A brief history of
Castel di Fiori and Podere valle Pulcini
The period before written records
By Brian Chatterton
First signs of human activity
Neolithic hunters
Memo Corneli, from whom we purchased our house and farm (Podere valle Pulcini), was one of the principle landowners of Castel di Fiori. Over the years he had collected a number of stone age arrow heads from his land. The sharefarmers had been encouraged to keep a look out for them when ploughing the fields. The small collection of beautifully work stone indicate the presence of stone age hunters on the land surrounding Castel di Fiori during a period many millennium BC.
I have always been intrigued by the practical application of stone age tools and weapons. To me the puzzle was how they attached the wooden handle to the stone axe blade or the shaft to the stone arrow head. Most re-constructions show leather straps being used. Obviously the archaeologists had not done it themselves or they would have found it ineffective. I discovered the secret when I purchased a digging stick with a sharpened stone point made by a group of aborigines from central Australia. They had discovered a natural resin glue, as hard and strong as modern Araldite super-glue, from the sap of the spinifex grass. European stone age hunter must have had a similar resin glue to attach their stone arrow heads to wooden shafts.
There have been excavations of stone age sites on the slopes of Mount Cetona (the mountain directly across the Chiana valley from Castel di Fiori) and there is a small but excellent museum of prehistory in the town of Cetona - less than an hour from Castel di Fiori.
Early Farming in the Neolithic period
There are no signs of any Neolithic farming at Castel di Fiori. It would be surprising if the land was farmed during the late stone age as the natural ground cover of oak forest would have been difficult to clear.
The generally accepted theory (see: Graeme Barker "Prehistoric farming in Europe," Cambridge University Press 1985) is that farming started in West Asia (and independently in other locations) and spread gradually to southern and eastern Europe. Over a number of millennium farming expanded east and north.
The early theories of farming expansion placed considerable emphasis on the migration of farmers or the conquest of new lands and the replacement of the existing population of hunter-gatherers with farmers. These theories were no doubted developed from the experiences of European settlers in America and Australia. More recently prehistorians have claimed that "technology transfer" could have expanded farming without the physical movement of the farmers. Ideas rather than people would have migrated. These new theories are no doubt based on modern development work in Africa and Asia.
New evidence from the genetic analysis of the Tuscan and Umbrian populations shows that they are related to the Turkish population around Izmir and that large migrations may have taken place in earlier prehistoric periods. Perhaps truth is as strange as myth and the traditional descent of the Etruscans, who inhabited this region in the first millennium BC, from the Trojans may not be as crazy as it sounds.
My experience in agriculture administration and development indicates that both people and ideas are needed for farming improvement. If we look at some recent changes within farming we can see that change without an influx of new farmers is extremely slow. These modern changes were not nearly as great as the change from hunting and gathering to farming that took place at the end of the Neolithic period.
In Britain during the nineteenth century there was a collapse in arable farming in many areas after the repeal of the Corn Laws. These areas turned to livestock but the change was led by newcomers from Wales and other regions of Britain with experience in livestock.
In South Australia the south-eastern part of the state was developed for livestock grazing but has now become more intensively farmed with arable crops. The change was initiated by arable farmer coming into the region from north of Adelaide not by local farmers acquiring new technology from the Department of Agriculture.
In Italy after WWII the sharefarming system collapsed and marginal arable land was abandoned. It could be profitably grazed by sheep for milk production. The change took place when Sardinian farmers crossed to the mainland and purchased arable farms. They still dominate sheep farming and while some local farmers have livestock as their main enterprise they have only a few sheep.
It is interesting to speculate on why the Neolithic farming revolution took place in the West Asia region. Again we have had a plethora of theories that tell us more about their authors than about the Neolithic farmers.
The first theories talked of "Man's destiny to advance on the ladder of progress" but when Darwin returned humans to the animal kingdom, ideas of a civilising mission became absurd. Instead of the "march of progress" it became an evolutionary advance. Further study of hunter gatherers in countries such as Australia cast doubt of the evolutionary pressures. It became obvious that the highly adapted hunter gathers were surviving better than primitive farmers. Why did the Neolithic people make the change? Is could not have been a lack of food supply as hunter gatherers are well adapted to their environments and are capable of controlling their populations to remain within the food available. Population must have expanded for some other reason. Reduced predation on humans by wild animals?
By the time farming reached Europe human selection of grasses had already begun and they were on the way to becoming our cereal crops. While there is considerable debate about the pressures that pushed the Neolithic hunter-gatherers into becoming early farmers there seems to be little interest in the strange decision of the stone age gathers to collect grass seeds. Anyone who has harvested grass pasture seed knows how difficult it is, how low the yields are and, if you were a stone age gatherer, what a low value food the seeds produced. There seemed to be so many other fruits and seeds that would provided a better food return for the energy expended in harvesting. Wild relatives of peas, beans, lentils etc. all seem to be much more worth collecting than the grasses. While these have become food crops as well the main emphasis seems to have been on the grasses.
Iron age fort
The iron age fort at Poggio del Croce provides considerable support to the idea that farming had begun at Castel di Fiori by the first millennium BC when bronze and iron was first used in this part of Italy. It would be surprising if the fort was built to protect hunting grounds and it is much more likely that there was an established farming settlement.
It is impossible to take an intelligible photo of the iron age fort as it appears as an undifferentiated pile of stones but by climbing over the stone heaps it is possible to distinguish a plan as shown above. The fort was circular with an entrance gate guarded by a further extension of the wall.
This sketch shows a section through the walls. They were constructed of thousands and thousands of stones collected from the surrounding hill and faced inside and out with a dry stone wall. In fact they are identical to the dry stone walls constructed on field terraces over the next three thousand years. The collapse of the upper parts of the walls has buried the dry stone facing but there has been some excavation to reveal the construction
The unanswered question about the iron age fort is "Why there?"
It is certainly a strategic place with a commanding view of Castel di Fiori and a huge swarth of surrounding countryside but it is too strategic and too remote to offer any real protection to a farming settlement at Castel di Fiori. There is no water supply on the hill top so it could not have been a settlement. The fact that it survives and has not been pillaged for stone to re-use in other buildings is strong evidence of its irrelevance to the security of Castel di Fiori.
Of course there may have been a second fort at Castel di Fiori which has been recycled into other building but it still leaves the iron age fort as some thing of a mystery. We do know there were large organised groups during this period and even earlier. Given the subsequent history of Castel di Fiori as a border region could the iron age fort have been a border fort protecting an area larger than the Castel di Fiori?
Farming had reached Italy earlier than the period of the construction of iron age fort, during the late Neolithic age, but the early farmers were confined to the areas with poor soils and less tree cover as the clearing of the forest with stone axes and fire was too difficult.
During the first half of the first millennium BC the development of iron tools allowed the expansion of farming into the forest areas.
The Etruscans
The Etruscans played a key role in this new phase of farming expansion. Their early settlements tended to be in the areas with poor soil and light scrub cover that could be easily cleared for farming.
They extracted iron ore from the island of Elba, smelted it and produced fine iron tools and weapons. They use the tools to clear the thick forest on the better land and initiated the drainage schemes that allowed large areas of the Tiber and Arno valleys to be farmed.
Orvieto and Chiusi (Latin name Clusium) were important Etruscan cities before their conquest by Rome. Much of their wealth was based on farming the rich land of the river valleys of the Peglia and Chiana (tributaries of the Tiber) while the hills were inhabited by the Umbrian tribes.
Where does Castel di Fiori fit in this pattern? It is not far from the Chiana valley - it is at the bottom of the hill below Cerqueto. Was it within the Etruscan sphere or the Umbrian tribes? Does it really matter as the Umbrian tribes could have copied the Etruscan farmers.
This is a view from the tower at Castel di Fiori towards Podere valle Pulcini which is to the top left of the photo.
The above sketch is an interpretation of the view from the tower at Castel di Fiori looking towards Podere valle Pulcini.
Clearing the forest
The olive grove below Podere valle Pulcini is on a slope and is well drained. The olives were planted in the mid 20th century. Before that it could have been an arable field cleared by the first farmers.
Drainage
On the right of the track going the Podere valle Pulcini is a patch of forest over some steep, stoney ground and on the right of that is Enzo's field. This is the flood plain of the creek that drains the forest above. It would have been covered with large trees three thousand years ago. It needed to be drained as well as cleared.
There is little doubt that winter flood water would have spread over the field and turned it into an unworkable bog. The creek has been confined into a man-made ditch on one side of the field and on the other side a bank has been built to intercept the water flowing off the forest during heavy storms. The bank channels the water under the modern road to join the creek further down stream.
Whether all this work was carried out by the Iron age farmers we have no way of telling but we can be fairly sure that the sloping land that is now our olive grove was cleared and farmed from an early period.
The drainage of Enzo's field is a model of the drainage principles used by the Etruscans in their development of the Tiber and Arno river basins. They understood that the fertile land along these river systems was waterlogged for much of the year due to flow of water off the surrounding hills. If this water could be intercepted and led into ditches and canals the land would not be excessively wet and and could be farmed for high yields.
Clearing the stones
The third aspect of land development at Castel di Fiori after clearing the forest and draining the flood plains was removing the stones. This probably began in the early period and continued for century after century. The heavy stones were dragged away on a sled - we found the rotting remains of one at Podere valle Pulcini - pulled by cows. The stone heaps would roll further down the hill and thus contaminate the next field below with more stones. To prevent this the farmers built dry stone walls. The walled terraces that are so much a feature of the landscape are in fact controlled stone heaps.
There are many classes of land at Castel di Fiori.
* The most productive is the flood plain that required drainage before it could be farmed.
* There are some good slopes that only required clearing. This land was probably used for cereals until the 20th century when it was planted to olives.
* On more stony ground there were small fields that have now been abandoned and are slowly returning to forest.
* In the forest there are some heaps of stones and even smaller patches of really miserable shallow soil that may have been fields that were abandoned at an earlier period and have now return to a complete forest cover.
Etruscan museums
The best local one is at Chiusi with a wide range of Etruscan artefacts There is a smaller collection in Orvieto in the museum opposite the Duomo. It is mostly ceramics.
The farming system
It is possible to infer a considerable amount about the farming system used by the early farmers. They would have practised a mixed integrated system quite different from the specialised monocultures used today.
It is safe to assume that the forest areas surrounding Castel di Fiori were more open than the present macchia (a scrub of dense oak re-growth) and that there was considerable grazing in the forest by sheep, goats and cattle on grass and legumes. There was also grazing by pigs who thrived on the acorns in autumn.
The whole area of Castel di Fiori could have been grazed and reconnoitred by livestock herders from lower down in the Chiana valley. They may have used the area for seasonal grazing in spring and autumn. When a farming settlement was established it must have been done on a reasonable scale. It could not have been a few family wandering into the forest to hack a few fields out of the undergrowth. Settlement needed a certain critical mass to survive. One or two small fields would have been overwhelmed by the invasion of deer, wild boar and other animals.
A settlement with a larger area under cultivation would have suffer damage but this would have been a much smaller proportion of the total output. It would have been surrounded by grazing lands that would have pushed back the wild grazing animals. Hunting would have provided more food for the settlers but would also have helped to keep the deer and pigs off the grazing land.
A farming system that included the integration of hunting, grazing and farming in this way has not been discussed by prehistorians but if we fast forward to the second half of the 20th century grazing in the forests around Castel di Fiori was abandoned. Hunting became a sporting activity where the main objective was not to control the wild animal population but to ensure they provide sport for future years. Surplus adult males are now hunted but not females or young as this would reduce the breeding population. I am sure that bronze and iron age hunters would not have had such limitations on their activities. There are now closed seasons to allow the wild animals to breed.
The result is that the forest is within a few metres of the crops and wild animals cause considerable damage to field crops and all vegetable gardens have to be strongly fenced to exclude the pigs and porcupines.
During the centuries BC when farming began at Castel di Fiori the grazing land would have acted as a buffer. The wild animals would have retreated to the untouched forests during the day when the livestock were taken into the forest to graze. They may have returned at night but the would not have been in such close proximity to the crops. Hunting would have taken place against all classes of animals and have been more effective in controlling the wild animal population.
This is the cover of Graeme Barker's book showing an Etruscan bronze ploughman from Arezzo near the head waters of the Chiana river. It is dated to the 6th Century BC - very much the time period that the Iron Age fort may have been in use.
The plough is almost identical to one we found at Podere valle Pulcini that was used with two cattle during the first half of the 20th century. Ploughman's fashions seem to have change over the last 2500 year however and the hat now seems out of place!
The wheat grown in the early farming period was mainly einkorn and emmer. Spelt wheat replaced emmer in the later prehistoric period when we think farming began at Castel di Fiori. Spelt wheat is called farro in Italy and is still grown in Umbria although not in Castel di Fiori. It fact it is enjoying something of a revival in popularity.
Bread wheats that are related to modern cultivars were present in ancient times but required better soil fertility and weed control to achieve good yields. The farro was more difficult to thresh.
The Etruscans also extended the range of crops grown to include vines and olives as well as the cereals and pulse crops that provided the staple diet of the population. It is unlikely that the olive groves at Castel di Fiori were as extensive as they are now. Our olive grove was probably planted in the 1950s and there are few trees in the surrounding groves that are very much older but this in a poor indicator as the severe frosts in mountain areas kill the olives above ground every 25 or 30 years. Most shoot again from the stump which becomes larger and larger but the trees rarely survive for centuries as they do in other parts of the Mediterranean where the winters are not so severe.
Romans
During the later half of the first millennium BC the Rome expanded north into the Etruscan territory. In spite of their technological inferiority the Romans gradually conquered the Etruscan city states through a mixture of bribery, treachery and military might. Orvieto was captured and all the citizens expelled to Bolsena. The Romans then moved on to Chiusi and eventual all the Etruscan states were absorbed into the Roman empire. Fortunately they quickly absorbed the Etruscan technology and maintained and expanded the Etruscan system of drainage canals and roads.
In spite of the drainage of the Chiana valley by the Etruscans some marshes and lakes remained which made it unsuitable for major roads. The main Roman road system passed to the west of Cetona toward Siena (the Cassia) and to the east of us towards Perugia.
The Chiana valley is now the major transport corridor between Rome and the north with two major railway lines and an autostrada but this began in the early 20th century. Before that period it was an isolated area.
The Romans were no doubt at Castel di Fiori but they have left little trace as their building materials have been recycled many times over. Some worked marble has been found with Latin inscriptions but whether these can be firmly dated to the Roman period is doubtful. Some of the houses are built to Roman dimensions which may indicate Roman foundations but again such evidence in not totally convincing.
We can be fairly sure that the land of Castel di Fiori was too poor to interest the important aristocratic families that built their villas on the best farming land and ran their large estates with slaves captured by Roman armies during their conquests. Castel di Fiori was probably farmed by poor but free farmers. The surplus population from these small farms provided the recruits for the Roman legions. After a couple of decades of service they were given their own farms in some remote corner of the empire.
The track to the Lombard tombs appears to be paved and it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that it is a fragment of a Roman road. The location is suitable but unfortunately it ain't a Roman road. The "paving" is in fact exposed natural rock.
The Lombard tombs
Tombs sound rather grand and the reality is a series of shallow graves within a simple building - presumably a church or chapel but we can only speculate. The Lombards were one of the invaders that hastened the decline of the Roman empire in Italy. They established a dukedom at Aquasparta just north of Lake Bolsena and this might have been the fringe of their territory.
This is one of the tombs. A number of skeletons were found including children. There were more than one in each tomb. A few objects such as coins were found and helped to date the site.
The chapel provides a reality check comparable to the Iron age fort. We really do know that there was a settlement during the period of the 6th and 7th centuries up to about 800 AD. The Lombard building also provides a glimpse of the building techniques that continued unaltered for more than one thousand years. They may have been used earlier but except for the rather tenuous evidence of Roman dimensions there is no direct proof.
We can assume that the building was a chapel or church because of the burials under the floor but it is difficult to determine whether it was linked to Castel di Fiori. The distance from the village is greater than usual for a church but it is possible and like the iron age fort we can be sure it was this distance that protected it from being recycled into other buildings.
The Iron age fort was built using dry stone wall without mortar. The Lombard building uses the absolute minimum of mortar. The stones have been selected to fit as in a dry stone wall but a thin layer of mortar has been applied. The mortar consisted of lime and sand. It must have been expensive as neither ingredient is found locally. It must have been carried up on pack animals.
The roof was made from terracotta tiles. The shape was the tapered half cylinder. Whether the tiles were baked locally or carried up from large kilns in the Chiana valley has not been determined. The same building techniques were used for the house at Podere valle Pulcini until the 20th century when cement and lime mortar was used in much greater quantities.
This is the view towards the door. The roof has been erected recently to protect the site. Hole in the stones indicate where the doors were hinged.
Life in the post-Roman empire period must have been like one of those films on the world after a nuclear war. After the looting of the treasure, the infrastructure of roads, bridges, canals and aqueducts was allowed to fall into ruin. The remaining inhabitants of Rome had to move down from the high imperial city to the flood plain of the Tiber when the aqueducts failed and they had to rely on wells and water from the Tiber. Similar changes took place all over Italy.
At Castel di Fiori the change would not have been great. The local farmers would have kept the ditches clear. There were no aqueducts, roads or bridges to fall down.
In the next chapter Lynne will say that the monks of the Abbey of S. Pietro di Aqualta developed farming at Castel di Fiori. There may not be any inconsistency. We know that the population of Italy fell after the destruction of the Roman empire and it is possible that marginal areas such as Castel di Fiori were abandoned completely or became outposts where there were only a few families with grazing animals. It could even have been inhabited on a seasonal basis. The monks may well have restored farming during this period.
The fall of the Roman empire meant the end of the name "Umbria." The regional name was revived by Mussolini in the 1930s.