The countryside of Tuscany in early Etruscan times is difficult to picture in our imagination. Written sources and archaeological records help us a great deal in the reconstruction of the "Classical" landscape which began to emerge around the later Etruscan period, when Rome already held sway over Etruria and the northern Apennines.

The traveller in ancient Italy was constantly in touch with nature. Cultivation on either side of the road pervaded the whole scene and accompanied him for hundreds of miles all along the lengthy, slow journeys. Large, white oxen, harnessed to the wagon, patiently loitered along side rows of slaves, who toiled away in silence, under the meagre shadow of an olive grove, where the chirping of the cicadas spread its hypnotic effect. Dangling three branches laden with fruit, along side festooned rows of vines, encircled the long cornfields, spilling over onto the road, offering their juicy delights to the thirsty wayfarer.

If its difficult to imagine Sicily and Greece without a single orange or lemon tree, or without the thorny agave and prickly pear; it would be equally difficult to imagine Tuscany without the cypress and the olive trees. What would Tuscany be without the roadside fig tree and without the fruits and vegetables which we take for granted, having formed for centuries an integral part of daily life in this country, as testified by the paintings of the Renaissance, and by our fathers?

The vine did exist, but we know not the way it was trained before the Etruscan colonisation. The Italian landscape, to which the olive tree and the vine conferred its distinctive character, was, up to the 1970s of the 20th century, similar if not identical to that of antiquity.

After the vine, the olive is the second most important tree in the Roman and Mediterranean Classical world. South of the Apennines, and in some districts also to the north, olive groves were the dominant feature of the landscape. Olive oil played an essential role in the diet, a greater role than wine.

In Medieval times -and perhaps Etruscan too- olive oil came third after butter and lard in mountainous districts, as olive trees were rare in the cool climate. Only in the modern era, during the 19th century, considerable areas in the mountains were planted with olive groves.

The chestnut has become common in Italy long before the Middle Ages. Chestnuts were a staple food before the potato came into widespread use; it was the essential food of shepherds and mountain dwellers that lived at higher altitudes. This exquisite fruit replaced the bitter acorn and the meagre beechnut as a staple food in Roman times. The Romans made a large use of chestnuts and of chestnut flour, as well as of the precious timber. Pliny says that chestnuts are good roasted; also the flour is better when roasted and bread made of such flour is eaten by fasting women. The chestnut came from Sardis, in Asia Minor, as Pliny says.

The cypress, the commonest and most distinctive of all trees in the landscape of Tuscany, as it's name suggests, comes to Tuscany from the Eastern Mediterranean, perhaps from Cyprus. Pliny says that this exotic tree has been introduced into Italy with difficulty:"…The cypress -thus goes Pliny-is so ugly a tree, and so useless, that it is planted beside our houses to remind us of our dead...". The country of origin of the cypress is, according to Pliny, the island of Crete. Perhaps the cypress was imported into Italy around the 5th c. BC.

Roman crops were numerous, even though the Romans did not know many of the crops that are common nowadays; conversely, many crops that were then common are unknown to us. The chief cereal, the oldest and the most common among the poorer classes for bread-making and for the Italian soup called "farinata", was emmer wheat.

Walking along the byways of Tuscany, the traveller will not fail to notice such ancient herbs as mentioned above, nowadays unknown to the majority, but widely used in the past, often in the very localities where we find them today. Poplars and alders still grow along the rivers and streams of the Tuscany, rows of cypresses still adorn the drives to old villas, they still surround old cemeteries and church yards. Field maples grow out of control, and no longer serve to prop a vine, whereas "wormwood" (Arthemisia absinthum) grows exclusively on ancient and medieval sites as it doe not spread from where it has been planted. The same can be said of "Good-King-Henry's spinach" (Choenpodium bonus henricus), no longer regarded as the delicacy of royal banquets. Wild vetch, lupines and peas grow wild by the roadside in all their glory between April and June, no longer sought after by hungry mouths.

The landscape of ancient Tuscany was not very different from that shown by early photography, with the exception that in Etruscan as in medieval times, the flood valleys were not extensively cultivated. The Etruscans intensively cultivated hilltops and cultivated the plains extensively. Basically only cereals were planted in the flood valleys, prone to flooding, whereas the hills were terraced and finely tilled in every corner. The late Romans; with their latifundi, were interested in gentle slopes and plains.

by Adriano Boncompagni - adrianobonc@yahoo.com

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