Italy and the Potato: A History, 1550-2000

David Gentilcore

• Editore: Continuum
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441173690
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Italienische Geschichte

Italy, like the rest of Europe, owes a lot to 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. The international importance of the potato today as the world's most cultivated vegetable highlights its place in the Columbian exchange. While the history of the potato in the United States, Ireland, Britain and other parts of northern Europe is quite well known, little is known about the slow rise and eventual fall of the potato in Italy. This book aims to fill that gap, arguing why the potato's 'Italian' history is important. It is both a social and cultural history of the potato in Italy and a history of agriculture in marginal areas. David Gentilcore examines the developing presence of the potato in elite and peasant culture, its place in the difficult mountain environment, in family recipe notebooks and kitchen accounts, in travellers' descriptions, agronomical treatises, cookery books, and in Italian literature.

1

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 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 Lombardy-Venetia 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.

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 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 road-building 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 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...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1 The ‘Perverse Strangeness of the Seasons’: 1816–17
• 2 An Exotic American in Italy: 1573
• 3 The Potato Apostles: 1764–67
• 4 ‘Substituting Potatoes for Wheat’: The Late Nineteenth Century
• 5 ‘Up Here it Makes More Sense to Plant Potatoes’: Potatoes, Population and Emigration in Italy’s Mountain Regions
• 6 ‘New and Broader Horizons’: The Twentieth Century
• 7 Epilogue: The Post-Modern Italian
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index