A growing body of archaeobotanical evidence throughout Italy and beyond indicates that in the early Roman empire people – ‘ordinary’ citizens, small and large landowners – were investigating tree cultivation and related processes on their own initiative, not merely following the intellectual fashions of the Julio-Claudian era that I have discussed in Chapter 3. The literary evidence shows the increased number of fruit varieties in circulation between Republican times and the first century ad, and archaeobotanical evidence extends and specifies the literary record. In this chapter, I focus on two Italian regions which seem to have played a significant role in the development of new fruit varieties, in acclimatizing imported plants, and in horticultural production in general: Campania and the eastern part of Cisalpine Gaul. The archaeological and archaeobotanical record of those parts of Campania affected by the eruption(s) of Vesuvius is exceptional, but the region’s remarkability and importance in agricultural, and more specifically, horticultural production was real in antiquity because of the fertility of the soil and favourable climate. Good climate, beautiful scenery, and fertile soil were what had brought the very top of Roman society to Campania by the mid Republic: scores of Roman senators and equestrians owned rural estates and luxury maritime villas in Campania, and as I discuss below, the presence of such elite estates and their skilled personnel may have been a crucial factor in horticultural advances. Cisalpine Gaul, on the other hand, comprised the large alluvial plain of the Po River, and was, and still is, the part of the Italian peninsula with the highest agricultural production potential. While the core of Cisalpine’s agriculture consisted of cereal culture and sheep rearing, some parts of Cisalpine developed successful viticulture and horticulture in the Roman period, a view inferred from the ancient sources and supported by the relatively abundant archaeobotanical record available for this region.

Campania Felix

When the so-called Villa B or villa of L. Crassius Tertius at Oplontis (mod. Torre Annunziata) came to light in 1974, the investigations revealed surprising and even tragic finds, among them the skeletal remains of fifty-four individuals who had gathered for shelter in one large room during the eruption of ad 79, an exquisite strongbox, jewellery, more than 200 coins, and a seal ring reading ‘L.CRAS.TERT’. Also found were c.1,000 kg of charred pomegranates discovered stored between layers of straw and covered by wicker mats. It is these pomegranates that are most interesting in the context of this study, because, as we shall see below, their quantity and secure packing suggest that they were transported from the orchards to Villa B for warehousing before redistribution around the region and possibly beyond.

Much discussion followed the discovery of these pomegranates as to their intended local use: in the leather industry, since the rind of the unripe fruit contains a tannin used in tanning leather; to extract dyeing agent; and as an additive in wine making.Footnote ¹ They have been reported to be immature fruits, but this is probably incorrect, based on the long-held belief that the eruption of 79 occurred in August and not, as mostly recognized now, in late October.Footnote ² To my knowledge, the possibility that the fruit had been picked and stored because there was interest and value in it as fruit, and that it was in store awaiting commercial distribution, has not been adequately considered.Footnote ³ In antiquity, pomegranates (Punica granatum) were sought for several medicinal preparations.Footnote ⁴ Its spread in the regions of the western Mediterranean was probably due to the Carthaginians; besides iconographic evidence from funerary and religious contexts, archaeobotanical evidence suggests that it first reached Motya in Sicily in the eighth century bc, at the start of the period of Punic influence.Footnote ⁵ The whole fruits, which would have kept better than the juice, could have been destined for commercialization in regional markets around the Bay of Naples or could even have been intended for export to places where they did not readily grow. The fertility of the Campanian volcanic soil and its favourable climate were well known in ancient and modern times. Strabo, in the passage quoted above, remarks on the beauty, by which he means the productivity, of the fields around Vesuvius. This agricultural productivity was not limited to the famous wines distributed to faraway regions by land and by seaborne trade. The products of Campanian horticulture and arboriculture could end up in the interregional and intraregional trade, especially when they could be preserved (e.g., in brine, in must, or honey) or when they naturally had a good shelf life (like the pomegranate). Indeed, among the cargo recovered from one of the ships excavated at S. Rossore, the Roman port of Pisae, were amphorae containing peaches, cherries, and plums, most probably originating from Campania.Footnote ⁶

The trading and importation of pomegranates, a fruit typical of the Mediterranean, into northern European regions are attested in archaeological discoveries from Switzerland. Seven charred barrels from a storage area at the military settlement of Vindonissa (mod. Windsch-Breite), dated to the last decade of the first century bc, had contained pomegranates, of which hundreds of grains and pericarps survived.Footnote ⁷ This find, the earliest attestation of this fruit to the north of the Alps, clearly indicates the import of pomegranates into the camp of the Legio XXI Rapax stationed there at the time, either as ‘luxury’ food for officers or, more likely, for medicinal purposes.Footnote ⁸ The discovery is also a reminder that many foodstuffs were, for the most part, traded in perishable containers – were it not for charred and waterlogged conditions, the barrels would have disintegrated and their content scattered, leaving not much trace.

I am not suggesting here that the pomegranates that were discovered at Vindonissa came from Campania; many other regions of the Mediterranean could have been their place of origin; the south of France, where cultivation of the plant had probably started already in the archaic period, is a potential source.Footnote ⁹ But it is not inconceivable that, just as barrels of Mediterranean pomegranates ended up in Vindonissa, so too were the pomegranates of Campania/Oplontis Villa B meant to be sold elsewhere. Excavations in the courtyard and ground rooms of Villa B have discovered c.600 amphoraeFootnote ¹⁰ – surely a commercial quantity – and a sizeable number of them were found, stacked upside down, in one of the corners of the courtyard, probably rinsed, dried, and ready for reuse.Footnote ¹¹ The Oplontis Project team sees confirmation of this interpretation in the fact that a small stone oven containing a pot with pine resin was discovered: the amphorae were being readied for internal recoating to keep them impermeable. As stated on the project’s website, ‘workers prepared storage amphorae, certainly for wine, and possibly for oil and garum’.Footnote ¹² Strangely, no one seems to have also considered that in antiquity fruit was often preserved and transported over long distances in must or brine; the amphorae about to be coated again could well have been destined for the extra-regional transport of pomegranates.

How many fresh pomegranates do c.1,000 kg of charred fruit remains represent? It is possible to suggest a very rough estimate for the weight of these fruit when they came to be stored in the room.Footnote ¹³ A modern, medium-sized fresh pomegranate (circumference = 25 cm) weighs c.225 g. In this fruit, the outer hard pericarp and the inner, soft mesocarp weigh c.88 g, and the arils (that is, the thin membrane containing the juice derived from the epidermal cells of the seeds) weigh c.134 g. Once the juice was removed, I was left with 19 g of (fresh) seeds to add to the 88 g of the endocarp + mesocarp; this gave a weight of 107 g. Assuming that during charring in ad 79 and centuries of being buried underground the fresh seeds and endocarps/mesocarps lost c.50 per cent of their weight, we are left with c.50 g for each originally fresh fruit. This means that 1,000 kg of charred pomegranates equate to about 20,000 fresh pomegranates, a very considerable quantity! Regardless of the intended use and final destination of the pomegranates stored in Villa B, the large quantity suggests either that the fruits came from an estate with monoculture or near-to-monoculture cultivations, or that the purchase and collection of the fruit produced in a number of different orchards had been centrally organized (by a cooperative agreement among producers or farmed out to a broker), and the produce conveyed to the same storage location.Footnote ¹⁴ Both options speak of market-oriented arboriculture and of well-integrated systems of production and distribution. On the basis of what we know about Roman planting practices and evidence for commercial orchards in Pompeii, it seems more likely that the pomegranates would have come from more than one orchard, as we will see in a moment.

In modern agriculture, a young pomegranate tree (four years old) produces about 20–25 fruits; maximum production capacity is reached in the tenth year, when yield increases to typically between 100 and 150 fruits per tree, equivalent to c.22.67 kg or 50 pounds per tree. Modern, well-managed orchards can achieve even higher yields, as many as 200 to 250 fruits per tree.Footnote ¹⁵ For the purposes of this rough and ready calculation, preferring to err on the low side, I posit that the trees in question were not very young, but had not yet reached their full production capacity either, and had received minimal irrigation. If we assume that each tree would have been able to produce 30 pomegranates, this would mean that the c.20,000 fresh pomegranates that had been stored in Villa B just before the eruption of ad 79 were the harvest from about 666 trees. If we posit higher yields per tree, but still lower than modern maximum production capacity, the number of our hypothetical trees would of course be lower; a possible production of 50 fruits per tree, would mean that the c.20,000 pomegranates were the produce of 400 trees.

The figure of 666 pomegranate trees can then be used to approximate the size of the orchard or, more probably, the orchards needed to produce the fruit. Columella recommends a spacing of between 3 and 4 m, whereas the spacing of trees in the commercial orchard, measuring c.2,100 m², which Jashemski excavated between Porta Stabia and Porta Nocera in Pompeii (i.22.2), was every 2–3 m.Footnote ¹⁶ For the purpose of reconstructing the Villa B store of pomegranates, let us split the difference and assume that the trees on which they were grown had been spaced 3 m apart. We would need a piece of land measuring about 5,600 m² (c.0.5 hectares or 1.3 acres) to grow 666 trees. This size is not a huge amount – equivalent to about two and a half times the size of the Pompeian commercial orchard just mentioned. However, from both the Pompeian fruit orchard and the large one at Rome at S. Giovanni in Laterano that we have already discussed,Footnote ¹⁷ it is clear that even the very large orchards would not be planted with only one type of tree, but rather with a selection of types alongside vines and nut trees. In the case of the garden of the House of the Ship Europa (i.15.3), which measured about 3,325 m² (one-third of a hectare or 0.8 acres), of the 416 root cavities identified by Jashemski, only 31 were fruit trees, while about half of the area of this garden was occupied by vines and by a number of plots separated by furrows, which she interpreted as beds for vegetables.Footnote ¹⁸ I am therefore of the opinion that the pomegranates found in Villa B came from a number of orchards in the area which were cultivated with other trees and plants. These may have been scattered landholdings belonging to the same proprietor or to different owners.Footnote ¹⁹ Estates in the Vesuvian region seem to have been rather small on average; estimates for one of the largest villa estates known in this area, the Villa della Pisanella, indicate that the fundus could not have been larger than c.59 iugera (14.8 ha), which is almost half the size of the standard 100-iugera estate provided by Columella.Footnote ²⁰ Agricultural production on this type of estate would have never tended to monoculture, increasing the risk of crop failure, but, as we have seen in various archaeological examples of commercial gardens from Pompeii, plots largely comprised vines intermixed with fruit trees and vegetable beds. We know that viticulture was a significant component in the agriculture of the Vesuvian area, therefore estates which engaged in commercial fruit cultivation were doing so on a relatively modest scale following mixed cultivation strategies. The cumulative arboricultural production of these estates was, nonetheless, a sizeable and significant component of the local agricultural economy.

References to the horticultural cultivations of the Vesuvian plain and Campania more generally are present in the literary texts. Strabo writes that some areas of Campania were so fertile that they were sown twice with spelt, a third time with millet, and a fourth time with vegetables.Footnote ²¹ Pliny and the agronomists refer to Campania as the place where specific varieties of fruit and nut had been developed (e.g., the Herculaneum fig; the Plinian cherry; the Falernian pear; the Corelliana and the Tereiana chestnut varieties), alongside a selection of new types of grape vine, such as the Horconia grape (a likely manuscript variant for Holconia), named after the Pompeian gens Holconia.Footnote ²² There were also some areas of Campania specializing in a specific type of cultivation, to the point that the ‘product’ had become more generically known in Latin by the Campanian geographic name: a common name for hazelnuts was abellana nux from Abella/Abellinum in Campania, the general area where currently historical terraced hazelnut groves can still be found.Footnote ²³ Other horticultural products appreciated for their quality include onions from Pompeii, quinces from Neapolis, and cabbages, widely cultivated throughout Campania according to Columella: distinct types of cabbage were grown at Cumae and at Pompeii and were more generally known after the names of these localities.Footnote ²⁴ To these products, aromatic plants and flowers used in the manufacturing of perfumes must be added, although some spices used in perfume were also imported from further afield, since Campania had great fame in perfume making: Capua and Puteoli had famous perfume-making workshops, while the quality of the roses of Paestum was renowned.Footnote ²⁵ Campania’s distinction in arboriculture and specialized cultivation techniques was not limited to fruit and nut trees. Minius Percennius from Nola is mentioned in Cato’s manual as an expert in the propagation and planting of the cypress.Footnote ²⁶ This tree, of which about 100 planted in a quincunx formation that have been dated to the Roman period were discovered along the Sarno River in the early twentieth century, was used to produce stakes and props and also planted as a boundary marker between estates, as Varro himself did in his property on Vesuvius.Footnote ²⁷

Because of the circumstances of their destruction and thus their preservation, Pompeii and other settlements in the Vesuvian region provide us with exceptional archaeological evidence, but Pompeii was a rather ordinary Roman town. It was, however, in an exceptionally fertile region, densely settled, and horticultural activity must have been omnipresent. There are compelling clues about the existence in the region of flourishing commercial arboriculture and about the fact that much experimentation and development of new fruit varieties took place on Campanian estates. It is even possible that some of the modern fruit cultivars typical of Campania are descendants of ancient Roman cultivars, as has been argued for the annurca apple or the cherry varieties Somma and S. Anastasia which, according to Ciarallo, have the same shape displayed by the cherries depicted in wall paintings from Pompeii.Footnote ²⁸ Cherry trees did grow in some of the gardens of Pompeii, where both cherry stones and wood belonging to the Prunus genus were found.Footnote ²⁹ The study of historical landscapes in Campania has identified several examples of fruits and nuts and of cultivation techniques which are attested for the region in the Roman period. While documentary evidence for cultivations in these historical landscapes only goes back to the medieval era, certain traditions and a focus on fruit and nut cultivation in mixed agricultural regimes in all likelihood date back to the Roman period and possibly earlier. I have already mentioned above the historical hazelnut groves in an area renowned, since the time of Cato, for the production of hazelnuts. To this example we can add the vite maritata vine-growing technique – vines trained high up on poplar trees and in between the trees – typical of Aversa and the Phlegraean area to the north of Naples, a technique mentioned by Pliny in reference to Campania, and, possibly, the terraced fruit orchards on the hills near Naples: Strabo had described the hillsides surrounding Lake Avernus as intensively cultivated.Footnote ³⁰ Information in medieval and more recent documentation on the agricultural regimes followed in these historical landscape districts of Campania comprising different types of natural environments (e.g. plain, hill, mountain) is not inconsistent with what we know of Roman agricultural practices and may provide us with some additional guidance, bearing in mind some obvious differences in crops. For instance, the area comprised between the Avella-Partenio massif and the mountains of Lauro and Nola had the following crop sequence: arables, such as wheat, hay, and maize (a New World crop) in the valleys; orchards, vineyards, and hazelnut groves in the foothills; and chestnut and thick coppice woods on the upper mountain slopes/summits.Footnote ³¹ Ancient evidence and archaeobotanically grounded studies such as the study of the fuel economy of Pompeii support the existence of similar agricultural regimes for Roman Campania.Footnote ³²

Campania was a great producer of horticultural produce and fruit, but, as mentioned above, this production did not occupy a large part of the cultivated land on any given estate – and indeed, as shown by Jashemski’s work, in Pompeii some of it could take place within the city walls. The Pompeian fruit orchard or market garden located between Porta Stabia and Porta Nocera gives an idea of the layout and intensity of planting adopted. As we have seen, Jashemski’s investigation of an area that was about 50 per cent of the original garden identified c.150 root cavities.Footnote ³³ The size of the root cavities suggested that about 90 per cent of the trees planted in this orchard were small ones, planted in rows with a spacing of 2 to 3 m.Footnote ³⁴ If the unexcavated part of this Pompeian property presented the same planting pattern as the portion excavated by Jashemski, a total of 300 plants can be posited as the tree population of the orchard. Two large clusters of root cavities identified in the southeast corner of this orchard belonged to clusters of smaller trees, possibly hazelnuts with suckers.Footnote ³⁵ The orchard had a source of water in the form of a cistern placed in front of the north wall, and Jashemski suggested that the path leading to the garden triclinium also served as an irrigation channel.Footnote ³⁶ Since the trees in this orchard were relatively young, they still needed irrigation and because the Augustan aqueduct did not serve this part of Pompeii,Footnote ³⁷ cisterns collecting rainfall were needed. A cistern might seem insufficient to cover the irrigation needs for 300 trees (especially during the hot summer months), but Jashemski also observed that in modern Pompeii apricot trees grow without any irrigation whereas the town’s peaches need irrigation only two or three times per year.Footnote ³⁸ Unlike other regions, the Vesuvian area has a very fertile and light soil, allowing tree roots to easily develop in depth and reach water/moisture, and the presence of small pumice particles in the soil creating little pockets allows for good water retention without supplemental irrigation.Footnote ³⁹ Jashemski’s study of a number of gardens in Pompeii has confirmed both the tree-root development in depth and the presence of the small pumice particles in the archaeological horizons.

Still in the same Pompeian orchard, a way of contouring the soil to allow water retention around the roots was effected near the eastern end of the south wall, where undisturbed original soil was preserved; this contouring – Jashemski termed it ‘sombrero-shaped’ – indicates that the trees were still relatively young plants and not completely established.Footnote ⁴⁰ The contouring into raised mounds around the tree trunks ringed by a shallow ditch a little below grade was intended to slow water run-off. This contouring practice continues in modern orchards of the region. Jashemski could not identify the types of tree that grew in the orchard, but different types of fruit tree, including fig and olive in combination with hazelnut, seem likely.

Commercial orchards, even small ones, often rely on plant nurseries to acquire their fruit trees. In Chapter 4, I have mentioned the archaeological evidence for plant nurseries and the evidence from documentary papyri about the existence of nurseries which supplied agricultural estates. Pompeii, in addition to abundant evidence for orchards, gardens, and vineyards, may also have had a plant nursery growing cherry, other trees of the Prunus species (peaches, plums, almonds), olive, grape vine, and hazelnut. It was discovered in 1986, when the large outdoor area at the back of the House of the Floral Lararium (ii.9.3–4) along Via Nocera was excavated.Footnote ⁴¹ A small cultivated area, measuring 420 m² and subdivided into eight porcae or raised strips of earth separated by shallow ditches oriented east–west, was identified. Numerous small holes measuring c.4/8 cm in diameter – single or in groups of three or four – were set at a distance of only 40 cm from one another, indicating that the plants were very small and thus suggesting that the facility was a plant nursery, not a commercial orchard; pottery sherds placed at the bottom of the holes indicate the intention to facilitate water drainage.Footnote ⁴² Judging from their size and spacing, the holes were probably for plants being reproduced by air layering and/or slippage. More than 100 casts of these holes were made,Footnote ⁴³ and the carbonized wood found in some of them was analysed, together with pollen samples.

Later analysis by Annamaria Ciarallo seemed to support the interpretation of the evidence for a nursery: she cited as proof that in the middle of the garden a fagus (beech tree) and an alnus (alder) had been planted,Footnote ⁴⁴ trees that in the literary sources are mentioned as useful to give shade to propagation attempts by air layering.Footnote ⁴⁵ This last detail given by Ciarallo in support of the nursery identification is not very convincing and it must be considered that the planted area was part of a large dwelling created by the annexation of two houses. The property seems to have been frequented by the public, since electoral inscriptions were found in one of the internal rooms; the rooms flanking the garden area had large windows looking onto the garden space, where a large masonry biclinium and an opus signinum floor with inserted marble fragments were found.Footnote ⁴⁶ These elements of socializing and feasting seem at odds with the garden being used as a plant nursery (but the biclinium could belong to an earlier phase of the house than the nursery, which was in existence at the time of the eruption). But if it indeed was a commercial nursery and the biclinium was in use at the same time, the presence of a dining area in the garden area is suggestive of the interlinking of commercial and social aspects of public and private functions that so often characterizes the Roman world.

The evidence from Pompeii and Herculaneum pertaining to horticultural cultivations within the town and in its immediate outskirts is complemented by archaeobotanical evidence for the consumption of these products, from the many finds of food in the houses and shops, mineralized remains in latrines and sewers, and in the context of the study of ritual offerings found in gardens and in shrines.Footnote ⁴⁷ Over twenty types of fruits have been identified in the archaeobotanical remains of the two Vesuvian towns, and these include cherries, plums, peaches, apples, pears, figs, olives, grape, blackberries, and mulberries.Footnote ⁴⁸ Attested nuts and herbs include almonds, hazelnuts, fennel, dill, and coriander.Footnote ⁴⁹ Not all of these products were necessarily grown locallyFootnote ⁵⁰ – a well-known tablet from the archive of the Sulpicii reminds us that lentils, a well-attested legume in Pompeii’s archaeobotanical record, reached Campania from Egypt, and black pepper and dates were also fruits of the long-distance tradeFootnote ⁵¹ – but several almost certainly were, such as mulberries. The results of the twelve-year Anglo-American excavation project of insula 1 in regio vi, which included a blanket sampling strategy of all contexts,Footnote ⁵² show that there was no clear-cut distinction between the carbonized assemblages found in first-century bc and earlier levels and those from the first century ad, except in the case of the olive, which was higher in the first century ad.Footnote ⁵³ Besides cereals, pulses were a well-attested find, especially from the street shrine they investigated; pulses were a common ritual offering in the Roman world. In this specific case, vetches (Vicia ervilia and Vicia sativa) were the most common legume recovered, followed by lentils. Among the fruits, the most common, in a number of assemblages, were fig, grape, and olive, with pomegranate, cherry, peach, apple, blackberry, and melon less common.Footnote ⁵⁴

Increased importance of fruit cultivation in first-century Campania comes also from other, indirect evidence. Research on the fuel economy of Pompeii over a period of c.400 years has shown that while fruit trees and nut trees were present in the charcoal record for the first century bc, there was a sudden increase in their frequency in the first century ad.Footnote ⁵⁵ Beech wood, which had dominated the earlier composition of the fuel used in Pompeii, had progressively diminished starting from the third century bc until the first century ad. Then, in the first century ad, the charcoal record in the town of Pompeii shows that the use of cuttings of fruit and nut trees as fuel dramatically increased, indicating that an increase in fruit cultivation and in fruit-bearing trees can be posited for the first-century ad Vesuvian region, and the territory around Pompeii in particular: the product of pruning was put to good use as fuel.

The pollen study from the harbour of Neapolis has revealed other important information about horticultural cultivations in the area of the Bay of Naples, especially vegetables. Cultivated cabbage and/or broccoli (Brassicaceae), together with radish, were identified, proving the presence of vegetable patches around the harbour area. Brassicaceae pollen in high concentration was also found, for the Roman period, in the coring at Lake Avernus and from a soil sample from the so-called villa of Poppaea at Oplontis. The early Roman imperial period stands out in the pollen record as far as horticulture is concerned: in the third century ad, a drastic decrease in horticultural activities occurred, matched by an increase in the presence of Mediterranean shrubland plants and some elements of the deciduous forest.Footnote ⁵⁶ These data suggest a contraction in the amount of land kept under cultivation, followed by a reversion to spontaneous natural vegetation.

Undoubtedly, vegetables must have been grown commercially in parts of Roman Campania alongside fruit varieties. The Pompeian onion (Pompeiana cepa) mentioned by Columella is often cited in modern literature, together with the ‘tender’ Pompeian cabbage,Footnote ⁵⁷ as a typical product of the area, transported on the Sarno River and perhaps depicted in a wall painting from the House of the Lararium (i.14.7) which shows large baskets full of agricultural produce being weighed and loaded on a river boat towed by two mules; the personification of the Sarno River looks over the scene.Footnote ⁵⁸ Onions or not, this painted scene certainly refers to either vegetables or fruit cultivated locally and to the role played by the Sarno in their local transport and commercial distribution; as shown by Strabo’s passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the river was an important water route for the transport of commercial goods. Local cultivation of onions is, however, attested archaeologically: in the elegant and sophisticated suburban Villa of the Mysteries, Maiuri found the imprint of a thick layer of onions that had been stored in cubiculum 16, of which he made a cast, suggesting that onions were one of the crops grown on the villa estate.Footnote ⁵⁹ In other cases, archaeobotany offers just hints for the cultivation of vegetables like the lettuce that must have been very widespread and common but which easily elude recording.Footnote ⁶⁰ In a farm of Pompeii’s suburbium lettuce seeds were found in a bronze container, in all likelihood stored away to be planted the following spring/summer.Footnote ⁶¹

It seems likely that a large part of this horticultural production occurred in medium-sized stand-alone orchards and vegetable patches like the one excavated by Jashemski near Pompeii’s amphitheatre or in orchards within larger estates devoted to viticulture. Intercropping of fruit trees and seasonal vegetables is the most likely form of cultivation adopted. Cultivations in antiquity were interspersed: in between the rows of olive trees, vines, or other fruit trees one could grow vegetables, or grain, or legumes. Two Roman orchards in the south of France identified archaeologically by the excavation of hundreds of rectangular planting pits show a much greater spacing between trees than what was advised in the agronomical texts or observed at Pompeii, 8 m in one case, 15 m in the other. Such spacing can only indicate intercropping or, possibly, integration with animal husbandry.Footnote ⁶² Crops were rotated, and not all the same plants would have occupied the same patch of land during the various seasons. Many of these practices are discussed in the treatises of the agronomists and, sometimes, environmental archaeology can confirm or shed new light on agricultural practices. Returning to Oplontis Villa B, excavators also found abundant remains of carbonized hay in two rooms. Their analysis revealed that many different vegetal species made up the hay, mostly fodder plants such as vetch and clover, but also graminaceae, plants from the genus bromus, spikelets of quaking grass (briza maxima L.), parts of grape vines (leaves, tendrils, and twig fragments), and even the leaves of olive trees.Footnote ⁶³ This in all likelihood means that the hay, before being cut, dried, and stored as animal fodder, had been grown in between rows of olive trees and vines.Footnote ⁶⁴ Fodder of similarly mixed composition from the Vesuvian area has been found elsewhere: in the mezzanine of the upper floor of the bakery next to the House of the Chaste Lovers in Pompeii, the fodder was made up of clover, graminaceae, and legumes such as field bean.Footnote ⁶⁵

While some horticultural products of Campania, e.g., dried figs and other preserved fruit, were likely traded outside the immediate region, a good part of the horticultural production was consumed locally. It is worth remembering that, just as today population density in this part of Campania is among the highest in Europe, so too was settlement density in antiquity very high; considering the number and density of towns and villas of different kinds, local demand for fresh fruit and vegetables must have been high.Footnote ⁶⁶ Wilhelmina Jashemski, considering the documentary evidence for fruit-sellers in Pompeii and their electoral notices, thought that the pomarii were a relatively strong association in this town, lobbying to have candidates to their liking elected as aediles or duumvir.Footnote ⁶⁷ The fruit-sellers were not the only sellers of horticultural products in Pompeii attested in electoral graffiti: we have also a lupine-seller (lupinarius and, in another graffito, lupinopolus), a certain Felicius. Lupine was regarded by the agricultural writers as the best legume to enrich the soil where vineyards grow, and it is thus not a surprise to find reference to its cultivation in the Vesuvian area, where viticulture was practised intensively. It was also an excellent fodder plant, and the legume was eaten by humans too, which may explain having a lupine-seller in Pompeii.Footnote ⁶⁸ Another electoral notice refers to ‘farmers’, agricolae, collectively.Footnote ⁶⁹

Arboriculture, then as now, needs the help of bees for pollination and the agronomists include instructions on keeping beehives in their treatises, honey and wax being widely used products.Footnote ⁷⁰ Honey and horticulture could be paired in targeted types of production, which clearly had a market: ‘Honey of Gavia Severa from bees fed on thyme’ is the text of a painted inscription on an amphora fragment from Pompeii.Footnote ⁷¹ Indeed, Varro mentions that the Veiani brothers in the ager Faliscus received good revenues from the honey they produced: their modest villa estate comprised a hortus, several apiaries, and plantations of aromatic herbs, including thyme.Footnote ⁷²

Gallia Cisalpina

Gallia Cisalpina, particularly the area corresponding to the modern region of Emilia Romagna, appears to have been another region of Italy crucial to fruit cultivation and possibly to the introduction of new types of fruit in the peninsula, as we have seen in the case of the peach. Cisalpine Gaul encompassed the largest alluvial plain of Italy and was obviously a fertile region. In the Roman era, successful vineyards had been established in parts of Cisalpine Gaul, but the area was particularly renowned for animal husbandry – the sheep and wool of Altinum and Mutina were famousFootnote ¹¹³ – and, of course, for cereal cultivation.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Strabo, in commenting on the agricultural fertility and resources of the region, mentions abundant production of wine stored in ‘barrels larger than houses’, pig rearing, wool, and pitch production.Footnote ¹¹⁵ According to Pliny the Elder, a common way of cultivating the grape vine found in parts of Cisalpine was to ‘marry’ the vines to trees, particularly to the elm, a technique confirmed by archaeobotanical discoveries from the territory of Roman Mutina consisting of remains of vines next to elm trunks.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Even marshy areas produced abundant wine yields, like Ravenna’s, where the vines produced plentiful grape harvests but, according to Strabo, exhausted their productivity quickly, dying out within four or five years.Footnote ¹¹⁷

If one had to characterize the typical agricultural strategies found on estates of Cisalpine Gaul, mixed agriculture and husbandry were the norm. A letter by Pliny the Younger to his friend Arrianus Maturus, a leading eques of Altinum, encapsulates this very well by making reference to the arbusculae (small trees), vinae (vines), segetes (cornfields), and oves delicatissimae (softest sheep) which were present on Maturus’ rural estate.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This is a picture well confirmed by archaeological data, showing the importance of animal husbandry and cereal cultivation in the region.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But just as Pliny’s word arbusculae hints at arboriculture being one of the things pursued on Maturus’ estate, so do we have an indication that some specific areas of Cisalpine Gaul distinguished themselves also for horticulture and fruit tree cultivation. Individual localities came to be known for specific horticultural products, for instance the extraordinarily large asparagus that, according to Pliny the Elder, were grown in Ravenna, and the fine apples cultivated on estates belonging to Gaius Matius near Aquileia and then sold in Rome, which I have mentioned earlier in the book.

A reference to estates of the wealthy engaging in large-scale commercial horticulture/arboriculture can be found in the bronze tablet from Veleia, near Piacenza in Emilia Romagna, dated to ad 112. This famous Tabula, which attests Trajan’s alimentary scheme, lists the local landowners who were indirectly funding the scheme by taking out loans from the imperial fiscus, pledging their properties as securities.Footnote ¹²⁰ The emperor disbursed more than 1 million sesterces in loans at 5 per cent interest; the return on these was then used to support 300 children of the town. Among the wealthiest proprietors, we find a woman, Cornelia Severa, who owned a varied portfolio of properties in the territory of Veleia and of Placentia, valued at a total of 1,158,150 sesterces. Among her properties listed in the inscription there are also the horti Publiliani Fadiani, worth 26,000 sesterces. These horti were located in one of the pagi of Placentia, the pagus Salutaris, and in all likelihood need to be understood as fruit orchards and not as the type of luxurious suburban residences we have encountered in Chapter 1.Footnote ¹²¹ The Tabula only broadly defines the types of property, using categories such as fundus, saltus, and agellus, and in the case of fundi it is not possible to know what was actually cultivated on these estates. The seventeen properties declared by Cornelia Severa vary in value from 22,000 sesterces, the lowest value given, to 200,000, the highest referring to a fundus with oviles, sheep pens. Without knowing the actual size of these properties and other details, it is difficult to give a definite assessment, but none of the entries in this important document refer to luxurious suburban properties; they all concern agricultural estates and pastures, and therefore this fact warrants understanding Cornelia Severa’s horti as orchards. It is, however, the archaeobotanical evidence from northern Italy that clearly attests the diffusion of horticulture in this region in the Roman era, particularly during the first two centuries ad. Not only does fruit become extremely well attested at all kinds of sites in this period, but a number of fruits/nuts such as mulberry, almond, and peach appear in northern Italy for the first time in the period between the late first century bc and the second century ad.

As explained in the Introduction, carpological remains are best preserved in waterlogged conditions, whereas cereals are mostly attested as charred remains; this different survival rate of the various plant remains depending on the preservation conditions obviously affects recovery rates and means that some types of plant can be underrepresented in a given context. The recovery of waterlogged plant remains is more common in northern Italy than in the southern regions because of environmental differences (in the Padana Plain, ancient layers are commonly found below several meters of alluvial sediments and are often below the water table) and also because archaeological investigations there have given more attention to environmental analysis. Sites in northern Italy have been archaeobotanically studied over several decades, so a relatively large dataset exists.Footnote ¹²²

Survey of the evidence pertaining to northern Italian funerary contexts, particularly burnt offerings at the tomb on the occasion of cremations and commemoration rituals dating from the first century bc to the third century ad, has identified a range of plant remains.Footnote ¹²³ Cereals, which survive well in charred conditions, are well represented, together with several pulses (field bean and lentil being the main types), although the authors of the study note that identification of legumes is often difficult due to the fragmentation of the seed. Among the fruit attested there was fruit that was clearly imported, for instance the date (Phoenix dactylifera),Footnote ¹²⁴ and types that most probably had local origin, since their cultivation is known from other sources: grape, walnut, hazelnut, pine nut, fig, and peach. Although these imported dates do not seem to have been widely consumed as food, they were relatively frequent as ritual offerings: the only find of dates in a residential context comes from a luxurious domus in Cremona which is believed to have belonged to an imperial functionary.Footnote ¹²⁵ The pine nut, fig, and peach could also have been imported from further afield, in preserved form in the case of the perishable fig and peach, whereas pine nuts left in the cone can last for a long time, but as we have seen in the previous chapter, the presence of peach stones at so many sites in eastern Cisalpine Gaul during the imperial era strongly suggests that the peach was cultivated locally.Footnote ¹²⁶

As remarked by Rottoli and Castiglioni, ‘The evidence regarding fruit, given the scarcity of data from contemporary settlements, constitutes a precious source of information about trading and the introduction of several plants into northern Italy, in addition to more strictly symbolic and ritual aspects.’Footnote ¹²⁷ While offering certain fruits during cremation (particularly grape and hazelnut) had been a ritual attested already in the Iron Age period prior to the incorporation of the region into the Roman state, rituals of the Roman period indicate the continuation of these practices but with significant addition of new fruits. These new species indicate that the area witnessed an increase in vegetable and fruit growing and in storage processes in Roman times.Footnote ¹²⁸ Fruit plants and vegetable plants whose cultivation is thought to have been introduced, or become more common, in the Roman age, include olive,Footnote ¹²⁹ grape,Footnote ¹³⁰ the bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), pomegranate, plum, melon/cucumber (Cucumis melo/sativus),Footnote ¹³¹ peach, and jujube (Ziziphus jujuba).Footnote ¹³² Peach, recovered from seven burial sites, has more attestations than jujube, perhaps because the peach stone, being larger than the jujube seed (which is like an olive stone), was more often visually recognized in excavation and manually collected. Both plants, which according to Pliny the Elder were introduced into Italy in the first century ad,Footnote ¹³³ are thought to have become rapidly widespread and cultivated in northern Italy.Footnote ¹³⁴ It was not only food plants that became more varied from the late Republic onwards, but also ornamental plants that have become, in Rome herself, staples of Roman gardens such as box and plane. In suburban and urban contexts of Roman Mutina these two ornamental plants are well attested.Footnote ¹³⁵

A recent, more comprehensive review of the archaeobotanical data for the whole of Roman northern Italy, which has taken into account 114 sites of different types,Footnote ¹³⁶ has confirmed this general picture of increased horticultural variety in the Roman age, adding nuances to the reconstruction by the inclusion of data also from ‘habitation’ sites, both urban and rural, alongside cemeteries and religious sites. Among the cereals,Footnote ¹³⁷ the most frequent are naked wheats (Triticum aestivum/durum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare), followed by emmer and millet, but the presence of these last two grains diminishes in the first century ad. As discussed in the next chapter, naked wheats, which are less suitable to long-term storage than husked grains, indicate a market agricultural economy catering to urban centres where the processing into flour and then into bread took place, rather than agricultural strategies more focused on subsistence. Naked wheats are one of the signs for urban aggregate demand for certain types of foodstuff, that same type of aggregate demand that, as we have seen in Chapter 3, is the catalyst for the development of large-scale commercial fruit cultivation.

In the case of fruit and nuts, the latest available data show a striking trend: these are the most common archaeobotanical remains recovered. They are present in 91 per cent of the A and 86 per cent of the B sites. The most frequently attested fruits/nuts are walnut, grape, hazelnut, olive, and peach. Other fruits often found at the A sites are sweet/sour cherry, bullace, damson, and sloe, while pears and apples have frequencies of between 6 and 11 per cent at both site types. Melon also seems to have been present in the vegetable gardens of Cisalpine, occurring at 9 per cent of the A type sites, whereas, despite the new data of the last nine years, cucumber and watermelon remain very rare.Footnote ¹³⁸ Watermelon is, in fact, attested only at one site of the imperial age located in Emilia Romagna, probably an import rather than grown locally,Footnote ¹³⁹ but its presence is still noteworthy since not everyone agrees that it was widely cultivated by the Romans.

Cultivation of nuts is also well attested in parts of Cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period; I have mentioned earlier the frequency, in the archaeobotanical record, of walnuts and hazelnuts. Local cultivation can be posited with some confidence in a number of instances when macro-remains are backed up by pollen and wood remains. For instance, pollen studies for Roman Modena show that chestnut, and to a lesser degree walnut, were fairly common and that, while cereals were the main crops grown on drained wetlands, in the Republican and imperial phases a sparse tree forest covered the plain.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Ancient Parma also displays, for the Roman era, an increase in chestnut pollen, which can be taken as indication of chestnut cultivation, as well as of elm. The recovery of numerous grape seeds, whose morphology suggests cultivated varieties, suggests local cultivation of vines trailed on trees, since, as mentioned earlier, elm was a common choice.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Obviously, changes in horticultural practices in the Roman period did not mean the obliteration of earlier traditions and practices. There are a few remarkable examples of continuity in the use of specific types of fruit, such as the case of the 1,500 endocarps of cornel (Cornus mas) discovered in the production area of a Roman Republican site in Cremona, interpreted as waste from the preparation of syrup or fermented beverage. Cornel had been abundantly consumed in that area since the Neolithic.Footnote ¹⁴²

The noticeable increase in the presence and variety of cultivated fruit at Roman sites of the imperial era is clearly seen for the Emilia Romagna region. A review of the available archaeobotanical evidence (largely endocarps recovered in waterlogged conditions) from northern Italy published in the year 2000, which focused on fruit only, had already highlighted the range of fruit consumed in Emilia Romagna in the Roman era. The attested fruit included ‘common’ fruit such as apple, pear, and plum, and exotic fruit such as the peach. Although these data came from only eleven sites, which may seem too sparse for overall generalizations and delineation of trends, they still represented a rich archaeobotanical dataset for Roman Italy, now confirmed by more recent finds.Footnote ¹⁴³ More recent archaeological investigations at the Roman rural villa of S. Agata Bolognese offer some information on horticultural production from a non-urban context. At this villa, occupied from the second half of the first century bc to the late third century ad, besides viticulture, probable cultivations included cherry, plum, walnut, and melon.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It is also worth noting that one of the sites included in the Roman Modena study shows the presence of a varied range of cultivated plants, not only food plants, only in the first and second century ad layers.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Agriculture as a whole seem to have been more intense in the early imperial age.

Increased variety of fruit and vegetables in circulation when compared to the Iron Age also occurs in the northwestern coastal part of Italy, but perhaps a bit later than in the northeast. The archaeobotanical finds from a Roman well at Vada Sabatia, in association with an area interpreted as warehouses in the ancient port quarter and covering a chronological arc from the first to the fourth century ad, attests the presence of walnut, chestnut, and grape (in all periods, but more abundantly in the third- and fourth-century layers), together with beets, cabbage, cucumber and/or melon (Cucumis sativus/melo), lentil, fava bean, and flax; these plants may all have been cultivated near the well.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Fruits recovered in numerous exemplars include peach, sweet and sour cherry, and plum, which also may have been cultivated locally, although their import as preserved fruit, considering that the well was near a port, cannot be excluded.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

When considering the overall evidence for all types of fruit that were recovered from these archaeological investigations (including wild and cultivated plants), some interesting conclusions can be posited. First, the number of cultivated fruit plants attested in the archaeobotanical record increased markedly in the Roman imperial period when compared to the Republican period (second to first centuries bc) and also to the late antique period (fifth to seventh centuries ad) (Table 6.1).Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Second, among the greater variety of fruit attested for the imperial period, there are various ‘exotic’ species (peach, almond, cherry-prune) and a strong prevalence of members of the Prunus species of the Rosaceae family: sweet cherry, damson, almond, and plum. These fruit trees are not attested in late antiquity, with the exception of the peach. Lastly, as far as the peach is concerned, the size of the stones recovered from archaeobotanical deposits of the early imperial age, measuring up to 3 cm in length, indicates that they were large fruits, whereas in late antiquity both the size and frequency of peach stones diminish.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ These data point to a very high investment in fruit cultivation in the imperial period. Large fruits are the result of well-tended plants; they show labour, use of manure and irrigation, experimentation with grafting and selection of desirable characteristics in the plant/fruit, availability of good cultivars, and reproduction of plants via vegetative propagation. In late antiquity, on the contrary, the disappearance of other Prunus species and the persistence only of the peach, but smaller in size, suggest less intensive care in fruit cultivation.

This ‘horticultural history’ for Emilia Romagna is also confirmed by the current available archaeobotanical data for most of northern Italy: the highest variety in terms of fruit occurred in the first and second centuries ad, with ten fruit taxa attested only in these phases and not in the later imperial period.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Bosi and her co-authors also firmly conclude that ‘In the Roman period of Northern Italy, fruit, which was increasing both in variety and quantity of archaeobotanical remains, appears to be one of the most important elements to highlight a change from the past.’Footnote ¹⁵¹ To sum up, people ate better and more varied fruit after the late first century bc, increasingly less good and with fewer choices after the fourth century.

What happened between the second century and the later empire to change this picture of horticultural diversity and investment in arboriculture in northern Italy? A possible explanation is environmental. Changes in climatic conditions between the early and mid empire, a time when the so-called ‘Roman Climatic Optimum’ was still in place, and late antiquity, when climate seems to have become unstable and wetter, may have had an impact on the variety and strength of arboriculture in these northern regions in the earlier period and its later partial demise.Footnote ¹⁵² It has been noted that ‘in the 5th to 6th century ad the onset of a comparatively colder and damper climate is manifest, with a probable increase in rainfall and flooding. This is also demonstrated by the notable variations in depositional dynamics in the Po delta.’Footnote ¹⁵³ These more unstable hydrogeological conditions are likely to have had an adverse effect on cultivations, particularly on vineyards and orchards. Besides the reduced variety of fruit attested in the later imperial period, other elements may be indications of wetter and colder climate. The chestnut, which as we have seen in Chapter 4 was not much appreciated as food in the early empire, but was cultivated for its wood, seems to have slowly increased its role in the diet of the inhabitants of northern Italy starting from the third /fourth century onwards. It is in this period that the nut is attested for the first time, archaeobotanically, at domestic sites, whereas in the earlier period it appeared only at cemeteries and religious sites.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

These changes, together with the increased presence, in third- and fourth-century sites, especially in the plain, of rye, a cereal which is more tolerant of poorer soils and colder temperatures than other grains, do suggest a less varied agriculture from the third century ad onwards, possibly due to environmental changes. However, while climate may certainly have contributed to changes in the intensity and diversity of fruit cultivation in Cisalpine Gaul, other archaeological data point rather to disruption in the supply–demand mechanism as a major cause.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Depopulation of the countryside in northern Italy after the peak reached in the early second century ad is evident from the archaeological record, and a number of Roman rural sites and also urban houses in Emilia Romagna show signs of abandonment and violent destruction as early as the third century ad.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In this part of northern Italy, late antiquity was a time when the number of rural settlements and the size of urban settlements diminished and disruption in trade networks and social structure due to war were present. In the second half of the third century ad the Iutungi invaded Italy and battles took place in eastern Cisalpine at Placentia, Fanum, and Pavia.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In this period, the Roman empire at large was also affected by the so-called Plague of Cyprian (ad 249–62), a pandemic which, for some scholars like Kyle Harper, nearly caused the total collapse of the empire.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Later, the sixth century was marked by both the Justinianic Plague (541–3) and, in Italy specifically, by the long Gothic War (535–54). The collapse of urban living, accompanied by war ravaging the countryside, was certainly not conducive to the large-scale arboricultural activity that can be posited for the early imperial period. Demand contracted and other more basic food plants became a priority at a time when fields and their very ownership were not as secure as before. As the urban growth during the first and second centuries ad and the settlement of the veterans of Actium in eastern Cisalpine had caused considerable investment in drainage works and in expanding the land devoted to agriculture, so the demographic contraction and unstable political situation of the later empire greatly affected agricultural strategies.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

In conclusion, the picture that emerges by combining the textual evidence with archaeobotanical and archaeological data for the cultivation of fruit trees and vegetables in ancient Campania and eastern Cisalpine Gaul, though admittedly fragmentary and incomplete, suggests that in the early empire horticulture in these two regions was particularly developed and was an important component of the local economy. In both Campania and eastern Cisalpine Gaul, the first century ad is marked by a higher number and greater variety of fruits available and, as mentioned in the case of Pompeii on the basis of the evidence from the woods used for fuel, by an increased cultivation of fruit trees. Both regions may have been the geographic areas where some of the new fruit trees coming from the eastern Mediterranean regions were first introduced to Italy: Campania in the case of the citron/lemon and Cisalpine Gaul for the peach. Both these regions had a major port, Puteoli and Aquileia respectively, which ensured connectivity and high volumes of trade from the whole Mediterranean.

It may be relevant that Campania was a region where wealthy Romans had owned villas and estates since the mid Republican period.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Not only did the presence of opulent villas and their wealthy occupiers stimulate the demand for luxury foods and high-quality fresh food, it may also have actually directly contributed to the development of new varieties and the acclimatization of exotic plants because the owners of these estates could afford to devote part of their lands to cultivations that required years to reach full productivity and the specialized slave-arboriculturists who, we must assume, were behind the creation of many of the new varieties of fruit discussed in Chapter 4. We have seen earlier in the book that there were links between eastern Cisalpine Gaul and some prominent individuals of the first century ad who had an interest either in horticulture or in acclimatizing new plants in Italy. Whether these men were intimately involved in these projects is not known, but their properties and the personnel of their estates may have participated in innovations and the development of large-scale commercial fruit cultivation that took off in the early imperial period. There was a combination of favourable conditions for these developments: sufficient aggregate demand and the presence of wealthy estates whose owners could afford the long-term planning and investment of time and money arboriculture entailed.

The discussion presented in this chapter shows that the Augustan ‘horticultural’ revolution addressed in Chapter 3 was not limited to the city of Rome and its environs. Campania and eastern Cisalpine Gaul were regions where horticulture, not just wine production, had a notable impetus in this period, with tangible changes in both the local economies and the diet of the people. The late antique trajectory these two regions followed was different. This different evolution shows that thriving cities, sufficient aggregate demand, and wealthy consumers who were also landowners, were instrumental in sustaining commercial horticulture, especially fruit tree cultivation. In late antiquity, on Palladius’ Campanian estate one could find citron/lemon trees. In the north of Italy, not only do various previously common fruits disappear from tables and orchards, some, like the apricot, are also completely forgotten until their rediscovery in the Middle Ages.