Oral histories of land care and abandonment

The elderly peasants we talked to described the present-day landscape as abandoned, overgrown, and fire prone. They contrasted this with the landscape that they grew up in, which was busy and full of people, including women and children. People gathered firewood and charcoal, raked leaf litter and cut ferns for stable bedding, cut brush for kindling, gathered herbs, berries, and mushrooms, and rapidly extinguished small wildfires. After the war, maritime pine trees were tapped for resin in some areas. Every scrap of wood or vegetation had some use. Pastures were closely cropped by sheep, and the forest floor was cleared of fallen branches, leaf litter, and shrubs. Forests were grassy and heavily grazed, and in places the soil was bare, with only a light covering of leaves or pine needles. Our informants described the landscapes of the Monte Pisano as having been ‘clean,’ comparing it unfavorably with the ‘dirty’ conditions of the present. As one woman told us ‘you could walk almost everywhere, whether there was a path or not’ and ‘whether because of litter raking, or... if a tree fell someone immediately made it into firewood’ (Lenzarini 2019).² The arrival of fossil fuel energy changed the forest. ‘When heating came in, everything, everything was abandoned, [now] a tree falls and stays in the woods, you can’t pass anymore, and it is harder to put fires out’. Woodland and pasture properties were clearly demarcated by trees and stones and invading others’ land was out of the question. There was little fire. As one woman remarked ‘What fires? What did it burn if there was nothing on the ground? Everything was cleaned’ (Bonanni 2019a). Another woman stated: ‘It didn’t burn before. You could even leave a cigarette, but it was so clean, there was not even a stick, not a blade of grass, not a bush, there was nothing, it was all clean’ (Lenzarini 2019). The heavy presence of people working the land meant that rare small wildfires were rapidly extinguished. Something of what these tended forests might have looked like can be seen in the pine forests in Fig. 2, where understory oak and scrub have been removed to reduce fire risk, creating a more open, parklike appearance.

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Fig. 2

Stand of maritime pine with tree heather beneath. Vorno, Monte Pisano

(Picture by author, 2019)

Most present-day forests have a dense layer of understory scrub with thick layers of leaf litter on the forest floor, as seen in Fig. 3.

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Fig. 3

Young maritime pines with an understory of tree heather, Monte Pisano

(Picture by author, 2016)

The decline in pastoralism allowed the colonization of mountain pastures by scrub and trees, while many pastures have been planted with exotic conifer plantations. A recent prescribed burn shows us what this kind of pasture might have looked like (Fig. ​(Fig.44).

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Fig. 4

Grassland on the crest of the Monte Pisano after a 2015 prescribed burn

(Picture by author, 2016)

Litter raking linked forests with olive groves through the work of humans who herded sheep and raked litter. Most share cropper households cultivated olive trees on terraces and combined sheep manure and forest leaf litter to produce fertilizer. Each farm household, with perhaps 3 to 5 hectares under cultivation, would keep a small herd of 10–50 sheep who were stabled at night. Every day or two, the stable bedding of leaf litter, mixed with animal dung and urine, was removed. The mixture of litter and manure was composted into fertilizer and dug into the roots of olive trees every other year, producing a deeply anthropogenic soil down to about thirty centimeters. During the day animals grazed pastures on the crest of the mountains, in woods, on olive terraces, along roads, and on open fields on the valley floor, depending upon the season. Litter raking was essential to olive cultivation and households with no animals made arrangements with visiting shepherds. Complex and constantly changing systems of exchange and intermarriage linked shepherds and peasants (Giambastiani 2021). While it was shepherds who paid farmers for grazing permission with cheese in the twentieth century, in the nineteenth century it was farmers who paid shepherds in cash (Mazzarosa 1846, 88). Litter raking to produce fertilizer allowed dense olive cultivation in a hilly region with little grain cultivation, and hence, little straw for stable litter. As Table 1 shows, our informants were nearly unanimous in recalling the former importance of leaf litter raking. The sole exception was a woman who had grown up in a small town and had less experience of rural work. An additional focus group of five women, born between 1939 and 1955, agreed that litter raking had been a universal activity. Litter raking continued until the 1960s, when first young men and then women left farming to take up industrial work in factories, and chemical fertilizers replaced animal compost.

Table 1

Litter raking by gender

	Men N=10	Women N=7
Reported litter raking as a common practice	10	6
Raked leaf litter themselves or saw close family members do so	2	6
Did not report litter raking	0	1

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A closer reading of our interviews strongly suggests that it was women and children who did most of the litter raking among this generation born between 1928 and 1956. It was almost entirely from the women we talked to that we heard the practical details of litter raking, and of how it fit into the cycles of daily and seasonal work. As Table 1 shows it was mainly women who remembered raking leaf litter themselves, or who gave detailed accounts of close family members doing so. Lucia Massoni, born in 1935, told us how her grandmother gathered litter with a wooden hand rake, and how litter was carried home by her grandfather on a donkey (Massoni 2019). Maria Lenzarini, born in 1928, raked leaf litter every morning before school, beginning when she was about five years old (Lenzarini 2019). Silvia, who was born in 1928, told us how she would rake leaf litter with two or three friends every morning (Bonanni 2019b). Heavy baskets or bundles of leaf litter had to be carried three or four kilometers on most days. Leaf litter consisting of pine needles could be tied up in bundles, but some people recalled using baskets. Leaf litter was piled ready for use outside stables, in a long mound resembling a haystack.

The detail of these women’s description is in striking contrast to the vaguer accounts from men. The men, born between 1936 and 1956, described litter raking as something that they knew about, but only two remembered having done it themselves. A man who grew up in a sharecropper family recounted that ‘litter raking was done’, another, born in an estate agent family, described it as ‘done by peasants’. Only two described litter raking in more detail. Fausto Giorgi, born in 1950 on a farm well outside the Monte Pisano, told us that the estate agent demanded that woodlands be kept clear by raking and burning, to facilitate water flow and prevent floods and landslides (Giorgi 2019). Fabio Casella, born in Calci in 1956, remembered seeing litter raking as a child.

Litter raking may have been women and children’s work well before the twentieth century. We know that in peasant households across Italy as far back as the eighteenth-century ‘heavy’ work such as plowing and digging was supposed to be done by men, although what counted as ‘heavy’ varied by region and time (Palazzi 1990, 1997, 321–342). In the Monte Pisano for example, the burdensome task of carrying firewood to the city of Pisa in the late nineteenth century was women’s work (Pelosini 1970 [1890]). Our interviews tell us that it was women who harvested olives from the ground, gathered kindling, and cut animal fodder and ferns, and raked leaf litter, all activities which would have been classified as ‘light’ work. In any case, gendered labor practices responded to changing household composition and economic opportunities. When men were away at war, injured, or drawn into industrial employment after World War II, women did ‘heavy’ men’s work too.

This generation of former peasants likely lived with particularly feminized agricultural labor. Although off farm employment was against the terms of share cropping agreements (Biagioli 2002), by the 1950s the lack of tenants was causing landowners to turn a blind eye. In the 1960s in the Monte Pisano, in many sharecropper households men worked in factories during the week, and did farm work on evenings and weekends, leaving women and children responsible for the rest. Combining on and off farm work has been a strategy of land owning peasants across Europe for centuries, often with increased on farm work for women (Holmes 1983). Women in landless households may have moved more quickly into waged labor, from spinning and weaving, to washing clothes for the cities of Lucca and Pisa. Men from landless households could find work in small rural industries, from paint manufacture to olive mills (Massoni 1999), or by migrating to more distant cities. Although the feminization of litter raking may have been a response to relatively recent economic shifts, it is likely that it has been ‘women’s work’ for much longer. Verses recounted by a peasant woman born in 1861 near Firenze describe litter raking as stereotypically a peasant woman’s work.

If I choose to be a peasant woman I will always gather leaf litter, I’ll turn as black as tar, I don’t want to be a peasant woman.

If choose to be firewood cutter I will always be lamenting, I will become a beast of burden, I don't want to be a firewood cutter (Contini 2012)

Quantitative estimates of litter raking

Qualitative accounts of litter raking can be combined with quantitative estimates of sheep populations to give an estimate of the quantity of biomass that was removed. The Monte Pisano now has about 200 sheep, grazed in abandoned olive groves on the lower slopes and on fallow agricultural fields on the plains. This is a stark contrast with the agricultural census of 1929, which records 8032 sheep for the three communes on the Pisa side of the Monte Pisano (Istituto Centrale di Statistica del Regno D'Italia 1933b). On the Lucca side of the mountains there were 4525 sheep divided between the Monte Pisano and the nearby Pizzorne mountains (Istituto Centrale di Statistica del Regno D'Italia 1933a). A reasonable estimate of the sheep population of the Monte Pisano in the early 1930s is about 10 000 animals with much smaller numbers of goats. These numbers roughly agree with our interview data, which describes almost all farms as having a flock of 10–50 sheep, with additional animals hosted during winter visits by shepherds from the high Apennines. One retired shepherd estimated that there were 1500 sheep on one side of the valley of Calci in the 1950s, which agrees well with the census figure of 3530 sheep for the entire valley. Census numbers are likely to be an underestimate, because peasants and shepherds tried to avoid taxes, because many animals were only present for part of the year, and because of distrust between shepherds and the state. The fascist regime of Benito Mussolini (1923–1943) saw grazing by goats and sheep as destructive of forests and had targeted goats with heavy taxes in the 1927 grazing regulations (Armiero 2011, 129–134). Burning within one hundred meters of woodland was severely fined (Consiglio Provinciale dell' Economia 1931). Mountain pastures were targeted for afforestation with conifer plantations where grazing by sheep and goats was banned. In this atmosphere of conflict and distrust between shepherds and the state, counting grazing animals was extremely difficult. The census reports are not any more reliable than our informants’ statements that every farm household had ‘ten to fifty sheep’. The combination of the two is more convincing than either alone.

Between oral history and census is possible to extrapolate the quantitative impact of litter raking upon forests. For the Pisa side of the mountains for which we have detailed figures, there would have been 2.2 animals/ha across woods and pastures, comparable to the 2.5–3.5 animals/ha recorded for the Valais region of Switzerland in the 1930s, where litter raking and wood pasture were similarly prevalent (Gimmi et al. 2008). Taking the lowest estimate for biomass removal by litter raking in the Valais case (Gimmi et al. 2008) of 0.16 kg/m²/year, this would have been 30–40% of the 0.4–0.5 kg/m²/year of net primary productivity (Maselli et al. 2009) for fertilizer, with additional biomass extracted by wood pasture. When we add the effects of firewood and brush cutting and the removal of fallen wood, our informants’ statements that the forest floor was almost bare soil are completely credible.

The long-term effects of litter raking on soil fertility and forest productivity have long a concern to Central European and Italian foresters (Piussi and Stiavelli 1986; Szabò 2021). In the Monte Pisano litter raking may have left a legacy of reduced soil carbon storage and forest growth rates, as in the Swiss case described by Gimmi and colleagues (Gimmi et al. 2013), but it may also have increased grass productivity in woodlands (Moreno 1990). In the case of the Monte Pisano, and in the summer dry climates of the Apennines, litter raking also made pine forests less likely to burn. Continued litter raking allowed otherwise highly fire-prone maritime pine to dominate lower slopes where pine had displaced chestnut in the nineteenth century (Casazza et al. 2021; Mathews 2022). A cultural landscape of flammable pine forests was kept relatively fire free as long as litter raking continued and people were present to put out small fires.

Managed fire and managed grazing

If forests were made less flammable by litter raking, it was a combination of cultivation, grazing, and managed fire which kept olive groves and agricultural fields clear of flammable vegetation. Several older women told us they burned grass on the slopes of terraces where scythes and sickles could not easily reach. Our interviews were carried out immediately after a major wildfire, and even elderly peasants and shepherds very unwilling to talk about managed burning. Instead they blamed fires upon incompetence, criminality, and landscape abandonment.

One exception is the former peasant Maria Lenzarini, talking about burning terraces. ‘When I burn I am safe. For me it does not get away. Maybe I bother people with the smoke. But peasants should support this because they are peasants. And now that there are no peasants left smoke bothers people. Two or three times the foresters came. The saw, they looked, they said “Do me a favor and put it out”. I put it out but they didn’t fine me’ (Lenzarini 2019). Several other older women told us that olive groves were kept ‘clean’ with very short grass by grazing and by burning the slopes of earthen terraces. In the Monte Pisano three shepherds (two now retired) flatly denied ever having used fire in order to improve pasture, but one told us that ‘at the time of my grandfather’ fire had been used to eliminate brambles and brush from pastures, and that this practice had been stopped by the forest service. This agrees with accounts of two former peasants in the provinces of Siena and Pisa, who told us that shepherds used to burn patches of brush and brambles (Rubus spp.), a practice also described for the Apennines (Benatti et al. 2019) and in Liguria (Cevasco 2012). One shepherd told us that he had maintained pastures solely by fertilizing and cutting brush, another that burning ‘was done’ to maintain pastures. These accounts agree with ecologists’ finding that heavy grazing can maintain grasslands for long periods of time (Bond 2019; Stevens et al. 2022). It seems likely that pastures were maintained through a combination of intensive grazing, manual brush cutting and fertilization, and in some places and at some times, by managed burning. In Italy, as in most Mediterranean countries, pastoral fire has been intensely stigmatized, making traditional managed burning poorly understood, although experimental recreations (Cevasco et al. 2020a), and collaborations between prescribed burning and traditional managed burning practitioners have taken place in a few areas (Ascoli and Bovio 2013). While historical ecologists, anthropologists, and historians are certain that fire was a key tool of historic agrosilvopastoral land management, there is little detail on how and when farmers and shepherds used fire. Our research on former burning practices, limited as it is, addresses this absence.

Qualitative transect walks

In a transect walk from the Vorno to Calci mountains in 2014, Mathews and a botanist assistant recorded qualitative evidence forest species composition and stand structure and recorded a dense scrub and a leaf litter 5–10 cm deep in young maritime pine stands at lower and middle elevations (Mathews 2018, 2022). There was less leaf litter in areas of oak and chestnut coppice at higher elevations. Fallen branches, tree heather, and brambles created potential fire ladders in abandoned chestnut groves.

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Garden and Landscape Studies program of Dumbarton Oaks and by the UCSC Committee on Research and Division of Social Sciences. The study was designed by ASM and the manuscript was drafted and revised by ASM. Fieldwork was carried out in collaboration by ASM and FM.