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The tratturi of Molise between myth and history

    Home The tratturi of Molise between myth and history

    The tratturi of Molise between myth and history

    by Natalino Paone

    Tratturi, vie dell’Europa mediterranea

    Tratturo, canada, draiville, drumurile oierilos, are names of farming streets in European countries such as Italy, Spain, France, Romania. Man organized them when he discovered transmigrant pastoralism or transhumance, so called because it is based on the periodic transmigration of livestock beyond the land of ordinary residence, for the period of inhospitality of the same. Thus, when the snow covered the mountain grass, flocks and herds moved to the plains, where pastures were available, favored by the mild winter climate, to then return to the land of origin and customary when the snow had disappeared and there he grass of the mountains, exquisite and sought after for irreplaceable qualities, was once again free, green and luxuriant. Twice a year, in autumn and spring, for centuries!

    The explanation of the phenomenon, moreover, is in the Latin derivation of the term transhumance: trans = beyond and humus = earth, beyond the earth (usual).

    But the connection of the two distant pastures was not the only problem to be solved, even if of vital importance. Transhumance meant equipping the two sites with minimum services and ensuring their operation in safe conditions. The same streets then had to respond to the double function of transit and feeding the cattle, a distinctive element that made them resemble grass carpets unrolled between mountains and plains. Furthermore, the phenomenon posed complex problems linked to the organization of both the production and the marketing of products, and which concerned the availability on one side of sufficient pastures and on the other, of fairs, means of transport, handicraft tools connected to a very articulated pastoral activity interacting with other sectors. A tangle of nodes, therefore, to be synchronized in time and manner, as befits a development project governed by the laws of the economy.

    The bet was successful and nomadic pastoralism, open to dangers of all kinds, was replaced by that centered on two areas, one of which destined to become the headquarters of the company, with all that this entails in adapting the families involved in the activity. , direct and indirect.

    Transhumance thus became the “response” of the pastoral economy to particular geographical and climatic conditions and was the discovery of fire for populations of several continents, from the Americas to Australia, Central Asia, Mediterranean Europe. And precisely in the Mediterranean this model involved the wide arc of territories located between the Pyrenees-Alps-Carpathian mountain barrier and the sea, with peaks in Morocco and in the Turks, thus identifying the great Mediterranean transhumance area.

    The sheep tracks are therefore present in the current collective imagination as transhumance roads, functional to pastoralism with the market objective based on the bi-seasonal transfer of livestock between two distant pastures that can be used at different times of the year. But the sheep tracks were not just the ways of the flocks or of the wool, as they say.

    Before the sheep tracks, in fact, the sweating cattle used the normal roads; in Molise it is with the Samnites, at the foot of the Matese in Molise, on the Sabina-Apulia road frequented by transhumance, that an organized place for rest and trade arises. A sort of service station of antiquity with manufacturing activities as well, such as the industrial dyeing plant destroyed by fire in the 2nd century BC. C.! With ancient Rome, transhumant herding took on almost industrial forms and was disciplined with supporting rules and policies, the great Varro, in reporting the seasonal movements of animals between the regions of central Italy and the Apulian plains, wrote that those lands they were joined by “public paths (calles publicae) that join distant pastures, like the small arch joins the two baskets of the soma”.

    The Romans, in the 1st century BC. C., on the remains of the Samnite rest center they built the city of Saepinum with its forum, basilica (multifunctional), thermal baths, theater, macellum (minimarket), fountains, factories (tannery), fountains. A small Rome inside high walls and towers covered with limestone cubes, with 4 monumental entrance gates on the transhumance routes where the cattle “conductores” paid the tax (vectigal) on passing livestock: an operation that in the 2nd century AD C. gave rise to phenomena of corruption that some modern scholars call the “tangentopoli of antiquity”.

    On the Roman ruins the rural village, still inhabited, was born again from the year 1000 onwards.

    With the fall of the Roman Empire and with the peninsula in the grip of barbarian fury, transhumance entered a phase of darkening, which soon became a transition, because it returned after the year 1000 and with political support from the Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese.

    Indeed, with the Aragonese there was the great modern revival with a large market-sized district from Abruzzo to the Gulf of Taranto, quality of the wool, assured grazing in the Tavoliere di Puglia upon payment of the tax (fida), enhanced infrastructures, (the we will see in the tratturi), complete production-marketing cycle, credenza industry (i.e. payment of the tax after the sale of the product, with the creditor State), supraregional administration (district) through administrative, economic and judicial institution in Foggia (Customs mena delle pecore di Puglia) and with public market rules at the service of the private sector system. A well-set model, to raise the participation to millions of sheep and with a duration of over 350 years: 1447-1806, when Giuseppe Napoleone gave the Tavoliere to private individuals, breaking the mountain-plain mutuality, leaving the mountain abandoned to itself like a lame duck, which will not be heard even in the unitary government and will end up as a victim of emigration from exodus from the second half of the nineteenth century. Pasquale Stanislao Mancini in vain will invite Minister Sella to rethink the decision to transform the redemption into a state credit, because the state needed to raise cash. It often happens in history.

    The charter of the Tratturi

    In 1865 a law of the newborn unitary state therefore completed the transfer of the Tavoliere to private individuals, and transhumance and collateral sectors, direct and indirect, entered an irreversible crisis. Of the many sheep tracks, for about three thousand kilometers, only 4 important ones (L’Aquila-Foggia, Celano-Foggia, Lucera-Castel di Sangro, Pescasseroli-Candela for about 800 km) were equated with roads and protected.

    Today in inland Molise, where agriculture has made less pressure, there are several cattle tracks in good conservation. But what is striking, especially in this region, is the territorial structure that has remained anchored to the tratturi that dictated the law of movement and settlement millennia ago. Of course today the tratturi, no longer frequented by active transhumance, have become paths of history and signs of a typical landscape: that landscape of proximity that is typical of the mutual relationship between man and environment, dotted with villages, farmhouses and nature reserves.

    The tratturi in Molise

    The road system of the tratturi in the South exceeded, as mentioned, slightly more than 3,000 kilometers and was divided into multiples and submultiples:

    • Tratturi,no less than 60 transits wide (111.11 m), highways of yesteryear mainly in the longitudinal sense as a “response” to the “question” of the course and recourse to development in the peninsula;
    • tratturelli, with variable width between 32 and 38 m;
    • bracci, with variable width between 12 and 18 m.

    The data of the Tratturi Office give today (1991 data) 14 tratturi, 70 tratturelli  e 14 bracci, in the modern age, the first ones increased to 111 meters, the second 32-38 meters, the third 12-18 meters respectively. Out of a total of over 3 thousand kilometers, in Molise there are just over 450. Among these, there are 6 main sheep tracks:

    • Aquila-Foggia (km 232, 225; in Molise 36,965);
    •  Centurelle-Montesecco (km 150,308; in Molise 40,063);
    • Ateleta-Biferno (km 69,571; in Molise 61,571);
    • Celano-Foggia;(km 201,858; in Molise 84,050);
    • Lucera-Castel di Sangro (km 125,838; in Molise 77,596);
    • Pescasseroli-Candela.( km 219,698; in Molise 70,570).

    As can be seen from the documents reported shortly before, the sheep track network also served the multiple needs of the territory and influenced every historical development. In this respect, the material testimonies on the territory are eloquent, ranging from the pre-Roman settlements to the current ones, passing through the urban centers of the Roman era and the medieval and modern settlements.

    But on this front, some concrete references say more than words. I remember them briefly.

    • In the 4th century BC, on the Via Sabina-Apulia (later tratturo Pescasseroli-Candela), at the foot of the eastern Matese, the Samnites Pentri organized a trading and rest center connected to transhumance (a kind of today’s ovinogrill!).
    • In the first century BC, the Romans buried the Samnite center under a beautiful city, Saepinum, equipped for the collection of the tax on livestock in transit (with Rome the transhumance became almost industrial, the livestock tax was borne by the exact livestock tax in the city on the Mammolo, Fomentano and Salario bridges). The tax on transhumant livestock (vectigal) was the one that sent the Samnites into a rage; to Saepinum, then, between 168 and 170 d. C., there were harassment and abuse of shepherds in transit, truncated by Roman decision carved on the right side of Porta Bojano (some scholars speak of ancient tangentopoli). Rome regulated the sector with laws from the third century. B.C. onwards: the income from tax on transhumance (vectigal) constituted a decisive part of public revenues, while in 295 BC. the proceeds from the fines alone to the “pecuari” supported monuments and public events. On the other hand, the privilege of tax officers was extended to shepherds who exempted them from paying the toll on public roads (calles publicae): what Varro, a Roman intellectual but owner of transhumance animals, defined “public paths that connect distant pastures, as the small arch unites the two baskets of the soma ”. The figure of the princeps was also important: owner of enormous agricultural and grazing expanses, of herds, of various types of manufacturing, of commerce, etc., who supplied the army with footwear and clothing, belts and ropes, wineskins, ampoules, parchments. , tents, shields, cuirasses, harnesses for mounts, reinforcements for sails, protection for the sides of ships (M. Pasquinucci, La Transhumance in Roman Italy, Giardini Editori, Pisa 1979, pp. 167-169).
    • In medieval and modern times, the grassy tratturo resumed its place with houses on the sides of the village on the Roman remains, which today coexist with the archaeological park, the only one inhabited by an institution that lives daily among chimneys that challenge the columns of the Augustan basilica. snatching from Guido Piovene, incredulous, the famous sentence reported in the encyclopedia “tuttitalia”, Sansoni, 1965: “this is the most romantic of the unearthed cities in Italy.”
    • In the Middle Ages Frederick II went up and down the Celano-Foggia sheep track.
    • In the modern age the sheep tracks were enlarged to adapt the space to the increased flocks up to a few million; but the expansion, although carried out with purchases of land from universities and barons, was continually undermined by trespassing by the frontists, forcing the guardianship authority to continually check from 1508 onwards and culminating in 1574 with the pragmatic of the viceroy Cardinal Granvela, who ordered the termination of the tratturi with stone cippi and provided for the death penalty for anyone who had uprooted or moved them.
    • In the second half of the seventeenth century Capracotta was among the top ten cities of origin of wool sellers (John A. Marino, The pastoral economy in the Kingdom of Naples).
    • The Templars had their privileged and reserved ways in the tratturi on the coast and along the Apennine ridge.
    • Over 70 are the inhabited centers of Molise linked to the sheep tracks.

    Therefore, the Ministerial Decree mentioned in affirming that the “Tratturi network as a whole constitutes the most important monument in the economic and social history of our Molise” did well. By virtue of that decree, today the tratturi and their appurtenances are protected by law 1089 of 1939: the same that protects the Colosseum and all other cultural assets of Italy.

    Other sheep tracks

    • Tratturo Pescasseroli-Candela, circa km.  220 (Molise km circa 70).
    • Tratto Guardiaregia-Bojano (da Molise in Europa, di N. Paone, Iannone editore Isernia 2006)
    • Tratturo Pescasseroli-Candela, circa km.  220 (Molise km circa 70).
    • Tratto Castelpetroso Santuario (op. cit.)
    • Tratturo Lucera-Castel di Sangro, circa km.  126 (Molise km circa 78). Tratto Pescolanciano-Carovilli (op. cit.)
    • Tratturo Castel di Sangro-Lucera, circa km.  126 (Molise km circa 78).
    • Tratto Pescolanciano-Duronia (op. cit.)
    • Tratturo Celano-Foggia, circa km.  202 (Molise km circa 84). Tratto Montedimezzo di Vastogirardi (op. cit.)
    • Tratturo Celano-Foggia, circa km.  202 (Molise km circa 84).
    • Tratto Pietrabbondante-Bagnoli del Trigno (op. cit.)
    • Tratturo Celano-Foggia, circa km.  202 (Molise km circa 84).
    • Tratto Salcito-Trivento (op. cit.)

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