatoes per capita. Even if we take away the same 60 per cent for livestock feed, that still leaves us with 134 litres of potatoes per person.) On Belgium, see Vanhaute, ‘Agrarian labour and food production’, pp. 146–7. 21 Mario Storchi, La vita quotidiana delle popolazioni meridionali dal 1800 alla Grande Guerra (Naples: Liguori, 1995), p. 20 n. 48. 22 Archivio di Stato, Naples, Ministero dell’Interno, inv. II, fasc. 1, 120, cit. in Domenico Coppola, ‘L’organizzazione sanitaria e l’alimentazione nel Regno di Napoli’, Paola Carucci (ed.), Gli Archivi per la storia dell’alimentazione (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 945–6. 23 J. F. W. Johnson, The potato disease in Scotland, being results of investigations into its nature and origins (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1845) [no page], cit. in Jean Ristaino, ‘Tracking historic migrations of the Irish potato famine pathogen, Phytophthera infestans’, Microbes and Infection, 4 (2002), pp. 1369–77. 24 Brian Haas, et al., ‘Genome sequence and analysis of the Irish potato famine pathogen Phytophthora infestans’, Nature, 461 (17 September 2009), pp. 393–8. 25 D. R. Glendinning, ‘Potato introductions and breeding up to the early 20th century’, The New Phytologist, 94 (1983), pp. 479–505, at pp. 493–4.

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26 W. D. Davidson, ‘History of potato varieties’, Journal of the Department of Agriculture of the Republic of Ireland, 33 (1934), pp. 57–81; see also Salaman, History, pp. 289–332; Larry Zuckerman, The potato: how the humble spud rescued the western world (New York: North Point Press, 1998), pp. 187–219; Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘The Lumper potato and the Famine’, History Ireland, 1(1) (1993), pp. 22–3. 27 Peter Solar, ‘The potato famine in Europe’, in Cormac Ó Gráda (ed.), Famine 150: commemorative lecture series (Dublin: Teagasc, 1997), pp. 113–27; Richard Paping, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Eric Vanhaute (eds), When the potato failed: causes and effects of the last European subsistence crisis, 1845–1850 (Thurnhout: Brepols, 2005), editor’s introduction, ‘The European subsistence crisis of 1845–1850: a comparative perspective’. By comparison, French potato production was much less affected. 28 J. C. Zadoks, ‘The potato murrain on the European continent and the revolutions of 1848’, Potato Research, 51 (2008), p. 40. 29 Paul Ginsborg, ‘Peasants and revolutionaries in Venice and the Veneto, 1848’, The Historical Journal, xvii (1974), pp. 503–50, at p. 509. 30 Historians debate the nature of the link, but see J. C. Zadoks, ‘Potato murrain’. 31 Biadene, Storia, p. 128. 32 Ginsborg, ‘Peasants and revolutionaries’, p. 514. 33 In Giulio Cesare Testa (ed.), Ovoledo racconta (Pordenone: Società di cultura del Friuli orientale, 1990), no page, cit. in Biadene, Storia, pp. 129–30. 34 Salaman, Potato varieties, pp. 7–10. 35 Carlo Siemoni (Karl Siemon), ‘Memoria sulla cultura delle patate’, MS, 5 March 1854, b. 81.143, Archivio dell’Accademia dei Georgofili, Florence. 36 Alas, both the museum and the company ran into hard times, but the Garnier Valletti collection of models survives, in Turin. Daniele Jalla (ed.), Il Museo della Frutta ‘Francesco Garnier Valletti’ (Milan: Officina Libraria, 2007). 37 Museo della Frutta: varietà di ‘frutti artificiali plastici’ di Francesco Garnier Valletti. Available online at: www.comune.torino.it/cultura/istitutoanatomia/Q_variet%E0_ frutti.pdf 38 Luigi Mucci, Discorsi agrari-parrocchiali per tutte le domeniche dell’anno (Naples: Sautto, 1852, 2 vols), vol. 2, p. 167, in Massafra, Campagne, p. 61. 39 Mucci, Discorsi, p. 115, in Massafra, Campagne, p. 61. 40 MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura, I, p. 881. 41 Ibid. 42 Valerio Castronovo, La storia economica: da contadini a operai, in Storia d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), vol. 7, p. 93. 43 Renzo Del Carria, Proletari senza rivoluzione: storia delle classi subalterne in Italia dal 1860 al 1950 (Rome: Savelli, 1977), vol. 1 (Dalle insurrezioni in Sicilia alla crisi del partito operaio: 1860–1892), pp. 141–57. 44 Two titles of many: Alessandro Garelli, Un nuovo progresso in agricoltura: le patate di gran reddito (Turin: Casanova, 1893), and A. Succi, ‘Prove di coltivazione delle patate con varietà dette: a gran reddito’, Giornale di viticultura e di enologia, vol. 5 (Avellino, 1897). 45 Ulderigo Somma, La coltivazione della patata (Asti: Tip. Cooperativa, 1904), p. 5. 46 Somma, Coltivazione, p. 16. 47 Somma, Coltivazione, p. 43.

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48 Pietro Venino, La patata (Milan: Antonio Vallardi, 1950), p. 81. 49 Somma, Coltivazione, p. 118. In 1874 Italian potato yields had been over three times higher, rather surpisingly, at 10.3 tonnes per hectare (Ministero, p. 317). In the period 1909–14 the yield was 5.7 tonnes per hectare (Bachi, p. 123), and in 1934 it reached 6.8 tonnes per hectare (Atti, 1935). Today’s potato yields are substantially higher: 25.5 tonnes per hectare in Italy (compared to 42.3 in Belgium). 50 Somma, Coltivazione, p. 5. 51 Alberto Caracciolo, L’inchiesta agraria Jacini (Turin: Einaudi, 1973). 52 Fausto Anderlini and Maria Angiola Gallingani, Montagne senza incanto. Un profilo storico-sociale della montagna bolognese: popolazione, risorse, regolazione politica (Bologna: CLUEB, 1989), pp. 1–2, 269–70. 53 On the limits to peasant self-sufficiency in Italy, see Carlo Barberis, ‘L’autoconsumo in Italia’, in Storia d’Italia, Annali 6: Economia naturale, economia monetaria (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), pp. 747–50. 54 Arrigo Serpieri, Il contratto agrario e le condizioni dei contadini nell’Alto Milanese (Milan, 1910), cit. in Paolo Sorcinelli, Gli italiani e il cibo (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1999), p. 176. 55 Carlo Amoretti, Della coltivazione delle patate e loro uso. Istruzione (1801; Rome: no publisher, 1802), p. 6. 56 Giambattista Marzari, Saggio medico-politico sulla pellagra o scorbuto italico (Venice: Gio. Parolari, 1810), pp. 58–9. 57 The only difference being that hopes were now pinned on a single potato variety, the ‘Matilde’, originally from Sweden and so well suited to upland areas in Italy. G. Frosini, ‘La patata Matilde’, in Rivista pellagrologica italiana, vii (1907), pp. 173–4. 58 Francesco Nobili Vitelleschi, Provincie di Roma e Grosseto, Atti della giunta per l’inchiesta agraria e sulle condizione della classe agricola (Rome, 1883), IX, part 1, pp. 792–4. 59 Richard Drake, ‘Sibilla Aleramo and the peasants of the Agro Romano: a writer’s dilemma’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 51 (1990), p. 259. 60 Vincenzo Padula, Antonello capobrigante calabrese: dramma in cinque atti [1864], Fausto Gullo (e.d.), (Milan: BUR, 1952), scene 1, act III. Available online at: www.liberliber.it 61 In nearby Basilicata, there was a similar saying: ‘Potatoes and peppers are for people’s health’. Both in Vito Teti, Storia del peperoncino. Un protagonista delle culture mediterranee (Rome: Donzelli, 2007), p. 115. 62 Núncia Santoro De Costantino, ‘Per ricordare Teresa. Sulle tracce di una donna tra Acquappesa e Porto Alegre’, Daedalus: Quaderni di Storia e Scienze Sociali, no. 20 (2007), p. 95. 63 Raffaele Valentini, general meeting of the Società economica di Calabria Citra, Cosenza, 30 May 1844, cit. in Oreste Parise, ‘Ci vuole proprio una bella patata’, Mezzoeuro: settimanale di informazione regionale (Cosenza), III(30) (15 May 2004). Available online at: www.oresteparise.it/articoli04/mezzo2004_20 64 According to the ‘Quinterno delle pezze ossiano liste giornaliere’, which lists ingredients bought for the marquiss’s table during the period 1834–6. Archivio di Stato, Cagliari, Reale Udienza: cause civili, b. 2,005, fasc. 22,350, cit. in Maria Valdès, ‘L’aristocrazia cagliaritana a tavola: cultura e abitudini alimentari fra ’700 e ’800’, Arch St Aliment, 3, p. 1987. 65 Archivio del Comune di Varese, Museo, fols. 10–11, cit. in Andreina Bazzi, ‘Il ricettario di Lucia Prinetti Adamoli’, Arch St Aliment, 2, pp. 1269, 1279.

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66 Giovanni Vialardi, Trattato di cucina, pasticceria moderna, credenza e relativa confettureria: basato sopra un metodo economico, semplice, signorile, e borghese (Turin: Favale, 1854). 67 Domenico Musci, Abbuffate reali. La storia d’Italia attraverso i menu di Casa Savoia (Turin: Ananke, 2007), pp. 60–2. 68 Musci, Abbuffate reali, pp. 84–6. 69 Musci, Abbuffate reali, pp. 80–1. 70 Polizia e cucina. Istruzioni a una cuoca piemontese del primo ’800 (Alba: Ordine dei Cavalieri del Tartufo, 1984). 71 First entry, dating from 2 February 1812, in Franco Tozzi (ed.), Pennino l’oste (Signa: Masso delle Fate, 1996), pp. 11–12. 72 Enrico Raseri (ed.), Materiali per l’etnologia italiana raccolti per la Società italiana di antropologia ed etnologia, chapters 5 and 6: ‘Alimenti e bevande prevalenti nella alimentazione dei poveri ed in quella dei ricchi’, Annali di statistica, series 2, VIII (Rome, 1879), cit. in Stefano Somogyi, ‘L’alimentazione nell’Italia unita’, Storia d’Italia, 16, Documenti: Gente d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), p. 847. 73 Francesco Casaretto, ‘I prezzi delle patate dal ’700 a oggi’, in Massimo Angelini (ed.), Le patate tradizionali della montagna genovese (Rapallo: Tipografia Emiliani, 1999), pp. 93–6. Available online at: www.caprifico.it/scritti/scritti_massimo/1999_le_patate_tradizionali_ libro.pdf 74 Somogyi, ‘Alimentazione nell’Italia’, p. 844. 75 In: MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura, 4, p. 162. 76 Scipio Slataper, Il mio Carso (1912; Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 1980), p. 3. Slataper was a native of Trieste, then still part of Austria, with a Slavic father and an Italian mother. His book is autobiographical, depicting scenes of daily life. 77 Giuseppe Conti, Firenze vecchia: storia, cronaca, aneddotica, costumi: 1799–1859 (Florence: Bemporad, 1899), p. 147. 78 Achille Spatuzzi and Luigi Somma, ‘Saggi igienici e medici sull’alimentazione del popolo minuto in Napoli’, in Sull’alimentazione del popolo minuto di Napoli. Lavori due, approvati dall’Accademia Pontaniana (Naples: Stamperia della R. Università, 1863), p. 63. 79 Marcellin Pellet, Naples contemporaine (Paris, 1894), Italian translation, Napoli contemporanea, 1888–1892 (Naples, 1989), p. 25, cit. in Pietro Tino, ‘Napoli e i suoi dintorni. Consumi alimentari e sistemi colturali nell’Ottocento’, Meridiana, 18 (1993), p. 67. 80 Matilde Serao, Il ventre di Napoli (1884; Naples: Delfino, 1973), p. 27. 81 Enrico De Renzi, ‘Sull’alimentazione del popolo minuto di Napoli’, in Sull’alimentazione del popolo minuto di Napoli. Lavori due, approvati dall’Accademia Pontaniana (Naples: Stamperia della R. Università, 1863), pp. 89–91. 82 Carol Helstosky, Garlic and oil: politics and food in Italy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), pp. 20–1. 83 F. Baleotti, ‘Aspetti e problemi dell’alimentazione a Bologna (1870–1900)’, tesi di laurea, University of Bologna, 1981–2, pp. 28–51, cit. in Sorcinelli, Italiani e il cibo, pp. 102–3. 84 Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, ‘Er ciscerone a spasso’, in Marcello Teodino (ed.), Tutti i sonetti romaneschi (Rome: Newton, 1998), p. 228. Available online at: www.liberliber.it 85 Belli, ‘Pe la Madonna de l’Assunta fest e comprianno de mi’ mojje’, in Teodino (ed.), Tutti i sonetti romaneschi p. 30. 86 Belli, ‘Li miseroschi’, in Teodino (ed.), Tutti i sonetti romaneschi, p. 433.

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Belli, ‘Lo stato d’innoscenza’, in Teodino (ed.), Tutti i sonetti romaneschi 455. Conti, Firenze vecchia, p. 207. Zuckerman, Potato, pp. 125–7. Ibid., p. 183. Horse was a not uncommon dish in many parts of Italy. Anna Gonnella, ‘L’assistenza pubblica a Trieste: l’alimentazione nell’Istituto dei poveri (1818–1918)’, in Paola Carucci (ed.), Gli archivi per la storia dell’alimentazione (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1995), vol. 3, p. 1606. Theodore Brinkmann, Economics of farm business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), no page, cit. in Paolo Conti, La leggenda del buon cibo italiano e altri miti alimentari contemporanei (Rome: Fazi, 2008), p. 25. Alberto De Bernardi, ‘Città e campagna nella storia contemporanea’, in Ruggiero Romano (ed.), Storia dell’economia italiana, L’età contemporanea: un paese nuovo (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), vol. 3 pp. 269–70. MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura. Somma, Coltivazione, p. 38. Nazzareno Diodato, ‘Climatic fluctuations in southern Italy since the 17th century: reconstruction with precipitation records at Benevento’, Climatic Change, 2007, no. 80, pp. 411–31, at p. 420. Lando Bortolotti, ‘Viabilità e sistemi infrastrutturali’, Storia d’Italia, Insediamenti e territorio (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), vol. 26, esp. pp.320–36. MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura, vol.1, p. 316 and vol.4, p. 273. MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura, vol. 4, p. 281. The variety is mentioned by Karl Siemon in 1854 as cultivated in the Casentino, and is the ‘Sächsische-Zwiebel’, known as the ‘Rouge de Bohème’ in France. The English version of the Vilmorin-Andrieux nursery catalogue refers to it as ‘a late but very vigorous growing and very productive variety. The tubers keep well, and contain a considerable proportion of starch’. W. Robinson (ed.), The vegetable garden (London: John Murray, 1885), p. 478. Mazzini, Toscana agricola, p. 92. The same expansion and concentration happed in other agricultural sectors, like citrus fruits growing in southern Italy. In the same period, from 1871–74 to 1894–97, Italy went from exporting a quarter (24 per cent) of its citrus fruit production to just over a half (53 %). Emilio Sereni, History of the Italian agricultural landscape, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 294. Atti della giunta sull’inchiesta agraria e sulle condizioni della classe agricola, provincia di Genova, vol. X (Rome, 1883), no pg., cit. in Massimo Angelini (ed.), Le patate tradizionali della montagna genovese (Rapallo: Tipografia Emiliani, 1999), p. 24. MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura, vol. 1, p. 315. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 194. Atti della giunta per la inchiesta agraria e sulle condizioni della classe agricola, vol. VII, Terza Circoscrizione [Campania], Fedele De Siervo (ed.), (Rome: Forzani, 1882), p. 24. Atti inchiesta agraria, vol. VII, p. 53. MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura, vol. 1, p. 317. Domenico Moschitti, ‘Sui progressi delle manifatture, dell’agricoltura, della pastorizia e delle industrie dal 1815 in fino ad ora’, Annali civili del Regno delle Due Sicilie, cx (Nov.– Dec. 1855), p. 113, cit. in Palmieri, ‘Offerta di stato’, p. 149.

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108 MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura, vol. 4, p. 344. 109 Sidney Sonnino, I contadini in Sicilia (Florence: 1877), no page, cit. in Riccardo Bachi, L’alimentazione e la politica annonaria in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1926; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of Economics and History), p. 5, n. 1. 110 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (1972; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), vol. 1, p. 39. 111 Grazia Deledda, Cenere [1904], Eng. trans. Jan Kozma, Ashes (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), p. 33. Writing mainly about the rural dispossessed of her native island, Deledda (1871–1936) was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1926, only the second Italian to win the prize, after Giosuè Carducci, and the second woman to do so. 112 Deledda, Ashes, p. 32. 113 Vittorio Angius and Goffredo Casalis, Dizionario geografico-storico-statistico-commerciale degli stati di S. M. il re di Sardegna (Turin, 1833–7; Bologna: Forni, 1971), pp. 63, 268, cit. in Guigoni, America in Sardegna, p. 190. At the rate of one starello to 50.5 litres, 4,000 starelli are 202,000 litres. At our conversion rate of one litre of potatoes equals 0.714 kg, this works out at 144,228 kg. 114 Unnamed author, ‘Coltivazione delle patate e loro usi particolari’, Memorie della Reale Società agraria ed economica di Cagliari (Cagliari, 1837), p. 347, cit. in Guigoni, America in Sardegna, pp. 198–9. 115 Angius and Casalis, Dizionario, p. 664, cit. in Guigoni, America in Sardegna, p. 191. 116 F. Salaris, Relazione sulla xii circoscrizione (province di Sassari e Cagliari), xiv, fasc. 1, Atti della giunta per l’inchiesta argaria e sulle condizioni della classe agricola (Rome, 1885), pp. 286, 364, cit. in Guigoni, America in Sardegna, p. 199. 117 Emilio Nasalli Rocca, Un governatore di Borgotaro nel ’700: il cavaliere D. Guglielmo Power (Parma: Tipografia Cooperativa, 1939). 118 [Giambattista Guatteri], Nomenclatura plantarum horti regii botanici parmensis anno 1791 (Parma: Bodoni, [1792]), where the potato is listed as Solanum Zanonii, in honour of Antonio Zanon, rather than Solanum tuberosum. 119 Antonio Boccia, ‘Itinerario e descrizione geografica, fisica, storica e statistica dei monti e delle valli dello Stato di Parma e Piacenza’, MS., 1804, Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, pp. 345, 351, cit. in Giancarlo Gonizzi, introduction to Federica Pasqualetti, La patata, regina della terra (Parma: Monte Università, 2008), p. 18. 120 Sereni, Italian agricultural landscape, pp. 265–6. 121 MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura, vol. 4, pp. 244–5, 246. 122 MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura, vol. 4, p. 287. 123 Mazzini, Toscana agricola, pp. 77, 313.

Notes to Chapter 5: ‘Up Here it Makes More Sense to Plant Potatoes’: Potatoes, Population and Emigration in Italy’s Mountain Regions 1 Il Montanaro [Pievepelago, Modena], 1 November 1883, in Monica Bertugli, ‘L’emigrazione delle comunità montane dell’Appennino modenese ovest dall’Unità d’Italia al secondo dopoguerra’, tesi di laurea, Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, supervisor Giovanni Muzzioli, 2001–2, pp. 49–51.

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2 Ibid. 3 Michele Colucci and Matteo Sanfilippo, Guida allo studio dell’emigrazione italiana (Viterbo: SetteCittà, 2010), pp. 7–11. 4 Massimo Quaini, ‘Dalla Corsica alle Alpi marittime: alla ricerca di un laboratorio storico sulla montagna mediterranea’, in Dionigi Albera and Paola Corti (eds), La montagna mediterranea: una fabbrica d’uomini? Mobilità e migrazioni in una prospettiva comparata (secoli XV–XX) (Cavallermaggiore: Gribaudo, 2000), p. 187. 5 Peppino Ortoleva, ‘La tradizione e l’abbondanza. Riflessioni sulla cucina degli italiani d’America’, Altreitalie, VII (1992). Available online edition at: www.altreitalie.it 6 Ercole Sori, L’emigrazione italiana dall’Unità alla second guerra mondiale (Bologna: il Mulino, 1979), p. 24. 7 Potato production figures in Ministero dell’Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Relazione intorno alle condizioni dell’agricoltura nel quinquennio 1870–1874 (Roma: Barbera, 1875–8), 1, pp. 315–17; emigration figures in Sori, Emigrazione italiana, pp. 26–7. There is little corelation for the provinces of central Italy, both because these were relatively minor sources of emigration, and because the two provinces from which there was mass emigration, Massa Carrara and Lucca, were relatively minor producers of potatoes in 1874. 8 William Langer, ‘Europe’s initial population explosion’, American Historical Review, 69 (1963), p. 14. 9 John Kombs, ‘The New World’s contribution to food consumption during the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of European Economic History, 27 (1998), pp. 68, 74; Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, ‘The potato’s contribution to population and urbanization: evidence from an historical experiment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(2) (2011), pp. 593–650; Zuckerman, Potato, pp. 220–8. 10 Pier Paolo Viazzo, ‘Migrazione e mobilità in area alpina: scenari demografici e fattori socio-strutturali’, Histoire des Alpes/Storia delle Alpi/Geschichte der Alpen, vol. 3 (1998), pp. 37–48, and Pier Paolo Viazzo, ‘Il modello alpino dieci anni dopo’, in Dionigi Albera and Paola Corti (eds), La montagna mediterranea: una fabbrica d’uomini? Mobilità e migrazioni in una prospettiva comparata (secoli XV–XX) (Cavallermaggiore: Gribaudo, 2000), pp. 31–46. 11 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (1972; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1, pp. 25–53. 12 Braudel, Mediterranean world, 1, pp. 33, 41, 51. 13 As far as the Italian government is concerned, ‘mountain’ municipalities are those which have at least 80 per cent of their surface area at over 600 metres above sea level, or at least 30 per cent of whose inhabitants live at over 600 metres, or which are located amidst other mountain municipalities, or towns of less than 3,000 inhabitants located on the fringes of mountainous areas. RAI: guidelines, ‘Linee guida sull’ambiente e la montagna’. Available online at: www.segretariatosociale.rai.it/codici/codice_montagna 14 Vera Zamagni, The Economic history of Italy, 1860–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 56. 15 Tullio Romualdi, ‘Dinamica evolutiva dell’agricoltura di collina e di montagna’, [no editor] Aspetti economici, estimativi e normativi dell’utilizzazione del suolo: atti del XIV incontro di studio (Florence: Centro Studi di Estimo e di Economia Territoriale, 1984), pp. 197–9.

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16 Gauro Coppola, ‘La montagna alpina: vocazioni originarie e trasformazioni funzionali’, in Piero Bevilacqua (ed.), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, vol. 1, Spazi e paesaggi (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), p. 514. 17 Valerio Castronovo, La storia economica, in Storia d’Italia, vol. 7, Dall’Unità a oggi: da contadini a operai (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), pp. 31–2. 18 Paola Corti and Matteo Sanfilippo, ‘Introduzione’, in Storia d’Italia, Annali 24 (Torino: Einaudi, 2009), p. xx. 19 Surveyed in Luigi Trezzi, ‘In tema di storiografia dell’economia alpina’, in Andrea Leonardi and Andrea Bonoldi (eds), L’economia della montagna interna italiana: un approccio storiografico (Trento: Stamperia dell’Università, 1998), pp. 6–16. 20 Antonio Lazzarini, ‘Degrado ambientale e isolamento economico: elementi di crisi della montagna bellunese dell’Ottocento’, in Antonio Lazzarini and Ferruccio Vendramini (eds), La montagna veneta in età contemporanea: storia e ambiente, uomini e risorse (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1991), pp. 50–60. 21 Viazzo, ‘Migrazione e mobilità’. 22 On earlier migratory patterns, see Giovanni Levi, Elena Fasano and Marco Della Pina, ‘Movimenti migratori in Italia nell’età moderna’, Bollettino di demografia storica, 12 (1990), pp. 19–34; and Giovanni Pizzorusso, ‘I fenomeni migratori a lungo raggio in Italia dal XV al XVIII secolo: un percorso storiografico’, Bollettino di demografia storica, 12 (1990), pp. 45–54; Giovanni Pizzorusso, ‘Mobilità e flussi migratori prima dell’età moderna: una lunga introduzione’, Archivio storico dell’emigrazione italiana, 3 (2007), pp. 205–22. 23 Domenico Sella, ‘Au dossier des migrations montagnardes: l’exemple de la Lombardie au XVIIe siècle’, [no editor], Mélanges en l’honneur de F. Braudel, 1: Histoire économique du monde méditerranéen, 1450–1650 (Toulouse: Privat, 1973), pp. 547–54. 24 Raul Merzario, ‘Una fabbrica di uomini. L’emigrazione dalla montagna comasca (1600–1750 circa)’, Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome. Temps modernes, 96(1) (1984), pp. 153–75. 25 Fabio Bettoni and Alberto Grohmann, ‘La montagna appenninica: paesaggi ed economie’, in Piero Bevilacqua (ed.), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, vol. 1, Spazi e paesaggi (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), p. 586. 26 Sergio Pretelli, ‘Microimprendere nell’Appennino umbro-marchigiano in età moderna e contemporanea’, in Leonardi and Bonoldi, Economia della montagna (Technical Report 1, Economia, Università di Trento, 1999), pp. 50–69. 27 Renzo Sabbatini, ‘Risorse produttive e imprenditorialità nell’Appennino tosco-emiliano (XVII–XIX sec.)’, in Leonardi and Bonoldi, Economia della montagna, p. 19. 28 Roland Sarti, Long live the strong: a history of rural society in the Apennine mountains (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), pp. 35–7, 81. 29 Raniero Paulucci di Calboli, Lacrime e sorrisi dell’emigrazione italiana ([1909] Milan: Mondadori, 1996), p. 68. 30 Giuliana Biagioli, ‘The spread of mezzadria in central Italy: a model of demographic and economic development’, in Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux (eds), Evolution agraire et croissance démographique (Liège: Ordina Editions, 1987), pp. 139–53. 31 Alberto Corsini, ‘Le migrazioni stagionali di lavoratori nei dipartimenti italiani nel periodo napoleonic (1810–1812)’, in AA. VV., Saggi di demografia storica (Florence: Dipartimento statistico-matematico, 1969), pp. 89–157.

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32 Adriana Dadà, ‘Uomini e strade dell’emigrazione dall’Appennino toscano’, in Albera and Corti, La montagna mediterranea, p. 153. 33 Bertugli, ‘Emigrazione delle comunità montane’, p. 22. 34 Dadà, ‘Uomini e strade’, p. 156. 35 Sarti, Long live the strong, p. 115. 36 Dadà, ‘Uomini e strade’, p. 154. 37 Sarti, Long live the strong, pp. 117–20. 38 Rudolph Vecoli, paper delivered at the fifth international conference of the Associazione Lucchesi nel Mondo, Chicago 1992, cit. in Dadà, ‘Uomini e strade’, p. 158. 39 Giuseppe Maria Galanti, Della descrizione geografica e politica delle Sicilie [1789–94], no page, cit. in Bettoni and Grohmann, ‘Montagna appenninica’, p. 608. 40 J. R. McNeill, The mountains of the Mediterranean world: an environmental history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 263. 41 Riccardo Bacchelli, Il mulino del Po (Mondadori: Milan, 1997), vol. 2, La miseria viene in barca, p. 524. Bacchelli is relating the effects of disastrous flooding along the banks of the Po in the spring of 1873. 42 Bettoni and Grohmann, ‘Montagna appenninica’, pp. 617–18, 631, 638–40. 43 Raffaele Quaranta, ‘Monografia agraria della provincia di Aquila’, in Atti della giunta per la inchiesta agraria e sulle condizioni della classe agricola, vol. XII (Rome: Forzani, 1885), p. 17, in Bettoni and Grohmann, ‘Montagna appenninica’, pp. 634–5. 44 Gabriele De Rosa, ‘Premessa’, in Gabriele De Rosa and Antonio Cestaro (eds), Territorio e società nella storia del Mezzogiorno (Naples: Guida, 1973), p. 13. 45 Pietro Tino, ‘La montagna meridionale: boschi, uomini, economie tra Otto e Novecento’, in Piero Bevilacqua (ed.), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, vol. 1, Spazi e paesaggi (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), p. 695. 46 Piero Bevilacqua, ‘Uomini, terre, economie’, in Piero Bevilacqua and Augusto Placanica (eds), Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi, La Calabria (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), pp. 165–6, cit. in Tino, ‘Montagna meridionale’, p. 707. 47 Sori, Emigrazione italiana, p. 110. 48 Tino, ‘Montagna meridionale’, pp. 723–4. 49 Tino, ‘Montagna meridionale’, esp. pp. 679–94; Maurizio Gangemi, ‘L’economia dell’Appennino calabro-lucano tra XVIII e XIX secolo negli studi dell’ultimo ventennio’, in Leonardi and Bonoldi, Economia della montagna, pp. 70–81. 50 Matteo Sanfilippo, ‘La storiografia sui fenomeni migratori a lungo raggio nell’Italia dell’età contemporanea’, Bollettino di demografia storica, 12 (1990), p. 58. 51 Gino Massullo, ‘Mobilità territoriale e quadri ambientali in Molise tra Otto e Novecento’, in Albera and Corti, Montagna mediterranea, pp. 148–9. 52 Marcel Aymard, ‘Le Sicile, terre d’immigration’, in [no editor] Les migrations dans les pays méditerranéens au XVIIIe et au début de XIXe (Nice: Centre de la Méditerranée moderne et contemporaine, 1974), pp. 134–57; Sanfilippo, ‘Fenomeni migratori’, p. 59. 53 Nereide Rudas, ‘L’emigrazione sarda: caratteristiche strutturali e dinamiche’, Studi emigrazione, vol. 11, no. 34 (1974), p. 183. 54 Marchese, Benedetta patata, p. 153. 55 Alessandra Guigoni, ‘L’introduzione del Solanum tuberosum in Sardegna. Due documenti editi dalla Reale società agraria ed economica di Cagliari’, Archivio di etnografia, n.s. II

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64

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(2007), p. 103; Alessandra Guigoni, Alla scoperta dell’America in Sardegna. Vegetali americani nell’alimentazione sarda (Cagliari: AM&D Edizioni, 2009), pp. 232–3. In a similar way, the Irish would plant at least one seed potato on Easter Friday, even if this came a bit early for potato planting, symbolically accompanying Jesus’s descent in death and the tomb before his resurrection three days later, and so bestowing a blessing on the harvest. Alfredo Cattabiani, Florario: miti, leggende e simboli di fiori e piante (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), p. 363. Atti inchiesta agraria, VII, p. 257. Somma, Coltivazione, p. 40. Harley Milstead, ‘Distribution of crops in Peru’, Economic Geography, 4 (1928), p. 97. Stephen Brush, ‘Man’s use of an Andean ecosystem’, Human Ecology, 4: 2 (1976), pp. 149–50. Stephen Brush, ‘Ethnoecology, biodiversity, and modernization in Andean potato agriculture’, Journal of Ethnobiology, 12: 2 (1992), p. 167. Brush, ‘Ethnoecology’, p. 180. Brush, ‘Andean ecosystem’, pp. 159–60. Archivio di Stato, Venice, Atti preparativi del catasto austriaco, b. 215, cit. in Elisabetta Mosena, ‘Famiglia, territorio, emigrazione e risorse a Forno in Val di Zoldo (Belluno)’, La Ricerca Folklorica, no. 37 (April 1998), p. 56. Gianpiero Dalla Zuanna and Marzia Loghi, Popolazione e popolazioni. Studi territoriali preliminari alla storia della popolazione veneta (Padua: CLEUP, 1997), pp. 20–1, cit. in Viazzo, ‘Modello alpino’, p. 39. Antonio Lazzarini, ‘Movimenti migratori dalle vallate bellunesi fra Settecento e Ottocento’, in Giovanni Luigi Fontana, Andrea Leonardi and Luigi Trezzi (eds), Mobilità imprenditoriale e del lavoro nelle Alpi in età moderna e contemporanea (Milan: CUESP, 1998), pp. 193–208. Mosena, ‘Famiglia’, p. 64. Daniela Perco, ‘Strategie di conservazione del cibo nella montagna bellunese tra Otto e Novecento’, Histoire des Alpes/Storia delle Alpi/Geschichte der Alpen, vol. 13 (2008), p. 78. Gino Redoano Coppedé, Le condizioni economiche, sociali e demografiche della provincia di Levante fra il primo e il secondo decennio della unione della Liguria al Piemonte (La Spezia: Camera di Commercio, 1986), no page, cit. in Salvatore Marchese, Benedetta patata (Padua: Muzzio, 1999), pp. 19–20. Archivio del Comune di Bellinzago, Serie III, b. 145, cit. in Giampietro Morreale, ‘L’alimentazione a Novara e nel Novarese tra fine Settecento e fine Ottocento attraverso i documenti dell’Archivio di Stato di Novara’, in Arch St Aliment, vol. 3, p. 1780. No potato consumption had been recorded 25 years earlier in Bellinzago. Giovanni Battarra, Pratica agraria distribuita in varj dialoghi (Cesena: Biasini, 1782), p. 137. Quoted in Anderlini and Gallingani, Montagne senza incanto, p. 269. Fabrizio Leoni, ‘Il ruolo delle castagne nell’alimentazione in Valtellina’, in Paola Carucci (ed.), Gli Archivi per la storia dell’alimentazione (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1995, 3 vols), 3, 1687–1702. Giovanni Cherubini, ‘La “civiltà” del castagno in Italia alla fine del Medioevo’, Archeologia medievale, VIII (1981), p. 247.

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74 Giuseppe Galasso, Economia e società nella Calabria del Cinquecento (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975), p. 182. 75 Central State Archives, Prague, Rodinný Archiv Toskánskych Habsburkú [Family Archive of the Hapsburgs of Tuscany], Petr Leopold, 54, ‘Pregevolissima relazione istorica, fisica e politica della Toscana fatta da Raimondo Cocchi alla venuta del granduca Pietro Leopoldo’, no page, cit. in Lucia Bonelli Conenna, ‘Nel paesaggio toscano: cipressi, vigne, ulivi e . . . ginestre, giaggioli e zafferano’, L. Bonelli Conenna, A. Brilli and G. Cantelli (eds), Il paesaggio toscano: storia e rappresentazione (Milan: Silvana, 2004), pp. 32–3 and 83 n. 66. 76 Bettoni and Grohmann, ‘Montagna appenninica’, p. 595. 77 Sarti, Long live the strong, p. 80. 78 Calendario casentinese per l’anno 1837 (Arezzo: Bellotti, 1836), pp. 95, 109–10, on the town of Poppi and area, and Calendario casentinese per l’anno 1841 (Florence: Piatti, 1841), pp. 34, 47, on Castel San Niccolò and area. 79 Carlo Siemoni (Karl Siemon), ‘Memoria sulla cultura delle patate’, MS, 5 March 1854, b. 81.143. See also, Lucia Bigliazzi, Luciana Bigliazzi and Nicola Siemoni, Il selvicoltore del granduca: Carlo Siemoni (1805–1878) (Florence: Accademia dei Georgofili, 2004), and Elsa Luttazzi Gregori, ‘Fattori e fattorie nella pubblicistica Toscana fra settecento e ottocento’, in G. Cherubini (ed.), Contadini e proprietari nella Toscana moderna (Florence: Olschki, 1981, 2 vols), vol. 2, pp. 5–83, at p. 74. On the ‘Cetica’ variety, see V. Vecchio, L. Ghiselli, S. Romagnoli, ‘Qualità e tipicità in Toscana’, in Zeffiro Ciuffolletti and Giuliano Pinto (eds), Desinari nostrali. Storia dell’alimentazione a Firenze e in Toscana (Florence: Polistampa, 2005), p. 250. 80 Carlo Massimiliano Mazzini, La Toscana agricola. Sulle condizioni dell’agricoltura nelle provincie di Firenze, Arezzo, Siena, Lucca, Pisa e Livorno (Florence: Telemaco Giani, 1884), p. 357. 81 According to Federico De Giacomo, permanent secretary of the province’s Società Economica, writing in the summer of 1860. Archivio di Stato, Naples, Ministero di agricoltura, industria e commercio, b. 136, in Massafra, Campagne, p. 61. 82 Raffaele Quaranta, ‘Monografia agraria della provincia di Aquila’, in Atti della giunta per la inchiesta agraria e sulle condizioni della classe agricola, vol. XII (Rome: Forzani, 1885), p. 29, cit. in Bettoni and Grohmann, ‘Montagna appenninica’, p. 634. 83 Domenico Moschitti, ‘Su’ progressi delle manifatture, dell’agricoltura, della pastorizia e delle industrie nelle provincie continentali del Regno, dal 1815 in fino ad ora’, Annali civili (1855), no. 109, pp. 90–2, cit. in Piero Bevilacqua, ‘Clima, mercato e paesaggio agrario nel Mezzogiorno’, in Piero Bevilacqua (ed.), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, vol. 1, Spazi e paesaggi (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), p. 665. 84 G. A. Pasquale, Relazione sullo stato fisico-economico-agrario della Prima Calabria Ulteriore (Naples, 1863), pp. 193–4, cit. in Walter Palmieri, ‘L’“offerta di stato” nell’agricoltura meridionale del primo Ottocento: trasformazioni e vincoli’, Meridiana, IX (1996), pp. 133–66, at p. 149, n. 18. 85 According to the Palermo-published journal L’Iride, 1822, pp. 132–3, in Carmelo Trasselli, ‘Su la prima introduzione delle patate in Sicilia’, in Rivista di storia dell’agricoltura, 2 (1962), p. 49. 86 ‘Relazione topografica agrarian economica del territorio di Piana’, Effemeridi scientifiche e letterarie [Palermo], xiii (1835), p. 50, in Trasselli, ‘Patate in Sicilia’, p. 49.

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87 Annali d’agricoltura siciliana, x (1862), pp. 200, 218, cit. in Trasselli, ‘Patate in Sicilia’, p. 56. 88 Annali d’agricoltura siciliana, xix (1870), pp. 274, cit. in Trasselli, ‘Patate in Sicilia’, p. 56. 89 Antonio Ronzon, ‘I paesi ignorati d’Italia. Il Cadore’, L’Illustrazione italiana, vol. 4, no. 16, 21 April 1878, cit. in Emilio Franzina, ‘L’emigrazione dalla montagna veneta fra Otto e Novecento’, in Antonio Lazzarini and Ferruccio Vendramini (eds), La montagna veneta in età contemporanea: storia e ambiente, uomini e risorse (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1991), p. 189. 90 Italo Giglioli, Malessere agrario e alimentare in Italia (Rome: Loescher, 1903), no page, cit. in Alberto Capatti, Alberto De Bernardi, Angelo Varni, ‘Introduzione’, Storia d’Italia, Annali 13: L’alimentazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), p. xli. 91 Massimo Livi Bacci, Population and nutrition: an essay in European demographic history, trans. T. Croft-Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 96. 92 Michael Haines, ‘Growing incomes, shrinking people: can economic development be hazardous to your health? Historical evidence for the United States, England, and the Netherlands in the nineteenth century’, Social Science History, vol. 28, no. 2 (2004), pp. 249–70; J. W. Drukker and P. G. Tassenaar, ‘Paradoxes of modernization and material well-being in the Netherlands during the nineteenth century’, in R. H. Steckel and R. Flouds (eds), Health and welfare during industrialization (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), pp. 331–79. 93 Atti della giunta per la inchiesta agraria e sulle condizioni della classe agricola, vol. IV, Veneto, Emilio Morpurgo (ed.) (Rome: Forzani, 1882), p. 471. 94 Atti inchiesta agraria, IV, p. 152. 95 Antonio Maresio Bazolle, Il possidente bellunese (MS 1890s), Daniela Perco (e.d.), (Feltre: Comunità montana feltrina, 1986, 2 vols.), vol. 2, p. 74, cit. in Lucia Fontana, ‘Emigrazione e famiglia a Tisoi (Belluno)’, La Ricerca Folklorica, no. 37 (April 1998), p. 22. 96 Atti inchiesta agraria, IV, p. 182. 97 Atti inchiesta agraria, IV, p. 51. 98 Atti inchiesta agraria, IV, p. 100. 99 Sori, Emigrazione italiana, pp. 26–7. 100 Commissariato generale dell’emigrazione, Annuario statistico della emigrazione italiana dal 1876 al 1925 (Roma: Tip. Universale, 1926), pp. 44, 49. 101 Antonio Lazzarini, ‘Degrado ambientale’, p. 49. 102 Lazzarini, ‘Degrado ambientale’, p. 48. 103 Lorenzo Del Panta, ‘Infant and child mortality in Italy, eighteenth to twentieth century: long-term trends and territorial differences’, in Alain Bideau, Bertrand Desjardins and Héctor Pérez Brignoli (eds), Infant and child mortality in the past (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 9. 104 Ercole Sori, ‘Malattia e demografia’, in Franco Della Peruta (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 7. Malattia e medicina (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), pp. 544–5. 105 Tino, ‘Montagna meridionale’, pp. 705–6; Sori, Emigrazione italiana, p. 25. 106 Lorenzo Del Panta and Maria Elena Forini, ‘Disponibilità alimentari e tendenze della mortalità in Italia: un tentativo di analisi per il periodo 1861–1921’, Bollettino di demografia storica, no. 20 (1994), pp. 112–13, 116. 107 Ibid., pp. 118–19.

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108 Nunn and Qian, ‘Potato’s contribution’. 109 Piero Bevilacqua, ‘Società rurale e emigrazione’, in Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi and Emilio Franzina (eds), Storia dell’emigrazione italiana: partenze (Rome: Donzelli, 2001), pp. 102–4. 110 Sori, Emigrazione italiana, p. 104. 111 Commissariato generale dell’emigrazione, Annuario statistico della emigrazione italiana dal 1876 al 1925 (Roma: Tip. Universale, 1926), p. 49. 112 Giovanni Salvi, ‘Continuità e cambiamento in una comunità dell’Appennino: Bertassi nei secoli XIX e XX’, Quaderni storici, vol. 16 (1981), pp. 130–52. 113 Pier Paolo Viazzo, Upland communities: environment, population and social structure in the Alps since the sixteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); J. R. McNeill, The mountains of the Mediterranean world: an environmental history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 114 Viazzo, Upland communities, pp. 110–11. 115 Robert Netting, Balancing on an Alp: ecological change and continuity in a Swiss mountain community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 159, 162–3. 116 Viazzo, Upland communities, pp. 213–14. Elsewhere in the same mountain valley, potatoes became a mainstay in the way they did not in Alagna. In Rimella, older villagers told Viazzo (in the 1980s) that in the past no grains had ever been cultivated, only potatoes. 117 McNeill, Mountains, pp. 108–11. 118 Archivio Centrale di Stato, Rome, Archivi Parlamentari, ‘Giunta parlamentare per l’inchiesta agraria sulle condizioni della classe agricola’, busta 3 (Basilicata), fasc. Lagonegro, fols. 19–22, in McNeill, Mountains, p. 129. 119 Deforestation was largely responsible for the over 60 per cent decrease in the annual chestnut harvest between 1874 and 1903. Italo Giglioli, Malessere agrario ed alimentare in Italia (Portici: Tip. Vesuviano, 1903), pp. 206–7. 120 Francesco Nitti (ed.), Inchiesta parlamentare sulle condizioni dei contadini nelle provincie meridionali e nella Sicilia, vol. V, Basilicata e Calabria (Rome: Bertero, 1909–10), p. 105, in McNeill, Mountains, p. 334. 121 McNeill, Mountains, p. 334, note 161. 122 Viazzo, Upland communities, pp. 101–2. 123 Emilio De Marchi, ‘Chi non cerca trova’, one-act play (undated but prior to his death in 1901), Oggi si recita in casa dello zio Emilio: commedie e monologhia per bambini (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1925). Available online at: www.liberliber.it 124 David Gentilcore, Pomodoro! A history of the tomato in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 99–132. 125 Vito Teti, Storia del peperoncino. Un protagonista delle culture mediterranee (Rome: Donzelli, 2007), pp. 6–7. ‘Patate ’mpacchiuse’ (literally, ‘stuck-together potatoes’) is a typical dish in the Cosenza area, sliced potatoes slowly cooked in a little oil. 126 Joe Pieri, The Scots-Italians: recollections of an immigrant (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2005); Chiara Ghilardi, ‘Dall’esodo all’immigrazione in Val di Serchio: movimenti di popolazione verso e dalla Gran Bretagna’, in [no editor], Il mare in basso: terzo convegno internazionale sulla montagna ligure e mediterranea (Genoa: Marconi, 1999), pp. 101–5.d

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Notes to Chapter 6: ‘New and Broader Horizons’: The Twentieth Century 1 Touring Club Italiano, Guida gastronomica d’Italia (Milan: Mondaini, 1931; anastatic reprint 2003), pp. 4, 5. On the promotion of ‘regional rebirth’ as part of Fascist policy, see Stefano Cavazza, Piccole patrie.Feste popolari tra regione e nazione durante il fascismo (Bologna: il Mulino, 2003), chapter one. It is now standard practice to view Italian cookery from this regional perspective, but when the guide was published it was quite new. Towards the end of the previous century Pellegrino Artusi had offered numerous regional and local dishes in his continually expanding cookery book (see below); but regionality had never been its organising principle. 2 Edmond Richardin, La géographie des gourmets au pays de France (Paris: Touring-Club de France, 1914), as discussed in Alberto Capatti’s introduction to the TCI re-edition of 2003, pp. 9–10. 3 There is no documentary evidence of the legacy, but the ‘baccanale dei gnocchi’ has a long history within the city’s carnival traditions, a celebration of abundance in the form of vast cauldrons of gnocchi served up as part of the revelries which preceded the rigours of Lent. Françoise Decroisette, ‘Carnavals urbains en Italie: la bacchanale ou cocagne des gnocchi à Vérone’, in F. Decroisette and M. Plaisance (eds), Les fêtes urbaines en Italie à l’époque de la Renaissance: Verone, Florence, Sienne, Naples (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993), pp. 31–63. 4 Franz Herre, Francesco Giuseppe (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), p. 140, cit. in Corrado Barberis, Mangitalia: la storia d’Italia servita in tavola (Rome: Donzelli, 2010), pp. 72–3. 5 Carol Helstosky, Garlic and oil: politics and food in Italy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), pp. 98–9. 6 Domenico Musci, Abbuffate reali. La storia d’Italia attraverso i menu di Casa Savoia (Turin: Ananke, 2007), pp. 39, 40. 7 Pellegrino Artusi, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (Florence, 1891; Turin: Einaudi, 1995, ed. Piero Camporesi), pp. 66, 82, 125–6, 206–7, 389–92. 8 Domenico Orano, Come vive il popolo a Roma: saggio demografico sul quartier Testaccio (Pescara: Ettore Croce, 1912), cit. in Helstosky, Garlic and oil, p. 34. 9 P. G. Grimelli, Metodi pratici per fare al bisogno pane e vino con ogni economia e salubrità nelle circostanze specialmente di carestia (1854), no place no page, cit. in Ada Lonni, ‘Dall’alterazione all’adulterazione: le sofisticazioni alimentari nella società industriale’, Alberto Capatti, Alberto De Bernardi, and Angelo Varni (eds), Storia d’Italia, Annali 13, L’alimentazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), p. 534. 10 Ulderigo Somma, La coltivazione della patata (Asti: Tip. Cooperativa, 1904), p. 123. Somma noted how in some areas of the Apennines and the Alps, it was customary to mix cooked potatoes with flour in bread-making. The result could be ‘quite good’, if the potatoes were worked in well with the flour and if the proportion of potatoes was not excessive. If it provided people with less nutrition than wheat bread, it at least hardened more slowly. 11 Maria Paola Moroni Salvatori, ‘Ragguaglio bibliografico sui ricettari del primo Novecento’, in Alberto Capatti, Alberto De Bernardi and Angelo Varni (eds), Storia d’Italia, Annali 13, L’alimentazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), p. 891. 12 Cento maniere di preparare le patate (Milan: Sonzogno, 1906, in the series ‘Biblioteca Casalinga’; reprinted 1927).

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13 Alfred Suzanne, Cent manières d’accommoder et de manger les pommes de terre (Paris: Frank, 1891, in the series ‘L’art culinaire’). Suzanne, a native of Normandy, spent much of his career in England and was chef to the duke of Bedford, before returning to France in 1887. Amy Trubeck, Haute cuisine: how the French invented the culinary profession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 77. 14 MAIC, Condizioni dell’agricoltura, 1, p. 317; Bachi, Riccardo, L’alimentazione e la politica annonaria in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1926, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of Economics and History), pp. 40, 68. 15 Indeed the annual value of the potato crop was only slightly higher than chestnut production. Bachi, Alimentazione, pp. 40, 50. 16 Bachi, Alimentazione, pp. 40, 50. 17 Alfredo Panzini, ‘I martiri dello stomaco’, chapter ten in his Lanterna di Diogene (1907), in Massimo Montanari (ed.), Convivio oggi. Storia e cultura dei piaceri della tavola nell’età contemporanea (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1992), p. 228. 18 Somma, Coltivazione, p. 139. 19 Mario Rigoni Stern, Storia di Tönle (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), pp. 50, 70, 71. 20 Helstosky, Garlic and oil, p. 51. 21 Assunta Trova, ‘L’approvigionamento alimentare dell’esercito italiano dall’Unità alla seconda guerra mondiale’, Storia d’Italia, Annali 13, L’alimentazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), at p. 501. 22 Gaetano Zingali, ‘Il rifornimento dei viveri dell’esercito italiano durante la guerra’, appendix to Bachi, Alimentazione, p. 540. 23 Zingali, ‘Rifornimento’, pp. 554–5. 24 Helstosky, Garlic and oil, p. 44. 25 Bachi, Alimentazione, p. 493. 26 Helstosky, Garlic and oil, p. 50. 27 Helstosky, Garlic and oil, pp. 53, 56. 28 Marinetti criticized the ‘biquotidian pasta pyramid’ for slowing down the Italian race; but in his ‘formulas’ – Futurist for ‘recipe’ – Marinetti found a place for the potato in its most reduced forms, potato starch and poltiglia (the word he used instead of the French purée). F. T. Marinetti and Fillìa, La cucina futurista: un pranzo che evitò un suicidio (Milan: Marinotti, 1998), 97, 111, 119. 29 Bachi, Alimentazione, pp. 118, 123. By comparison, today’s figure is only 71,968 – although today’s yields per hectare are substantially higher. 30 James Davis, Rise from want: a peasant family in the machine age (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1986), p. 143 n. 11. 31 Atti del primo convegno nazionale per l’incremento della produzione delle patate (Como: A. Noseda, 1935), plate facing p. 72. 32 Mario da Monte, A tavola nel Casentino (Stia: Fruska, 2005), p. 202. 33 Musci, Italia a tavola, pp. 150–2. 34 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome, Ministero degli Interni, Pubblica Sicurezza (1927–33), cat. C1, sezione II, b. 59, report of 1 August 1931, in Simona Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime, 1929–1943 (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991, 2009), p. 51. 35 Fernanda Momigliano, Vivere bene in tempi difficili: come le donne affrontano le crisi economiche (Milan: Hoepli 1933), in Fiorenza Tarozzi, ‘Padrona di casa, buona massaia, cuoca,

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36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44

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casalinga, consumatrice. Donne e alimentazione tra pubblico e privato’, in Alberto Capatti, Alberto De Bernardi, Angelo Varni (eds), Storia d’Italia, Annali 13, L’alimentazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), p. 658. Colarizi, Opinione degli italiani, p. 103. Fausto Anderlini and Maria Angiola Gallingani, Montagne senza incanto. Un profilo storico-sociale della montagna bolognese: popolazione, risorse, regolazione politica (Bologna: CLUEB, 1989), pp. 5, 12, 18, 49, 280. Pier Paolo Viazzo and Dionigi Albera, ‘La famiglia contadina nell’Italia settrentrionale, 1750–1930’, in Marzio Barbagli and David Kertzer (eds), Storia della famiglia italiana, 1750–1950 (Bologna: il Mulino, 1992), p. 162. A. R. Toniolo, ‘Studies of depopulation in the mountains of Italy’, Geographical Review, 27:3 (1937), pp. 474, 477. Atti del primo convegno, p. 80. Atti del primo convegno, plate facing p. 64. Atti del primo convegno, plate facing p. 72. Atti del primo convegno, plate facing p. 64. Atti del primo convegno, organizer’s introduction, pp. 5–6. The possibility of potato fuel is intriguing. The use of ethanol of vegetable origin to power engines has returned as an issue in recent years and Italy has always been short of its own fuel supply, whether coal or petrol, and so this ‘bio-fuel’ (to use a modern term) must have seemed quite attractive to the Fascist government. Whether making ethanol out of potatoes to use as fuel was economically viable is another matter. Atti del primo convegno, pp. 8–11. In the Quechuan language, potato names may reflect salient characteristics. Thus, a pink, flat and oval potato is called a ‘cow’s tongue’ (wacapahallum), a cylindrical potato with eyes clustered at one end is a ‘cat’s nose’ (mishpasingu), and a mottled, rounded oval potato is a ‘condor’s egg’ (condor runtu). Names may refer to places of orgin, as in the Curimarca variety, or they may reflect native wit and irony, as in the ‘priest’s ear’ variety (kurapalingling), as this would be seen through the confessional screen, and the variety known by the lovely name of ‘dog’s stomach’ or ‘dog’s vomit’ (alcapapanzan) – known in Spanish by the rather more marketable name of ‘Peruvian flag’. Stephen Brush, ‘Ethnoecology, biodiversity, and modernization in Andean potato agriculture’, Journal of Ethnobiology, 12: 2 (1992), p. 180. Atti del primo convegno, pp. 32–43. Atti del primo convegno, p. 47. Atti del primo convegno, p. 51. Atti del primo convegno, p. 3. Pietro Venino, La patata (1931; Milan: Antonio Vallardi, 1950 edition), p. 8. Francesco Crescini, Indagini sulle patate nel settore autarchico (Bologna: A. Galavotti, 1938). Lidia Morelli, Le massaie contro le sanzioni (Turin: Lattes, 1935), pp. 30–1. Laura Gambetta, Seminare e raccogliere (Turin: Checchini, 1936). Romano Bracalini, Otto milioni di biciclette: la vita degli italiani nel ventennio (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), pp. 203–5. Helstosky, Garlic and oil, p. 105.

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57 Renato Perotti, ‘La panificazione con percentuale di patate ad integrazione del fabbisogno frumentario nazionale’, Nuovi annali di agricoltura, 18 (1938), pp. 208–37; Ercole Bedeschi, Pane miscelato con patate: libretto: metodo per la confezione (Pontremoli: Tip. Artigianelli, 1941). 58 Miriam Mafai, Pane nero: donne e vita quotidiana nella seconda guerra mondiale (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1989), pp. 85, 88, 92. 59 Colarizi, Opinione degli italiani, p. 380. 60 Helstosky, Garlic and oil, p. 109. 61 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome, Ministero degli Interni, Partito Nazionale Fascista, ‘Situazione politica per province’, b. 1, 15 October 1940, Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani, p. 375. 62 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome, Ministero degli Interni, Partito Nazionale Fascista, ‘Situazione politica per province’, b. 9, 17 October 1941, Colarizi, Opinione degli italiani, p. 378. 63 Menu of 19 August 1939, Musci, Abbuffate reali, p. 170. 64 Giorgio Hermann, La piccola cucina vegetariana (Milan: Naturismo, 1941; Sanremo: l’Eco della Riviera, 1943). 65 Petronilla [Amalia Moretti Foggia], 200 suggerimenti per . . . questi tempi (Milan: Sonzogno, 1943), no page, in Mafai, Pane nero, p. 241. 66 Colarizi, Opinione degli italiani, p. 377. 67 Venino, Patata, p. 8. 68 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome, Ministero dell’Interno, Pubblica Sicurezza, Ispettorato generale, Servizi annonari, interception no. 12009, Rome, 6 March 1944, 14.40, in Helstosky, Garlic and oil, p. 111. 69 Davis, Rise from want, p. 117. 70 Pierpaolo Luzzato-Fegiz, ‘Nuove ricerche sui bilanci familiari’, Giornale degli economisti, March-April, 1946, in Stefano Somogyi, ‘L’alimentazione nell’Italia unita’, Storia d’Italia, 16, Documenti: Gente d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), p. 865. 71 Antonio Reviglio, La lunga strada del ritorno. L’odissea dei soldati italiani internati nella Germania nazista (Milan: Mursia, 1975), p. 29 72 Reviglio, Lunga strada, p. 68. 73 Reviglio, Lunga strada, p. 108. 74 Aldo Rizzi, Per due patate un sacco di legnate (Bergamo: Tip. Orfanotrofio Maschile, 1945), pp. 22–3, 27–8. 75 Overall, some 30,000 Italian military internees perished. The most recent study, which makes extensive use of first-person accounts, is by Mario Avigliano and Marco Palmieri, Gli internati militari italiani. Diari e lettere dai lager nazisti 1943–45 (Turin: Einaudi, 2009). 76 Enzo De Bernart, Italiani e patate (Foligno: Campitelli, 1949), p. 125. 77 De Bernart, Italiani e patate, p. 199. 78 In Paolo Sorcinelli (ed.), Lascerei respirare le colline. Storie di vita e di paese (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2008), p. 167. 79 Alberto Capatti, Alberto De Bernardi and Angelo Varni, ‘Introduzione’, Storia d’Italia, Annali 13, xvii–lxiv, at xxxv, lvii.

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80 Francesco Casaretto, ‘I prezzi delle patate dal ’700 a oggi’, in Massimo Angelini (ed.), Le patate tradizionali della montagna genovese (Rapallo: Tipografia Emiliani, 1999), pp. 93–6. Available online at: www.caprifico.it/scritti/scritti_massimo/1999_le_patate_tradizionali_ libro.pdf 81 Anderlini and Gallingani, Montagne senza incanto, p. 58. 82 OECE, Niveaux de consummation alimentaire dans le pays de l’OECE, 1951, in Helstosky, Garlic and oil, p. 138. 83 Camera dei Deputati, Atti della commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sulla miseria in Italia e sui mezzi per combatterla, vol. 7, Indagini delle delegazioni parlamentari: la miseria in alcune zone depresse (Milan: Istituto editoriale italiano, 1953), p. 96, in Helstosky, Garlic and oil, p. 134. 84 In Sorcinelli, Lascerei respirare le colline, p. 287. 85 Venino, Patata, p. 9. 86 Venino, Patata, pp. 12–13, 28–9 87 Valerio Castronovo, Da contadini a operai, in Storia d’Italia, vol. 7, Dall’Unità a oggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 410. 88 Castronovo, Da contadini a operai, p. 442. 89 L’Espresso, 21 June 1959, cit. in Giovanni Caliendo, ‘La rivolta contadina del 1959’, 17, 20 and 29 June 2009. Available online at: www.marigliano.net 90 Vito Teti, Storia del peperoncino. Un protagonista delle culture mediterranee (Rome: Donzelli, 2007), pp. 5–6. 91 Elizabeth David, Italian food (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), pp. 255–6. 92 Waverly Root, The food of Italy (New York: Atheneum, 1971), pp. 175, 267, 344, 376, 443, 531, 683. 93 Root, Food of Italy, p. 36.

Notes to Chapter 7: Epilogue: The Post-Modern Italian 1 Massimo Angelini, ed. Le patate tradizionali della montagna genovese (Rapallo: Tipografia Emiliani, 1999), editor’s introduction, pp. 7–9; available online at: www.caprifico.it/scritti/ scritti_massimo/1999_le_patate_tradizionali_libro.pdf. 2 Silvano Faggioni, Jvonne Nolli, Paolo Ceccoli, Il grande libro della patata (Gardolo: Reverdito, 1989), pp. 19–22. 3 A comprehensive index of varieties is the ‘European Cultivated Potato Database’; available online at: www.europotato.org. 4 ‘Dietary supplement factsheet: selenium’; available online at: http://ods.od.nih.gov/ factsheets/selenium, accessed 16 March 2009. 5 Valeria Poggi, Alberto Arcioni, Paola Filippini, and Pier Giorgio Pifferi, ‘Foliar application of selenite and selenate to potato (Solanum tuberosum): effect of a ligand agent on selenium content of tubers’, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, no. 48 (2000), pp. 4749–51. 6 ‘Selenella: la regina delle patate’, Agricoltura nuova: mensile dei giovani agricoltori (July 2008); available online at: www.agricolturanuova.cro/it/index.

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7 Marco Riva, ‘Ai confini del cibo’, Nuovo consumo (May 1994), cit. in Eva Bonelli and Romeo Bassoli, ‘Gli stili alimentari oggi’, in Alberto Capatti, Alberto De Bernardi, Angelo Varni, eds, Storia d’Italia, Annali 13, L’alimentazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), pp. 1009–31, at p. 1024. 8 Hubert Bonin, ‘Frite et troisième révolution industrielle. La pomme de terre globalisée par la chaîne productive structurée autour de McCain et McDonald (1956–2008)’, in Marc de Ferrière Le Vayer and Jean-Pierre Williot (eds), La pomme de terre de la Renaissance au XXIe siècle (Tours and Rennes: Coédition Presses Universitaires de Tours et Rennes, 2011), pp. 343–69. 9 Dario Bressanini, ‘Amflora, la patata per la carta’, Le Scienze, blog entitled ‘Scienza in cucina’ (posted 3 March 2010). 10 ISTAT (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica) data relative to 2009; available online at: http://agri. istat.it/. 11 The ‘Cetica Red’ is closest to the ‘Red King Edward’, a redder and rounder offshoot of the ‘King Edward’, dating from 1916. Alan Romans, The potato book (London: Frances Lincoln, 2005), pp. 76, 97; ‘Ma quante belle patate. . .’, Origine: il sapore del territorio italiano, no. 6 (November–December 2008), p. 27; www.promozione.provincia.arezzo.it/asp/patata/asp. 12 There is substantial regional variation, the early varieties of southern Italy (grown for ‘new potatoes’ or primaticce) producing much less than the late varieties of northern Italy. ISMEA (Istituto di Servizi per il Mercato Agricolo Alimentare), ‘Ortaggi e patate’, News mercati, no. 14 (2008); available online at: www.ismea.it/flex/cm/pages. 13 L. Giardini, et al., ‘L’irrigazione della patata nella pianura veneta ed emiliano romagnola’, Atti dell’incontro nazionale sulla patata (1983) (Bologna: Tipostampa Bolognese, 1985), p. 31. 14 Stephen Brush, ‘Ethnoecology, biodiversity, and modernization in Andean potato agriculture’, Journal of Ethnobiology, 12: 2 (1992), p. 177. 15 Nancy Sell, Industrial pollution control: issues and techniques (New York: John Wiley, 1992), chapter 13; ‘Food process techniques’, pp. 294–327; Chris Foster et al., Environmental impacts of food production and consumption: a report to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Manchester Business School/DEFRA: London, 2006). 16 Tullio Romualdi, ‘Dinamica evolutiva dell’agricoltura di collina e di montagna’, in [no editor] Aspetti economici, estimativi e normativi dell’utilizzazione del suolo: atti del XIV incontro di studio (Florence: Centro Studi di Estimo e di Economia Territoriale, 1984), p. 200. 17 Fausto Anderlini and Maria Angiola Gallingani, Montagne senza incanto. Un profilo storico-sociale della montagna bolognese: popolazione, risorse, regolazione politica (Bologna: CLUEB, 1989), pp. 76–8. 18 Vito Teti, Il senso dei luoghi. Memoria e storia dei paesi abbandonati (Rome: Donzelli, 2004). 19 Vera Zamagni, The economic history of Italy, 1860–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 346–9. 20 Vercelloni, ‘Modernità alimentare’, p. 985. 21 Pietro Raitano, ‘Come ti rifilo il bisogno che non hai’, Altreconomia, no. 41 (July–August 2003), pp. 6–9; available online at: www.altreconomia.it/site/fr_rivista.

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22 ‘I consumi italiani di surgelati nel 1969’, Alimentazione italiana, 16: 8 (August 1970), p. 11, in Carol Helstosky, Garlic and oil: politics and food in Italy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 148. 23 J. J. Pierce, ‘EU frozen food consumption inches up’, Global Frozen Foods Almanac, October 2002; available online at www.qffintl.com/pdf/oct_2002/global_eu. 24 ‘La patata: l’umile tesoro’; available online at: www.paginemediche.it/it/dossier, accessed 26 May 2008. 25 Ministero delle politiche agricole, alimentari e forestali, Ottava revisione dell’elenco nazionale dei prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali, 2008; available online at: www.politicheagricole.gov.it/ProdottiQualita/. 26 Alessandra Guigoni, ‘La preparazione e distribuzione pubblica del pane di patate all’interno della Sagra Ospitalità nel cuore della Barbagia di Gavoi’, in Laura Bonato, ed. Festa viva. Tradizione, territorio, tourismo (Turin: Omega, 2006), pp. 389–97. 27 Oreste Parise, ‘Ci vuole proprio una bella patata’, Mezzoeuro: settimanale di informazione regionale, 3: 20, 15 May 2004; available online at: www.oresteparise.it/Articoli04/ mezzo2004_20. 28 John Reader, Propitious esculent: the potato in world history (London: Heinemann, 2008), p. 270. 29 Sidney Mintz, ‘Food and its relationship to concepts of power’, in his Tasting food, tasting freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), pp. 17–32. 30 Ellen Messer, ‘Three centuries of changing European tastes for the potato’, in Helen Macbeth, Food preferences and taste: continuity and change (Oxford: Berghahn, 1997), p. 103. 31 Gretel Pelto and Pertti Pelto, ‘Diet and delocalization: dietary changes since 1750’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xiv (1983), pp. 507–28.

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THESES Bertugli, Monica, ‘L’emigrazione delle comunità montane dell’Appennino modenese ovest dall’Unità d’Italia al secondo dopoguerra’, unpublished undergraduate thesis, Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, 2001–2.

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Gallo, Antonio, ‘L’Accademia dei Georgofili e l’introduzione della patata in Toscana’, unpublished undergraduate thesis, Università degli Studi di Firenze, 2000–1. Papadopoulos, Christos, ‘The Greek world and medical tradition: healers and healing on the eve of the Greek revival (1700–1821)’, unpublished PhD thesis, University College London, 2008. Qualizza, Giorgio, ‘Proverbi e detti sloveni nelle Valli del Natisone: raccolti e analizzati secondo il lessico e la struttura’, unpublished undergaduate thesis, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Trieste, 1978–79. Available online at: www.lintver.it/cultura-tradizioni-proverbi.

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Index Page numbers in bold refer to figures and recipes. aardappel (potato) 26 abbé, figure of 50 Abruzzo, region xii, 55, 57, 58, 59, 74, 81, 87, 99–100, 110, 153, 157, 162, 163 Accademia dei Fisiocritici (Siena) 51 dei Georgofili (Florence) 6, 8, 12, 13, 21, 44, 48, 51, 53 delle Scienze (Bologna) 51 delle Scienze e Belle Lettere (Naples) 51 Account of the manners and customs of Italy 36 Acireale 110–11 acorns, use 39, 40, 57, 89, 145 Acton, John Frances Edward 58 Adami, Anton Filippo 44 Adamoli, Domenico 77 Adriatic Sea 5, 6 agriculture, changes to 18, 163–6 commercialization 85 intensive 135, 137 lowland 104, 121, 135, 158–9 mechanization 119, 156, 158–9 mountain 73, 95–103, 114 mountain, potato in 103–11, 114, 158–9 slash and burn 101 subsistence x, 74 Agrigento, province 139 Agro Romano 75–6 agronomists, role of 8, 11, 15, 18, 34, 35, 37, 48–9, 57–8, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 73, 74, 85, 104, 111, 165 agronomy, study of 8, 19, 43, 48–9 Alagna 116–17 Albergo dei Poveri (orphanage) 3 Albergotti, Giovan Battista 56 alcohol, potato 11, 138, 167n. 2, 169n. 40 Alessano 124 Alexandria 2 Alifiero Ossorio, Giuseppe 58

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alpacas 105 Alps, Italian 65, 66, 95–7, 116–17, 121, 140 emigration from 94, 112–13, 137, 159 potato blight in 69 Alps, Swiss 116–17 Alsace 38 Altieri, Ferdinando 33 altitude, factor xii, 38, 104 Alto Adige 57 Amat Amat, Vincenzo Anastasio 77 Ambrosiana Library 56 Americas, emigration to 93, 98, 103, 111, 113, 115, 122 Amoretti, Carlo 15, 56, 59, 75 Andes Mountains 18, 27, 28, 38 agriculture 104–6, 158, 164 Andreos 4 Angelini, Massimo 154, 162 Angius, Vittorio 65 Annali d’agricoltura del Regno d’Italia 57 Annona (grain provisioning board) 40, 42, 43 antioxidants, effects 155 Antonello, capobrigante calabrese 76 Antonini, Pellegrino 8 Antwerp 28 Apennine Mountains 13, 17, 36, 65, 140, 148, 159 northern xi, 93, 94, 97–9, 101, 107, 115 southern 1, 57, 65, 99–102, 110, 116, 121, 159 Arbizzano 20 Arduini, Giovanni 11 Arezzo 5, 22, 56, 79, 89, 90 province 139, 157 Argentina 27, 71, 115 Aristotle 29 Arlecchinata 128, 130 armies, foreign 12 Arno, River 79–80

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artichokes 77, 78, 128 artisans, migration 97 Artusi, Pellegrino 91, 126–7, 128 Asiago 57 Asolo 57 Aspromonte Mountains 101 assimilation, dietary, of potato 53, 61, 83–4, 165 aubergines (eggplant) 27, 77, 124, 150 Augsburg 24 Austria 1, 2, 4, 12, 33, 34, 69, 81, 85, 130, 132, 133 Italian emigration to 112, 115 autarchy 123, 141 Avellino, province 87–8, 108 Avezzano 55 Aymara (language) 28 Bacchelli, Riccardo 22, 100 Badia a Prataglia 109 bakeries, looting 4 Baldini, Filippo 48, 49, 51–2, 59 Balsamo, Paolo 50 Bandiera, brothers 76 Barbacciani, Ranieri 11 Barbagia 89 Baretti, Giuseppe 11, 36 Barga 11, 121 barley x, 2, 3, 12, 18, 31, 39, 41, 42, 67, 105, 106, 117, 124, 132, 135 bread 89 barter xi Bartolini, Gregorio 63 Bartolomei, Girolamo 13 BASF (chemical company) 156 Basilicata, region 81, 88, 100–1, 116, 117–19, 123, 139 batata (sweet potato) 33 see also sweet potatoes Battaglia 16 Battarra, Giovanni 50–1, 107 Bauhin, Gaspard 25–7 Bayle-Barelle, Giuseppe 55 beans xi, 3, 30, 75, 124, 131, 143 see also legumes per capita consumption 107 beech trees 19, 97, 106 beets and beetroot 83, 144

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begging 40 Belarus xi Belgium 25, 67, 68, 74, 84, 85, 161 belladonna 27 Belli, Giuseppe Gioacchino 35, 83 Bellinzago 107 Belluno 57, 85, 153 province 32, 34, 96, 106, 111, 150 province, emigration from 94, 112–13, 114, 115 Benevento, province 87–8, 108 Bergamasque potatoes 78 Bergamo 4, 57, 87 province, migration 97 Bertassi x–xi, 115, 120 Berti Pichat, Carlo 64, 70 Bertonio, Lodovico 28 Bicchierai, Luigi 79, 80 Bignami, Pietro Maria 47–8, 49, 55 biodiversity 138, 156, 158 birth rate x, 5, 159 black market 82, 133, 142–3, 147–8 blight, potato 67–70, 71, 74, 90, 104, 165 bobici 124 Boccia, Antonio 90 boiled potatoes 52, 55, 77–8, 82, 83, 107, 109 Bolivia 18, 27, 28 bollito 123 Bologna 4, 19, 21, 37, 55, 64, 83 province 64, 107 university 56, 155 Bolzano, province 125, 137 Boni, Ada 134 Bonnet potatoes 79 books, circulation 49 cookery 77–80, 126, 128, 134, 144 Borboruso 35 Borgotaro 89–90 botany, and the potato 23–30 braccianti (field hands) 130, 132, 136 see also day-labourers Braudel, Fernand 95 Brazil 33, 114 bread 148 chestnut 30 as measure of living standards 142–3 as midday staple 83 mixed 39, 43, 89, 127, 142

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INDEX

mixed, per capita consumption 107 potato 16, 19, 29, 30, 34, 43, 44, 45, 46, 51, 127–8, 138, 142, 148, 161–2, 163, 165 subsidy 133 wheat 36, 64, 75, 89 white 17 ‘bread tree’ 108 bread-tuber, name for potato 34 Brescia 4 Brianza 20 brigandage 2, 76 Britain xi, 34, 84, 161 British, resident in Italy 11, 121 broad beans 31, 39, 66, 83 bronchitis 114 Brush, Stephen 106 buckwheat 95, 106 Buenos Aires x Burdin, August 71 Burger, Johann 19 Burgundy 33 Burke, Edmond 36 cabbage 75, 83, 110, 124, 144, 153 Cadore 57, 69, 111, 125 Cagliari 62, 77 province 89 Calabria, region xii, 11, 53, 55, 57, 62, 65, 74, 76, 81, 88, 100–1, 110, 114, 121, 123, 124, 152, 157, 162, 163 chestnut cultivation 108 emigration from 94, 114, 115, 120–1, 152 Calì Fiorini, Mariano 111 calories 11, 94, 105, 133, 147–8 Camerino 57 Camigliatello Silano 162–3 Campania, region xii, 74, 81, 87, 103, 157, 161, 163 emigration from 94 campanilismo (localism) 123 Campini, Antonio 49, 51 Campobasso 41, 58, 62 province 138, 139 camps, prisoner of war 146–7 Canada xii, 33, 152, 156 Canary Islands 28 canòciu (wooden potato chest) 107 Caporetto 133

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Cardano, Girolamo 29 cardoons 23 Carducci, Giosuè 35, 65, 176n. 52 Carlo Alberto, king 77 Carnia 32 see also Friuli Carnival 125 Carona 125 carrots 31, 150 Carsoli 58 Casalciprano 41 Casalis, Goffredo 65 Casentino Mountains 9, 22, 70, 98, 135, 157 chestnut cultivation 108 Castel San Niccolò 109, 135 Catania 85, 125, 150 Catanzaro, province 139 Catechismo agrario 50 Catechismo di agricoltura pratica e di pastorizia 50 Catherine the Great, empress 43 cattedre ambulanti (post of itinerant instructor) 71 cattle 89, 90, 96, 98, 105, 130, 148 cauliflowers 140, 144 Cava de’ Tirreni 55 Cavallermaggiore 114 Celestine Benedictines 53 Cenere (Ashes) 88–9 Cent manières d’accommoder et de manger les pommes de terres 128 Cento maniere di . . . 128 Centro Moltiplicazione Patate (seed-potato supplier) 150 cereals x, 2, 10, 11, 41, 81, 100, 103, 106, 157 chalo (mixed potato planting) 28 charcoal, production x, 8, 66 charcoal-burners 99 charity 3, 4, 40, 58, 84 Charles III, king 39 cheese, Parmesan xii, 85 pecorino 153 chestnuts x, 1, 17, 19, 36, 55, 59, 81, 83, 117 cultivation 97, 107–9, 118, 121 per capita consumption 107 and potatoes 20, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 48, 88, 107, 128 Chi non cerca trova 120

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Chianti (area) 9 Chiarenti, Francesco 6, 7, 8–9, 12, 17, 19, 20, 21, 110, 125 chickens 41 chickling 31 chickpeas 83, 143, 145 Chieti 59 Child, John (earl Tynley) 51, 53 Chile 27 China xii, 28, 155, 163 chips, potato (french fries) 155, 156, 160–1 cholera 5 Christ stopped at Eboli 88 chronicles, circulation of 27–8 chuño (freeze-dried potatoes) 28 ciambotta 124 Ciardetti, Leonardo 12–13, 15 Cieza de León, Pedro 27–8 Cinque Terre 49, 150 Cirio Company 87 citrus fruit xi, 105 climate, role 1–2, 21, 38, 54, 85, 97, 101, 104, 107, 116, 164, 165 Clusius, Carolus see de l’Écluse, Charles coal 142, 143 coca 105 cockroaches, repellent 141 coffee xi, 132, 133, 141, 142 College of Physicians (Florence) 6 Collezione di quanto si è scritto . . . intorno alla coltivazione ed uso delle patate 59–61 Colombia 27 colonies, African 137 Coltellini, Agostino 33–4, 44 Coltivatori Diretti (Coldiretti) 151 Columbian exchange xi, 18 Columbus, Christopher 98 Comelico 34 Communist Party, Italian 151 Como 138, 139, 140, 141 province 87, 108, 139, 150 province, migration 97 companies, seed 71, 142 conditions, peasant 8, 94, 98, 99, 145–6, 148, 159 conquest, Spanish 18, 106 Consorzio della Patata Tipica Bolognese 155

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Constantinople (Istanbul) 2 consul, English 11 United States 1 consumption, food 73, 132, 146, 148 frozen foods 161 potato xi, 67, 73–5, 81–4, 87, 88–90, 107, 137, 150, 157, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165 Conti, Giuseppe 82 Contri, Giovanni 19 Conversano 19 cookery 17, 76–7, 160 see also diet elite 77–80, 143–4, 165 peasant 76–7, 80, 111 cooperatives 130, 133, 151, 157 corn see maize Cornuda 33, 69 Corrado, Vincenzo 49, 53–4, 57, 58, 59, 79, 124 Corriere d’Informazione 149 Corriere della Sera 149 Corsica 55, 99 Corsini, Alberto 95 Cortuso, Giacomo 25 Cosentini, Tomasino 62 Cosenza 121 province 35, 55, 88 province, emigration 94, 115 Cossu, Giuseppe 62 courgettes (zucchini) 77, 124, 144 Cremona 57 crisis, agricultural 71–3, 97, 113, 114, 122 subsistence 1, 15, 21, 22, 46, 56, 63, 69, 145 crisps, potato (chips) 155, 160–1 crop failure 1, 69 crop zones 104–5, 106 croquettes, potato 76 Crovi, Raffaele 16 cultivation, potato 66, 73–4, 88, 90, 103–11, 134–5 government encouragement of 15, 18, 21, 43–5, 58–9 spread of 55–6, 64 culurgiones, culurjones 103, 153 Cuneo 55, 78 Cuoco galante, Il 53

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INDEX

province 94, 138, 139 curiosity, potato as 28–9, 163 Cuzco 28 cycle, agricultural 116, 117 da Vico, Tommaso 125–6 Dalla Bella, Luigi 20 Dalla cucina al salotto: enciclopedia di vita domestica 134 Dalle Piane, Niccolò 48, 49, 52, 55 Dalmatia 6 Dandolo, Vincenzo 15, 16, 20 Dauphiné 38 David, Elizabeth 152 Davis, James 145 day-labourers 39, 75, 116 De Bernart, Enzo 147 de Jatta, Donato 19 de l’Écluse, Charles (Carolus Clusius) 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31 De Marchi, Emilio 120 De rerum varietate 29 de Sabouin, Giacomo 44 de Serres, Olivier 32 De Vegni, Leonardo 53 debbio (slash and burn agriculture) 101 deforestation 20, 42, 50, 96, 100, 101–2, 106, 110, 115, 121 Del cibo pitagorico 53 Deledda, Grazia 88 delocalization, of food 164–5 depopulation, of mountain areas 126, 136–7, 159 diet, in Alagna 116 changes in 17–18, 111, 127, 132, 160–1, 163 Italian 74, 81, 148 Jewish 27 in Lagonegro 118 place of potato in xii, 20, 22, 52, 65, 74–84, 105, 107, 118, 137, 152–3, 160, 163–6 regional 123–6 Slovene 124 vegetable 144 Dioscorides 25, 29 disappearance, of potato 36–8, 43 Discalced Carmelites, Order of 23

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disease, related to diet 113–14 dishes, potato 123–6, 141, 152–3 Dizionario geografico-fisico della Toscana 21 Dolomite Mountains 32, 34, 96, 106, 125, 132 Domenica degli Italiani, La 149 Dondero, Michele 49 Doria, Niccolò 23 Doria, Paolo Mattia 40 drought 21, 38, 39, 56, 97, 117 Duce 138, 142 see also Mussolini, Benito dumplings, potato 127 see also gnocchi Durante, Castore 29, 33, 174n. 18 duties 2, 73 see also taxation Eboli 88 economic resource, potato as 66, 107 ecosystem, mountain xii, 116, 120, 158 Ecuador 18, 27 Edinburgh 121 eggs 41, 75, 83 Einbrennsuppe 124 emigrants, diet of 87 emigration 73, 152 from Ireland 68 mass 94, 99, 102, 114, 118 rates 94, 112–13, 122 reasons for 112 study of 93, 137 Emilia-Romagna, region x, xii, 24, 99, 155, 157, 161, 163 Encyclopédie, The 52 England xii, 50, 165 Enlightenment 42–6, 52, 55 epidemic disease 5, 36 avoiding 42 erosion, soil 117, 119 Este 16, 19 Ethiopia, invasion 141 Etna, Mount 102, 103, 110–11 Etruria, kingdom 6 Europe 2, 11, 20, 24, 27, 33, 114, 122, 165 arrival of potato xii, 22, 28, 32 northern xii, 73, 87, 90, 157, 163 European Economic Community 150, 158 European Union (EU) xii, 119, 156, 157, 161, 162, 163 expenditure, on food 148

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export, of potatoes xii, 84–7, 130, 135, 150, 158, 163 expressions, idiomatic 34–5 factors, estate 8, 9, 50 Faicchio, Giovanni 49 famine, of 1763–7 1, 36–42, 51, 54 of 1803 1, 11, 58–9 of 1815–16 1–6, 20, 41, 56, 64, 98 of 1815–16, typhus during 5, 40 in Casalciprano 41 diseases associated with 5, 36, 40 Irish 68–9 potato as solution for 6–15, 51, 88 famine food, potatoes as 9–11, 43–4, 51, 88, 164 farmers, tenant 8, 20, 39, 66, 75, 90, 97, 101, 109, 110, 159 resistance to potatoes 16–18, 21–2 fast food, 83, 156, 165 Fenelli, Geremia 49 Ferdinand IV, king 58 Ferrara 22 Ferrari, Rino 149 fertility 114 fertilizer 156 Festa del Gnocco 125 Festa dell’Uva 123 fevers 5 FIAT ‘500’ 142 Finland 59, 155 fish 124–5 and chips 121 fried 84 Fiume (Rijeka) 15, 125 flatulence 52 flavour, potatoes 23, 24, 28, 48, 52, 53, 64, 71, 109, 146, 152 flooding 1, 102, 119 Florence 6, 8, 13, 21, 37, 44, 49, 82, 84, 85, 135 Florenceville 156 Florio, John 33 Flounder, The 34 flour, duty on 73 mixed cereal 20 see also bread price 132, 142

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fodder, animal 1, 15, 20, 21, 25, 39, 43, 45, 51, 55, 57, 65, 67, 89, 90, 111, 138, 156, 164, 165 Foggia, province 124 Fonni 89 food, adulteration 74 distribution 132 production 134, 152, 158, 160 shortages 148 forestry 101, 121 see also woodlands Forno di Zoldo 106 France 4, 6, 38, 42, 46–7, 48, 50, 56, 59, 67, 77, 84, 85, 151, 159, 161 Italian emigration to 99, 112, 116, 121 Franz Josef, emperor 126 Frederick the Great, king 43 French (language) 127, 128 french fries see chips, potato fried potatoes 12, 84, 152 Friuli, region 4, 19, 24, 32, 34, 45, 46, 163 frozen potatoes 156, 161 fruits, resin models 71 fuel, potato 138, 142, 199n. 44 Fugger, Hans 24–5, 31 fungicides 68 Gade, Daniel 18 Gagliardo, Giovan Battista 50 Galanti, Giuseppe Maria 55, 100 Galiani, Ferdinando 41, 42 Gallina, Francesco 30 Gambetta, Laura 142 gardens, botanical 24, 25, 37, 44, 55–6, 89–90 Garfagnana 163 Garnier Valletti, Francesco 71, 72 gâteau of potatoes 54 gattò di patate 123–4 see also potato pie Gavoi 162 gelatine 78 General Commissariate for Consumption 133 genetically modified potatoes 156–7, 162 Genoa x, xi, 2, 23, 81–2, 87, 88, 115, 143, 148, 153, 154 Genoa, Republic of 49, 99 see also Liguria Gerard, John 27

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INDEX

Germany 85, 130, 142, 146, 151, 152, 155, 159, 161 ghiotta (dish) 153 Giampaolo, Paolo 21 ‘Giardino dei semplici’ 44 see also gardens, botanical Gibraltar 63 Giglioli, Italo 111 Gillispie, Charles 47, 48 Giornale d’Italia 43, 46 Giudecca Island 12, 15 Glasgow 121 gnocchi, potato 22, 52, 54, 61, 65, 125–6, 127, 128 all’ossolana 125 alla romana 125, 135, 136 goats 117 Gorizia 4 province 137 goulasch 124 grain 1, 2, 150 see also cereals; wheat campaign for 134 provisioning 40, 42 speculation 4 Gran Sasso 99 granaries, looting 4 Grand Council, Fascist 141 grape must, cooked 57 grapes 1, 4, 73, 97, 100, 150 Grass, Günter 34, 43 Great War see World War I Greece 142, 148 Griselini, Francesco 43 gross domestic product (GDP) 160, 162 Grosseto 85, 95 Gröstl 124 Guasco, count 44 Guida gastronomica d’Italia 123–6 Guigoni, Alessandra xii, 162 hay, as famine food 4 healthy, potatoes considered 11, 51–2 helianthum tuberosus (Jerusalem artichoke) 33 hemp 1, 95, 150 Herbario nuovo 29, 33 Hermann, Giorgio 144 herring, salted 110

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Holland, Henry 5 holm oak 19 homesickness 111 horses 21, 105 horticulturalists, armchair 16 Hospital de la Sangre (Seville) 28 hunger, description 147 hygiene 5 idiomatic expressions, potatoes in 34–5 Illustrazione italiana, L’ 111 imports 132, 133, 134, 138, 160 Indonesia 1 industrialization 84, 98, 113, 114, 127, 164 industry, potato in 87, 156 infection, resistance to 5 Ingegnoli (plant nursery) 73 inn, food served 80 inquiry, Jacini 74, 87, 89, 103, 112, 117, 118, 135, 148 Parliamentary, of 1953 148 instructors, agricultural 71 intercropping 9, 38, 66, 150 see also polyculture International Potato Centre (Lima) 27 internment, of Italian soldiers 146–8 introduction, of potatoes 9, 23, 31, 38, 44, 64 iota 124 Ireland xi, xii, 38, 46, 67, 68–9, 94, 164, 165 irrigation 104, 116, 117, 156 Isernia 67 Istituto dei Poveri (Trieste) 84 Istruzione popolare circa la malattia delle patate 69 Italiani e patate 147 Jacini, Stefano 74 jalka (tuber zone) 105 jalka fuerte (natural pasture) 105 Jerusalem artichokes 31, 33, 37, 50 Jesuits (Society of Jesus) 28 Johnson, Samuel 36 Karst region 135, 145 kichwa (temperate zone) 105

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L’Aquila 16, 59, 100 province 140 L’Espresso 151 La cucina italiana 134 La Spezia, province 139, 150 labour, in potato cultivation 65–6, 150 Lagonegro 116, 117–19 Lake Celano 55 Lambruschini, Raffaello 6 landowners, absentee 2, 9 reform-minded 8 resistance to potatoes 17, 63 role of 15–16, 17, 39–40, 44, 45, 50, 59, 65, 90, 103, 165 lands, common 96, 98, 100, 121 landslides 101 Langer, William 94 Lanzo Valley 38, 55, 56, 135 lard 41, 124 Lastri, Marco 9, 55 latifondi (large estates) 102–3, 110, 117 Lazio, region 97, 99, 103, 162, 163 leaves, as famine food 4 Lecce 87 province 124 Leghorn see Livorno legumes x, xii, 39, 41, 63, 66, 67, 68, 77, 81, 101, 148, 157 per capita consumption 107 Lemie 135 lentils 31 Leonessa 150 leprosy 30 Levi, Carlo 88 liberation, of Italy 148 lichens, as food 17 Liguria, region x, 48, 65, 81, 87, 97, 107, 137, 162, 163 Lima 27 Linnaeus, Carl 25 Linz 12 Liri Valley 103 literacy 106–7 Little Italy 120 livestock x, 1, 8, 21, 39, 50, 67, 75, 76, 87, 89, 90, 109 Livi Bacci, Massimo 112

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Livorno 1, 2, 11, 88, 99, 121 llamas 18, 105, 106 Lodovico di Borbone 6 Lombardy, region 32, 42, 49, 50, 74, 75, 77, 123, 125, 139–40, 157, 163 pellagra in 5–6 Lombardy-Venetia 1, 2, 15, 18 London 36, 40, 84 Low Countries 38 Lucca 11, 13 province 98, 99, 121, 139, 163 Luckenwalde (prisoner of war camp) 146, 147 lupins 4, 39, 83 macaroni 11 see also pasta McCain Foods Limited 156, 176n. 43 McDonald’s 156 Macerata 57 province 139 machinery, agricultural 130, 142, 158–9 McNeill, John 119 Magazzini, Vitale 23, 31, 33, 36, 47 Magi, Giovan Battista 79 maize x, xi, 2, 15, 27, 31, 39, 42, 63, 68, 73, 76, 88, 95–6, 105, 106, 111, 135, 150, 155 cobs 83, 144 as famine food 43 flour 3, 30, 81, 143 see also polenta husks, as famine food 4 intercropped with potatoes 38, 66 introduction of 18, 66–7 and pellagra 5–6, 56, 75, 94, 112 per capita consumption 107, 127 preferred to potatoes 16, 17, 19, 46, 64 terms for 34 malaria 75, 101, 104, 119 Malito 35 malnutrition 5 Malta 63 malus insanum (aubergine) 27 mandrake 20, 27 Manetti, Saverio 43–4 Manfredini brothers 13 manioc xi, 44 manuring 2, 38, 64, 116 Manzone, Federico 50 Marche, region 97 Marchesato 55

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INDEX

Maremma 93, 99, 109 Marescalchi, Arturo 123 Maria Luigia, duchess 12 Marigliano 150–2, 162 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 134 market, potatoes sold at 11, 12, 48, 55, 56, 81, 104, 143, 170n. 50 marketing 155, 157, 166 markets, lowland 96, 98 Marola 49 Marshall Plan 150 Martiri dello stomaco, I 130 Marzari, Giambattista 75 mashed potatoes 4, 51, 52, 54, 79, 80, 107, 109, 123, 124, 127, 130, 153 Massa-Carrara 22, 99 Massafra, Angelo 65 massaie rurali (farmwives) 142 Mattioli, Pietro Andrea 29 Maximilian I, emperor 25 meadowland 2, 96, 106, 116, 160 measles 114 meat 132, 133 Medici Archive Project 29 Memorie sopra il meraviglioso frutto americano chiamato volgarmente patata 10 menus 12, 78, 126, 135, 143 Messer, Ellen 164 Mestre 11, 57 Mexico 28 mezzadri 97, 98, 159 see also farmers, tenant mezzadria (tenant farming) 97 Mezzogiorno (southern Italy) 87 Michiel, Pietro Antonio 23–4, 27, 29 migration, effects of 164 patterns x, 66, 92–3, 94, 98, 99, 101, 102, 115, 121, 122, 159 as resource 96–7, 98 Milan 13, 20, 49, 56, 71, 75, 84, 87, 148, 149, 152, 161 province 124 milk xi, 132 millet 31, 124 mills, woolen 98 minestre (soup/stew/pasta) 124, 127, 136, 143–4

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minestrone (thick vegetable soup) 75, 80, 124, 127 minestrònis 123 Minims, Order of 53 Ministry of Agriculture 123, 133 Agriculture, Industry and Commerce 71, 85, 87, 88 Mintz, Sidney 163–4 mobility, culture of 94 Modena 13 Duchy 12 province 99, 124, 139 Molise, region 5, 22, 57, 58, 62, 65–7, 74, 75, 81, 93, 104, 138, 163 deforestation 42 famine 41 migration and emigration 94, 102 Momigliano, Fernanda 136 monoculture 68, 156 Mons-en-Hainault 25 Montagnana 16, 19 Montaione 6, 21 montanari (mountain dwellers) 74, 103, 109 Montanaro, Il 93, 98 Montanti, Revd 1 Montefegatesi 98 Montelatici, Ubaldo 9, 44–5 Monteleone 53 monti frumentari (charitable grain banks) 40, 62, 110 Monticelli, Teodoro 50 Monza 57 Morelli, Lidia 134, 141 Moretti Foggia, Amalia see Petronilla Morina, Giuseppe 59, 60–1 mortality, decline in 113, 114 during famine 5, 40, 41 infant 98 livestock 1 and potato blight 68, 69 Moschitti, Domenico 88 mountain areas, government support xi, 74, 160 mountainous, definition of 95 mountains, chestnut cultivation in 107–9 marginalization 98, 114, 122, 158

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populations 30, 35, 75, 95, 100, 114, 118, 126 potato cultivation in 11, 21, 22, 32, 37, 49, 55, 56, 57, 59, 62, 70, 73, 75, 88, 103–11, 114, 115–20, 154, 158 as subject of study 38, 93, 95 mousse, potato 76 ’mpacchiuse potatoes 121 Mucci, Luigi 71 Mugello (region) 13 Munich 3 Murat, Joachim 57, 59 Mussolini, Benito 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141 Mustel, Nicolas 47 My Name is Potato 34 naming, of potatoes 32–4, 139–40, 199n. 46 see also potato varieties and types Naples, city xii, 3, 5, 34, 36, 40, 49, 53, 68, 76, 83, 84, 87, 88, 102, 143, 151 Naples, Kingdom of 13, 15, 39, 41, 42, 48, 51, 53–4 see also Two Sicilies, Kingdom of economic survey 57–8 famine 39–42 potato campaign 58–63 Naples, province 124, 135, 139, 150 Napoleon Bonaparte 6 National Research Council (Italy) 137 Nations, League of 141 Negri, Ada 134 Netherlands 4, 38, 69, 94, 151, 154, 155 Netting, Robert 117 New Brunswick 156 New France 33 New York x Nice 56 Nightingale, Florence 156 Noja (Noicottaro) 6 Nola 151 Norway 20 Novi Velia 55 Nuoro 89, 153 province 139 nutrition, levels 113–14 oats 2, 31, 67, 135 Occhiolini, Giovanni Battista 10, 49, 52, 55

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Odessa 2 oil, linseed 153 olive 41, 57, 132, 142, 152 olives 1, 77, 97, 100, 117 onions 3, 78, 83, 110, 128, 153 Onorati, Nicola Columella 59, 171n. 75 Opizzoni, Carlo 19 oral histories 147 Organization for European Co-operation 148 Oristano 65 Ott, Hieronimus 24 overpopulation 94, 95, 96–7, 101, 102, 114 overshoot, ecological 118 Padua, botanic garden 24, 25 province 2, 4, 16 province, mortality rates 5 Padula, Vincenzo 76 paella 153 Palermo 12, 34, 50, 85 Palermo, province 50, 111 Palmeri, Vincenzo 50 Palmieri, Walter 59 pamphlets, pro-potato 46–52 pancotto 124 Panzini, Alfredo 130–1 Papal States 2, 39, 64 papas (potatoes) 24, 27, 29, 31, 32 peruanorum 26 Paris 40, 42, 49, 84 Parma 12, 17 botanic garden 89–90 province 34, 89–90, 99 Parmentier, Antoine-Augustin 17, 22, 42, 46–7 parsnips 31 pasta xii, 44, 83, 84, 110, 124, 127, 131, 132, 134, 142, 148 pasta and potato soup 143–4 pasture, mountain 96, 98, 101, 105, 116 patata, use of term 28, 33–4 patatari (potato-eaters) 35, 103, 152 Patate alla Milanese 130 Pavia 32 province 140

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INDEX

Pavone, Rita 34 peas 12, 78, 107 peasants, conditions 8, 57, 74, 94, 98, 99, 145–6, 148, 159 intended beneficiaries of potato pamphlets 50 landless 75, 77 mountain-dwelling 75, 106, 164 Saxon 11 use of potato 65–7, 165 peddling 32, 121 pedlars, itinerant 98, 102, 109 peelings, potato 84, 147 pellagra 5–6, 56, 75, 94 Pellet, Marcellin 83 Penne 55 Pepe, Antonio 41–2 Pepe, Raffaele 22, 58, 67 pepper, black 24, 30, 31, 83 peppers, chilli 3, 28, 30, 53, 77, 105, 152 sweet 124, 150 Perna, Tommaso 41 Perrini, Francesco 57 Peru xii, 18, 27, 28 Perugia 39, 55 province 138 Pescara, province 140 Pescia 22, 125 Peter Leopold, grand-duke 44 Petronilla (Amalia Moretti Foggia) 144 Petta, Demetrio 110 Pettini, Amedeo 134, 143 ‘pharmacy foods’ 155 Phillip II, king 28 phylloxera 73 physicians, role of 5, 6–8, 29–31, 44, 49, 51–2, 169n. 40 physiocracy 8, 44 Phytophthora infestans (potato blight) 68 Piacenza 85 Piana degli Albanesi 50, 110 Piatti, Guglielmo 13 piatti tipici (traditional dishes) 65, 123–6, 166 see also dishes; recipes Piedmont 18, 37, 40, 42, 48, 55, 62, 74, 81, 96, 107, 116, 123, 125, 135, 137, 161, 163

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Pieve di Cadore 106, 112 Pievepelago 93, 98 Pifferi, Piergiorgio 155 Pigafetta, Antonio 29 pigs 21, 25, 39, 65, 67, 76–7, 84, 98, 108, 130, 131, 132, 148 Piove 16 Pisa 6, 11, 22, 37, 121 province 139 Pisanelli, Baldassare 30 Pistoia 13, 22, 44, 99, 108, 110, 139 Pistoiese (area) 8, 9, 19, 125 Pius IV, pope 28 Pius IX, pope 33, 69 Pizarro, Francisco 27 pizza xii, 75 plague, bubonic 6 Pliny 29 pneumonia 114 Po, River 22, 100 Po Valley 137 poderi (farms) 97, 159 podestà (mayor) 16, 138 Podromos theatri botanici 25 Poggioreale 151 Pognici, S. 70 Pola (Pula), province 137 Poland xii, 157, 163 polenta xii, 2, 36, 64, 75, 82, 84, 94, 107, 112 buckwheat and potato 107 chestnut 107 polyculture 66–7, 118, 156 see also intercropping pomme d’amour (love apple), term for tomato 33 pommes de terre à la Lyonnaise 124 pomo di terra, as term for potato 33, 34, 37 Ponte a Signa 79 Poppi 109 population, increase x, 66, 84, 98, 101, 118, 163, 164 potato-fed 94, 111–15, 120, 126 pork fat 57, 110, 152 pork scratchings 83 Porta al Prato (Florence) 85 Portugal 23 Post, John 1 pot, ‘American’ 17

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INDEX

potato, berries 52 blight 67–70, 71, 74, 90, 104, 165 dishes 123–6, 141 flan 79 flour soufflé 127 leaves, as tobacco substitute 52 pie 54, 79, 80, 127 post-modern 161 ‘potato revolt’ 150–2, 162 publications encouraging 12–13, 14, 15–16, 20, 42–62 salad 12, 54, 65, 127 ‘water’, as treatment 52 Potatoes à la crème 12 Potatoes and chestnuts 108 Potatoes with anchovies 54 Potenza, province 88, 119 emigration 94 Potosì 28 Power, William 89 Prague 22 preserves 141 price, of potatoes 21, 48, 68, 81, 82, 84, 91, 109, 127, 133, 148, 149, 151 prices 2, 15, 18, 21, 39, 40, 42, 48, 63, 67, 68, 112, 136 control of 132, 134 priests, role of 4, 15, 17, 19–20, 44, 49, 58 Prinetti, Laura 77 Pringles 161 prisoner of war camps 146–7 prizes, for potatoes 62 Prizzi 111 processing, potato 159 production, potato xii, 64, 67, 73, 74, 84–91, 119, 125, 130, 131, 137, 145, 150, 152, 155, 158 conference on 138–41 prosciutto xii Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) 162, 163 Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) 62, 162–3 proverbs 34, 77 prunes 12, 125 Prussia, potato in 43, 69 Puglia, region xii, 1, 6, 19, 66, 81, 100, 102, 163

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pycnocomus 23, 25 Quaini, Massimo 93 qualities, humoural 30, 31 Quaranta, Raffaele 110 Quechuan (language) 24 Quilico, Pietro 49 quinoa 27, 106 Quito 27, 28, 38 Radda 20 railways 84–5, 87, 101, 110 Rariorum plantarum historia 25 rationing 142–3 potatoes 145 rations, soldiers’ 132–3 Ravenna 152–3 ravioli 65 Re, Filippo 8, 12, 49, 56–7 reactions, to potatoes to 23–9 Reale Società Agraria ed Economica (Cagliari) 62, 63 recipes, potato 53, 54, 55, 77, 78, 79, 80, 126–7, 128, 136 see also dishes, potato reclamation, land 136, 137 Redi, Francesco 37 reform, agricultural 42–3, 50, 57, 59, 151, 164 Reggio Calabria 101 Reggio Emilia 17, 107 regime, Fascist 126, 134, 136–8 regionalism, Italian 123–6 remittances 115, 118, 119 representations, of potatoes 10, 24, 25, 26, 72 Republic, Parthenopean 58 residents, foreign 11–13, 43 resin models, potatoes 71, 72 resistance, to potatoes 16–20, 36, 46, 63 resources, limited 94, 95, 106 Reviglio, Antonio 146 Revolution, French 56 Reynolds, Joshua 36 ribollita 80 rice xi, 5, 75, 83, 124, 127, 142, 148, 153 Riflessioni e osservazioni sull’agricoltura toscana 7, 8 Rigoni Stern, Mario 32, 132 Rimbotti, Verdiano 13

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INDEX

riots, food 4, 39, 69–70, 82, 126, 133 peasant 5, 73, 76, 150, 151–2 urban 69 risk, attitude to 17, 66 rituals, potato 103 Riva, Marco 155 Rizzi, Aldo 146–7 Rocca Contrada 28 Roccatagliata 49 Roda, Marcellino 82 Romano, Antonio 16 Rome 4, 22, 27, 49, 78, 83, 84, 88, 102, 127, 152 Rondanini, Luigi 19 Root, Waverly 152 roots, as famine food 4 Rossoni, Edmondo 141 rosticceria (rotisserie) 161 rosticciata 124 rotation, crop 16, 22, 65, 67, 90, 100, 104, 106, 109, 134, 157, 165 Rouen 28 Rovegno xi Rovigo 57 Rozier, François 47, 59 rule, Austrian, opposition to 69–70 Rumford soup 3–4, 84 Russia xii, 43, 71 rye 2, 69, 95, 100, 101, 104, 106, 108, 116, 117, 132, 135 sago 44 sagra (festival) xi, 121, 162–3 Sala, Giovanni Domenico 31 salad 77, 83, 107 salaries 114–15, 132, 142 Salerno, province 135 Salò (Italian Social Republic) 146, 147 salt 75 salt cod 83, 110 Salvi, Giovanni 115, 119 San Carlo (company) 161 San Miniato 6 San Nicola da Crissa 152 San Remo 124 San Zeno 125 sanctions 141

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Sanfermo, count 12 Santa Fé 38 Santa Maria del Taro 90 Santa Maria Nuova (hospital) 6 Sarchiani, Giuseppe 12 sardines 110 Sardinia xii, 2, 33, 34, 40, 62–3, 65, 77, 81, 88–9, 99, 103, 111, 162 Sardinia, Kingdom of 71 Sarfatti, Margherita 134 Sarti, Roland 98 Sassari, province 89, 140 sauerkraut 12 Savoy, dukes of 29 Savoy, Piedmontese 37 Saxony, as source of potatoes 32 Scandinavia 104 schnapps, potato 11 Scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, La 126 scrofula 30 secrets, book of 13, 56 seed corn, as famine food 4, 40 lending of 40 seed potatoes 35, 38, 67, 69, 73, 110, 140, 154 distribution and supply of 15, 16, 20, 32, 43, 141, 150, 151, 156 storage 105 Segna, Revd 58 selenium 155 self-sufficiency 95, 96, 103, 106, 120, 134 Seminare e raccogliere 142 Serao, Matilde 83 Seras, general 12 sermons 4 Sesia Valley 116 Seume, Johann Gottfried 11 Seville 27, 28, 31 Sgaravatti (plant nursery) 73 sheep 18, 21, 89, 98, 99–100, 105, 109, 117, 148 Sicily xii, 2, 11, 12, 39, 50, 81, 88, 102–3, 110–11, 155, 157, 163 Siemon, Karl (Carlo Siemoni) 22, 109 Sila Mountains 62, 76, 101, 162–3 silkworm cultivation 99, 142 Slataper, Scipio 82

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Slow Food 138, 163 smallholders 96, 97, 110, 112, 150–2 snack foods 160–1, 166 societies, learned 8, 13, 43, 45, 56, 59, 61–2 Società Agraria Torinese 56 Società Botanica Fiorentina 43 Società dell’Agricoltura (Chieti) 59 Società di Agricoltura del Molise (Campobasso) 58, 62 Società di Agricoltura Pratica (Udine) 45, 63 Società Economica (Campobasso) 66 Società Economica (Potenza) 88 Società Economica della Calabria Citra (Cosenza) 62, 77 Società Patria (Genoa) 49, 50 Socrate, Giovanni 45 Solanum tuberosum esculentum (botanical name for potato) 25, 27, 31 Somma, Ulderigo 73, 74, 85, 104, 127, 132 Sondrio 32 province 87, 88 Sonnino, Sidney 88 Sonzogno, publisher 128 Sora 103–4 Sori, Ercole 94 soup, barley 107, 124 economic 3–4, 58, 60–1 potatoes 146–7, 148 in prisoner of war camps 146–7 vegetable 75, 80, 83, 124, 127, 136, 165 soup kitchens 3, 84 soy 155 spaghetti 145 see also pasta Spain 23, 25, 27, 28, 38 speculation, market 49 spelt 31, 42, 67 Spilimbergo 70 spread, of potatoes 29–31 staple, potato as xii, 31, 68, 133, 163 starch, potato 17, 87, 128, 138, 144, 145, 156 Statistica Murattiana 57–8, 59, 110, 136 Stazioni Sperimentali Agrarie (experimental farms) 71 stew, horse 84 lamb 124 storage, potatoes 82, 89, 107, 133, 140

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Storia di Tönle (Tönle’s story) 132 straw-weaving 99 study, scientific, of potato 47, 51–2 Stura, department 55 sugar xi, 105, 125, 141, 142, 148 Sumbawa, Mount 1 Supino 71 surveys, economic and agricultural 56–7 Susa Valley 56 Suzanne, Alfred 128 Sweden 17 sweet potatoes 29, 31, 33, 105 sweetcorn 124 see also maize Swinburne, Henry 11, 53 Switzerland 130 swordfish a ghiotta 125 symbolic associations, of potatoes 32–5, 120–1, 130, 164 syphilis 30 Talismano della felicità 134 Tambora, Mount 1 Tanara, Vincenzo 177n. 5 Tanucci, Bernardo 39, 40, 42 Taranto 1 Targioni Tozzetti, Giovanni 44, 45 tartufo, tartuffolo (truffle, little truffle), as name for potato 25, 32, 37, 49 Tavoliere Plain 100 tax, milling 73, 90 tax office, destruction of 151 taxation 2, 66, 112, 122, 130 see also duties techniques, cooking 17 temple (lowland crop zone) 105 Terra di Lavoro 57 terraces, mountain x, xi, 8, 97, 99, 115, 118, 132, 160 Tesino Valley 57 Teti, Vito 17, 120–1, 152 Théâtre d’agriculture 32 theft, potatoes 20 Thirsk, Joan 66 Thompson, Benjamin (count Rumford) 3 tiella di cozze 153 Tighe, George William 22 Times, The (London) 5 Tisoi 112 Tissot, Samuel 47

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INDEX

tithes 1 see also taxation tomatoes xi, xii, 3, 25, 27, 28, 33, 53, 77, 83, 116, 124, 131, 152, 153 Tommasi, Donato 15 Toniolo, A. R. 137 tool, potato lifting 90 tools, agricultural 66, 96, 117 topinambour (Jerusalem artichoke) 33 Törbel 117 Toronto 120 tortelli 99 Touring Club Italiano 123 tourism 115, 119, 162 tradition, invented 123, 125, 166 Traditional Speciality Guaranteed (TSG) 162, 163 Tramonti 4 transhumance 99 Trattato delle patate per uso di cibo 53 Trattato di cucina 77 tratturi (shepherding tracks) 100 Trentino-Alto Adige, region 95, 124, 163 Trento 57, 81 province 137, 139 Treviso 4, 57 province 69, 139 trials, potato 15, 19, 45, 49–50, 55 Trieste 2, 81, 82, 84, 101, 124 province 69, 124, 125, 135, 137, 139, 146 tripe 65, 153 truffles, in gift exchange 29 and potatoes 24, 25, 28, 29–30, 31, 37, 51, 54, 78, 127, 128 tuberculosis 114 Turin 36, 56, 71, 82, 84, 87, 102 Turkey oak 19 turma de tierra (truffle) 32 turnips 31, 107 Tuscany, Grand-Duchy 20, 21, 24, 39, 44, 70 agricultural conditions in 6–8, 109 famine in 5, 9, 18, 20, 39 potato campaign 13, 21, 43–5 Tuscany, region 81, 89, 90, 93, 97, 99, 108, 162, 163 Two Sicilies, Kingdom of 5, 68 see also Naples, Kingdom of typhus 5, 40

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uberlekke 116 Uchucmarca 106 Udine 3, 4, 12, 13, 34, 45, 63 province 94, 124, 139 Ukraine xi Umberto of Savoy, prince 135 Umbria, region 95, 97, 163 unemployment 2 Unification, Italian 35, 48, 71, 74, 81, 84, 95, 97, 100, 101, 102, 108, 110, 112, 115, 118, 132 United Kingdom 157 United States xii, 1, 2, 71, 84, 154, 161 Italian emigration to 99, 102, 115, 121 unrest, social 69, 143 Urbino 57 uses, of potatoes, culinary 53, 57, 76–80 industrial 87, 156 Native American 17–18, 24, 27, 28 peasant 65–7, 165 Val d’Ossola 125 Val di Chiana 90 Val di Taro 89–90 Val Tanaro 107 Valdagno 57 Valle d’Aosta 37, 95, 103, 153 Varese 77 varieties and types, of potato 11, 15, 22, 27, 28, 32, 45, 48, 55, 56, 125, 138–40, 154–5, 180n. 54 ‘Amflora’ 156–7 in Andes Mountains 105, 106, 139, 199n. 46 andigena 31 ‘Basilicata’ 139–40 ‘Bea’ 155 ‘Berlinese’ 140 ‘Bianca del melo’ 139 ‘Biancona’ 139, 140 ‘Bintje’ 140, 155, 156, 165 ‘Black’ 68 ‘Böhm’s Allerfrueheste Gelbe’ 140 ‘Braciola’ 139 ‘Calice’ 139 ‘Caporettana’ 139 ‘Cetica’ 109, 135, 157, 166

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INDEX

‘Chiphel’/ ‘Rouge de Bohème’/ ‘Zwiebel’ 87, 188n. 99 ‘Desirée’ 155 development of 140 ‘Early Rose’ 71 early season 45, 85–7, 135, 138, 150, 158, 163, 202n. 12 ‘Euphyllos’ 71 ‘Francese’ 140 ‘Gavoi’ 139 ‘Germanese’ 140 ‘Grecia’ 139 heirloom 140 hybrid 154–5, 162 ‘Innovator’ 156 ‘Irish Apple’ 68 ‘Jaerla’ 155 ‘Keen’s Seedling’ 71 ‘Kennebec’ 155 ‘King Edward’ 157, 165, 166 ‘King of the Flukes’ 71 late 45 ‘Lingua di bue’ 89 ‘Lumper’ 68 ‘Majestic’ 140 ‘Marjolin’ 71 ‘Milanese’ 139 ‘Monna Lisa’ 155 ‘Monterchiese’ 139 native 71, 73 new 70, 158 ‘Nostrale di Sciacca’ 139 ‘Nostrana di Faeto’ 139 ‘Nostrana gialla’ 71, 72 ‘Olandese’ 140 ‘Ox Noble’ 15 ‘Paterson Princess’ 71 ‘Piatellina’ 139 ‘Porettana’ 139 ‘Precoce d’Albona’ 139 ‘Primaticcia’ 139 ‘Primura’ 155 ‘Quarantina’ x, xi, 139, 154 ‘Real Cumberland’ 15 ‘Regent’ 68 ‘Riccia’ 139 ‘Ricciona’ 139 roàne 107

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‘Rosa di Chioggia’ 139 ‘Ruby’ 71 ‘San Giovanni’ 90 ‘Sappada’ 139 ‘Segonzac’ 71 ‘Selenella’ 155 ‘Sieglinde’ 155 ‘Sirtema’ 155 ‘Slava’ 139 ‘Snowflake’ 71 ‘Sorcio’ 89 ‘Spunta’ 155 ‘Susa bicolore’ 71, 72 ‘Tondo di Berlino’ 140, 155 ‘Trivellino’ 139 ‘Truffe d’août’ 71 tuberosum 31 ‘Turchesca’ 139 ‘Vergato celeste’ 139 ‘Veronese’ 90 ‘Viola di Colfiorito’ 139 ‘Vitelotte’ 71 ‘Zuccherino d’Annover’ 89 Vecoli, Rudolph 99 vegetables, resin models 71 vegetables, root 31 Vegetina (flour substitute) 144, 145 Venetian-style potatoes 124 Veneto 33, 69, 74, 75, 81, 112, 150, 161, 163 Venezia Giulia, region 124, 137, 145, 146 Venezia Trientina, region 137 Venezuela 27 Venice 2, 13, 15, 24, 28, 43, 45, 82, 102, 107 blockade 12 decline 112 demand for wood 96 province 124, 139 Venice, Republic of 11 Venturi, Franco 41 verjuice 23 Vernazza 49 Verona 20, 57 Festa del Gnocco 125–6 province 20, 24 verticality, concept 104–5, 106 Vialardi, Giovanni 77 Viazzo, Pier Paolo 116, 119 Vienna 12, 25, 52

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INDEX

Vilmorin (plant nursery) 73 Virgil 29 Virginio, Giovanni Vincenzo 56 Visceglia, Maria Antonietta xii Vitaloni, Alberto 161 vitamin enriched potatoes 155 Vittorio Emanuele II, king 77 Vittorio Emanuele III, king 139, 143 vivaista (nurseryman) 71 Vocabolario della Crusca 37 Volta, Alessandro 20 Volterra 6 von Humboldt, Alexander 38 von Salis-Marschlins, Karl 55 Waldensians 37 walnuts 125 Walser community 116 war, of Austrian succession 43 effects of 164 gardens 144 Napoleonic 2 wheat x, xi, 17, 18, 31, 39, 42, 43, 45, 63, 64, 67, 69, 88, 89, 95, 102, 105, 108, 111, 117, 142, 155 imports 132, 133 per capita consumption 107

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243

potatoes substitute for 35, 65 price 2, 21, 73, 134 Wietzendorf (prisoner of war camp) 147 wine 41, 123, 143 as payment for labour 8, 17 women, roles 88, 105, 116, 117–18 woodland, deforestation 20, 96, 101–2, 118–19 as resource 19, 96, 98, 108 sale of 100 woodsmen 99 woodworkers 109 wool-making 99 workhouses 4 World War I 126, 127, 132–3, 135, 137, 142 World War II xi, 108, 121, 141, 142–8 yields, potatoes 10, 15, 20, 21, 45, 73, 74, 90, 104, 119, 138, 141, 158 zampone 124 Zanon, Antonio 45–6, 48, 51 zastoch 124 Zingali, Gaetano 133 Zorzi, Pietro 15, 17 zucchini 153 see also courgettes Žužek family 145–6

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