Strabo’s account of Cisalpine Gaul (‘the Keltic land within the Alps’) provides neglected evidence for the changing ethnography of the Transpadane area in the early first century BC. In 102 BC the existing Gallic peoples (Insubres and Cenomani) were dispossessed by the invading Cimbri, who held the whole area until they in turn were defeated by Marius the following year; the land was taken by the Romans for veteran settlements that in 89 BC were given the status of ‘Latin colonies’. By Strabo’s time they were important cities, and one of them was Catullus’ native Verona. Although ‘Catullus’ may be a Gallic name, his father’s ownership of the prime site of Sirmio makes it very likely that he was descended from one of the colonists.

In this chapter, the literary, documentary, and archaeological evidence pertaining to horticulture and arboriculture in eastern Gallia Cisalpina and in Campania is investigated. The chapter argues that these two regions of Roman Italy played an important role for horticultural developments in the late Republic and early imperial era, both as producers of fruit and vegetables and possibly also as developers of new cultivars. The archaeobotanical record of Gallia Cisalpina also clearly shows that, from the Augustan era throughout the whole of the first century AD, the frequency and diversity of recovered remains of fruit greatly increased. These two regions had very important ports, Puteoli and Aquileia, which handled a large amount of trade coming from the rest of the Mediterranean and it is possible that these ports were entry routes into the wider region first, and the rest of Italy later, for new fruit trees coming from the eastern Mediterranean regions such as the peach, the apricot, and the citron/lemon.