The Appennine range, which extends down peninsular Italy like a backbone, attains its greatest development in the central part where the altitude is frequently above 6000 ft and, in the case of a few peaks, 9000 ft is attained. Most of these mountains fall within the Abruzzo region, while some rise in neighbouring Latium, Marches and Molise. This extensive territory, with its plateaus and highlands, offers excellent summer grazing grounds and it is a fact that the sheep has been the economy of this area since the remotest of times, particularly in the case of Abruzzo.
It was the paramount activity of the region, involving the entire society from the rich sheepmaster in his palace at L’Aquila down to the young shepherd boy. Even before the Roman conquest of Italy (III century B.C.), we learn that the ancient Marsi, the native people of the region, negotiated with their neighbours for permission to lead flocks through to the winter pastures down on the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic seaboards. Wool was the most important clothing material in ancient Italy and with the spread of latifundia (vast landed properties) in the II century A.D. the sheep industry expanded even further. The ancient region of Samnium (coinciding with southern Abruzzo, Molise and northern Campania of today) with its Collegium Lanarium (College of Wool-workers) was foremost in this respect. Juvanum, not far from the town of Scanno in present day Abruzzo, was the centre of the cult to Jovis Lanarius (Jove the Wool Bearer). The importance of the sheep and wool industry did not cease after the Roman period, as borne witness by the powerful mediaeval guild of Santa Maria Apollonia with its seat at L’Aquila, the capital of the region. From the 15th to the 19th century the annals of the Abruzzo sheep industry can be traced through the archives of the Dohana Menae Pecudum, the crown institution which owned and governed the network of sheep lanes and the 400,000 ha of winter grazing grounds down in the plain of Foggia.
Sheepfarming is still widespread in Abruzzo although in reduced circumstances. The land reform of the 1930s and especially that of the 1950s eliminated much of the permanent grassland in the lowlands where the fl ocks found their winter grazing. Large ownerships require hired labour and since the 1960s this has become very difficult to find. Sheep farms have thus been re-organised on a family basis and today rarely exceed 1,500 head. Transhumance has nearly stopped because the men now prefer to winter their animals in stables which allows them to remain in their home village all year round. Tilling of the soil on the mountain slopes has been abandoned and so the livestock can be grazed at lower altitudes on the one-time fields, in this way saving the men from having to camp high up in remote districts. The wool breeds (Gentile di Puglia, Sopravissana) of yesterday have been nearly everywhere substituted by milch breeds (Sarda, Comisana, Carapellese) since the only profit today is in the cheese and, to a lesser extent, in the mutton. The recent infl ux of shepherds from Macedonia, Albania and Roumania, willing to work for a salary, has, for the moment, given a respite to the economy.
During the golden age of the Abruzzo sheep industry in the 19th century there were as many as thirty thousand men at various hierarchical levels caring for three million head. The classic masseria di pecore, i.e. sheepfarm, of those times possessed from two to five thousand animals. Some proprietors would own several. A masseria was organised on lines and discipline similar to the military. The manager of a masseria was known as the massaro; in the case of a large one he would be aided by one or more sottomassari. The next down in the hierarchy was the capobuttero who was in charge of the supplies and oversaw the cheese-making, so that he would be sometimes called the casaro. Directly under his authority were the mounted butteri who tended the beasts of burden. Then in descending order came the pastori, the scapoli or guardamorra, and finally the butteracchi. The pastori were the senior shepherds; the scapoli or guardamorra were the younger men, while the butteracchi were boys who did most of the actual leg work.
The typical Abruzzese shepherd was an upstanding person showing a certain level of culture in times when most people were unlettered; in his leisurely moments he entertained himself with readings from Tasso, Ariosto and Andrea Da Barberino. His pay was part in kind: loafs of bread and olive oil, and donatives in time of festivities. The Abruzzo sheep was the Gentile di Puglia, a breed derived from local stock (Pagliarola) crossed with Merino rams imported in 1433 by king Alfonso I and in the 18th and 19th centuries by cardinal Ruffo, king Francis I and Joachim Murat. From June to October the flocks frequented the native mountains of the men, at altitudes above 4,500 ft. Each morra, or flock, comprising three to four hundred head was conducted by a shepherd, a young apprentice shepherd and an escort of four or five mastini. Strangely, such a highly developed industry never dedicated itself seriously to developing a herding dog. After being milked, by the time the grass is nice and dry at about 10:00 a.m., the animals are let out to graze. The sheep do not scatter but stay ing as they walk. At about 5:00 p.m., later if it is a fine day, they have completed the grazing circuit and are back in the neighbourhood of the pen; before being milked again and let in for the night they are taken to drink. The encampment where the pen and shepherd’s hut are is called stazzo. The buildings are made of dry stone; the wall of the pen should be high enough and garnered with thorn branches along the top to give some discouragement to raiding wolves and bears. The stazzo should be located on slightly sloping, well-drained terrain where it can be blessed by the first warming rays of dawn. Stazzi are found here and there over the mountainside, each with its own sheep walks knowingly graded according to quality. As the season advances the sheep are moved from the lower to the higher ones. Some herbages are good for the lambs, others for the rams, and so on. The more comfortable camps in a more accessible position at lower altitude are kept for the ewes that are being milked, since the produce has to be conveniently delivered every day down to the valley. Far away stazzi, high up on remote slopes, are reserved for the nimble yearling ewes which are not yet in milk.
The mountains are not fenced but boundaries and limits are nonetheless respected. During the first days up on the summer pastures, at the beginning of the season, the shepherd carefully takes the flock to graze along the perimeter of his assigned area. This exercise marks a trail which becomes the olfactory boundary which keeps the sheep within their allotted grazing ground. Once the daily routine is established the shepherd becomes more lax in going after the sheep knowing that the animals will follow a circuit and turn up at the right time at the stazzo. But the mastini stay with them, of course. The shepherds go down once a week to the village to visit their families and then, returning, fetch up the weekly provisions on donkey back.
When autumn begins to be felt in the air, the time to leave the mountains arrives. The traditional wintering grounds are to south of Abruzzo in Apulia, in the province of Foggia, just like in the times of Varro: “In Apulia hibernabant in Marsicis montis aestivabant”. The lowness of the land here and its proximity to the sea make for a mild winter climate with no snow. Great public sheep-lanes, called tratturi, existed for transferring flocks and herds from the mountains to the plain and vice versa. There were three main tratturi leading from L’Aquila (243 km), Celano (207 km) and Pescasseroli (211 km) down to the Apulian plain. Minor ones from the various separate massifs converged into these main ones. Because the journey took many weeks, the sheep-lanes had to be grassy and wide in order to let the livestock feed along the way. The last transhumance on foot goes back to the 1950s; those that still practice it today now transfer the livestock by motorised transport.
The 19th century German scholar Ferdinand Gregorovius was a noteworthy witness of the annual migration: “We climbed laboriously by hair-pin curves. At Raiano we took a brace of oxen. Thus proceeding, at a certain point we found ourselves in the midst of a large herd of sheep and goats being slowly led into the mountains by the shepherds, big men clad in sheepskins and holding spits in their hand. From that moment on we saw the length and breadth of the entire slope covered by the summering herds. These are watched over by hairy dogs the size of a St. Bernard carrying leathern collars armed with spikes as a protection against the fangs of wolves.” (1871, In Den Abruzzen.) Another illustrious observer of the transhumant herds of Abruzzo was the French antiquary François Lenormant, a contemporary of Gregorovius. “All the branches lead into the Tratturo Grande, a long grassy unpaved artery, 80 to 120 metres wide, that stretches from L’Aquila to beyond Andria. It is along this way that, in our day still, every year, for days on end, descending in November and ascending in May, columns of half-tame cattle go by, escorted by wild-looking shepherds on horseback, but above all there are great herds of sheep. A herd of sheep is called punta and comprises about ten thousand head. It proceeds in detachments of three or four hundred animals, each accompanied by a shepherd on foot holding a crook and assisted by five or six enormous dogs clad in a snowwhite coat.” (A Travers l’Apulie et la Lucanie, 1883.)
Whenever the tratturo flanked cultivated fields farmers would ominously line the way to see that their crops would not be invaded. There was little sympathy between the shepherds and the tillers of the soil. On the way down the dogs sometimes could not resist slipping into to the vineyards to feast on the grapes but, alas, they would find the owner waiting for them with his shotgun! After being plied for millennia the tratturi have fallen in disuse. Some tracts in the mountains are still recognisable as wide swathes of grass stretching over the landscape. The parts down in the lowland have either been whittled down to ordinary country lanes or else they have been more or less legally merged into the bordering properties.
On arriving down in the Apulian plain, the Abruzzese sheepmasters were obliged to graze their animals on land belonging to the crown of Naples, a territorial institution known as the Tavoliere. The tax paid for the right to use these pastures extending to 370,000 ha was the most important revenue of the government. To quote a figure, in 1751 the Tavoliere yielded 400,000 ducats. The origins of this institution can be traced back to antiquity. In pre-Roman times the pastoral Marsi used to negotiate with the local Dauni for the use of this area. We know from Varro that in Roman times “itaque greges ovium abiguntur ex Apulia in Samnium aestivatum atque ad publicanum profitentur, ne, si inscriptum pecuda paverint, lege censoria committant”. During the time of Norman rule (1059-1194) the matter was regulated by the laws “Pervenit ad aures nostri culminis” and “Cum per partes Apuliae”. Later came the Melfi Code (1231) of Frederick II and the law “De iure affidaturae herbagii, pascuorum, glandium, et similium” of Robert of Anjou. The most thorough and systematic organisation came with of Alfonso I of Aragon, however, who on 1st August 1447 established the “Dohana Menae Pecudum” which lasted for four centuries.
The importance of this institution for the government is stressed by the following episode. During the dynastic war between the French and the Spanish for the possession of the Kingdom of Naples (1501), success depended on who would be able to put his hands on the revenue deriving from the Dohana Menae Pecudum because this would enable the fortunate one to pay the troops and keep them from disbanding. The Duke of Nemours had just managed to get control near San Severo of flocks amounting to 600,000 head when he was attacked by the Spanish light cavalry issuing from Foggia. Finding himself in straits, the Duke gave the order to slaughter the animals so that the booty should not fall to the enemy. But he was forestalled by the Castilians who, famous sheepmen themselves, dismounted and in a great cloud of dust managed to fleece the multitude of sheep and grab the grazing tax.
The 370,000 ha that constituted the Tavoliere were not one uninterrupted stretch of land but were distributed in 43 separate units called locazioni. Within the area of a locazione it was strictly forbidden to plough and to build so that the land assumed the aspect of an open steppe sparsely dotted with temporary huts and sheepfolds. Each locazione was subdivided into poste which were the basic units that harboured the individual masserie di pecore, or sheepfarms (see Appendix V). The carrying capacity of each posta was in the order of several thousand head; 100 ha allotted for every 400 sheep.
On the wake of the Napoleonic conquest, Joseph Bonaparte abolished the Tavoliere in 1806 and the locazioni were put up for sale. No ecological changes became immediately evident, however, because most of the land was bought up by the same livestock owners who used to lease it from the Dogana delle Pecore, so a large part of it remained as grassland, although now cultivation was no longer prohibited. When the legitimate Bourbon dynasty was reinstated an attempt was made (1816) to re-establish the old order but with little success. Gradually, more and more of the virgin turf came under the plough. The policy of the government before World War II insisting on wheat production and the land reform of the 1950s which split up large properties into small farms caused the grassland in the plains to shrink even more. A residue of winter pasture, nevertheless, was still left because of the fallow land resulting from crop rotation. The custom was to plant wheat for two years in succession and then to leave the ground fallow for two years (maggese). But with the introduction of chemical fertilisers in the second half of the 20th century there seemed to be no need to let the fields rest and leave them to pasturage. Because of this development transhumant flocks find little room nowadays down in the plain of Foggia. But even as I write there are perhaps the signs of a further change. As subsidies from the European Union tend to dwindle, farmers can no longer bear the cost of fertilisers and pesticides so that they may again soon have to revert to crop rotation and animal dung to sustain the fertility of their fields.
What has just been briefly described is the historical and cultural cradle of the Mastino Abruzzese. The breed, however, because of its excellence, was exported far beyond the sheepfarms of Abruzzo, to wherever, in fact, the need arose to defend livestock from wolves. Within the borders of the Kingdom of Naples the Mastino Abruzzese spread to other areas besides those frequented by the flocks from Abruzzo. Thus they were and still are to be found in the regions of Campania and Basilicata. Local populations exist in the Salento, the southern part of Apulia where sheep farming is quite unconnected to that of northern Apulia. The dog stops short of Calabria where it is substituted by another pastoral breed, remarkably different from the former in that it presents a dark coat.
Outside the Kingdom of Naples to the north, another pastoral economy having nearly as much historical right to consider the breed as its own was that of the Papal States. Here the routes of transhumance were between the Sybilline Mountains in the Marches region to the north and the low-lying countryside surrounding Rome (Campagna Romana). The industry was organised along very much the same lines as that in the neighbouring kingdom to the south. Under Martin V in 1427 the taxes paid by the owners of the flocks amounted to 6500 gold florins and in the 17th century this revenue used to bring 40,000 ducats a year to the coffers of the Pope. The “Dogana Pecudum” established in 1402 by Boniface IX differed somewhat from the Neapolitan model. The flocks had no exclusive lanes along which to travel but only the ordinary public roads, especially the Via Flaminia, with the right to graze, however, for eighty metres on either side of the way. For a long time after the end of the Dogana in 1828 this customary use of the public roadways kept on. As my father recalled witnessing as a small boy, the Via del Corso, the street going through the heart of Rome, was still being plied in the 1920s by the flocks migrating between the Via Flaminia and the pastures west of the city. Such movements were allowed only during the middle of the night; the mass of sheep filling the entire length of the way from Piazza del Popolo to Piazza Venezia. The wintering grounds were not crown demesne like the Tavoliere but belonged to the great landowning families of Rome who were also the owners of the sheep. Themen who actually conducted the flocks were mountainfolk from the Marches region. The rules of the Dogana Pecudum held an extra element which was quite absent in the parallel institution of the Kingdom of Naples. The sheepowners had to supply a certain amount of lambs for the consumption of the populace of Rome. In an edict of 1602 the number of heads required was 156,132. The period of sale, at the price fixed by the government, went from Easter to June. The breed of sheep was the Sopravissana, very similar to the Gentile di Puglia but coarser, a blend of the local Appennine sheep (Pagliarola) with Merino rams imported by Benedict XIV. The Roman flocks never reached the size of the Abruzzi ones. Even before the unification of Italy (1861), there was interchange between the two industries, however, since the flocks from the northernmost part of the Kingdom of Naples were allowed to cross the border and descend to the winter pastures of the Papal States saving themselves the much longer walk all the way down to Apulia.
The Grand Duchy of Tuscany also had its sheep industry organised on the model of those of the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal States, but on a smaller scale. As far back as the 14th century the republic of Siena had set up a system of exploiting the 60,000 ha of lowland pasturage within its territory, but the fully codified Dogana delle Pecore was established in 1419. This institution lasted up to 1778 when granduke Peter Leopold abolished it and sold the land to private entrepreneurs, following the new ideas on political economy. The flocks averaged 300,000 head and the leasing of the grazing land brought 15,000 florins to the coffers of the state. During the early period the herds belonged to the mountain folk from the northern Appennines (descending transhumance) but in the 19th century lowland urban classes also began to invest in the business (ascending transhumance). By special agreement between the two governments, there were also fl ocks that commuted between the mountains of the Papal States and the seaboard of the Granduchy of Tuscany. The stock was Merino or Merino-derived imported from Rome, Abruzzo, Apulia and Spain during the 18th century. When I began my observations back in the 1960s there was no trace left of this large-scale Tuscan sheep farming.
Large-scale sheep farming has been historically practiced all along peninsular Italy but the centre of this pastoral culture is in Abruzzo. Signs past or present of the white pastoral dog can be found most anywhere in Italy but the core of the breed is with the sheepfarms of Abruzzo.
P. Breber
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