Greening Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 252

marbles and fell into ruin and were forgotten. The Roman forum became known
as Campo Vaccino, or field of Cows, the Capitolium became monte Caprino, or
Goats hill, while the once orderly space of the imperial fora was progressively
occupied by houses with gardens or simply “covered with trees, fields and vine-
yards” (Krautheimer 1980, 311), while hills like the “Quirinal and the pincio were
entirely rural until in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they became a sub-
urb of elegant villas” (ibid., 313). more recently, Jim tice has been instrumental
in bringing to the surface the historical relationship between Rome and urban
agriculture by looking at one of the most important cartographic documents for
studying the forma urbis and the historical landscape of the city: the Nolli map
of 174 8.6 if the relationship between Rome and agriculture inside the perimeter
of the aurelian walls defines land use historically, the rural characteristics of
Rome's disabitato changed only, and forever, with the transformation of the city
from the sleepy capital of Catholicism to the modern capital of a kingdom with
industrial and imperial ambitions and its ensuing rapid urbanization. follow-
ing the first urban master plan of 1873, large tracts of urban countryside were
surveyed, plotted, subdivided, developed, and eventually transformed into mod-
ern neighborhoods, institutional buildings, army barracks, railroad stations, bus
depots, industrial and commercial areas, and roads (insolera 1962; agnew 1995).
today, leftovers of those centrally located vineyards and gardens exist within se-
cluded monasteries and churches, for example, on Colle oppio, san Giovanni,
the Celio, and the palatine, and are tended by monks and nuns who use them
partly as subsistence gardens and as places for meditation and prayer (frolet and
trabalzi, in press).
urban agriculture in Rome today
it is interesting to note how agriculture reappears in the city. we have mentioned
the transformation of Rome's urban landscape in the late nineteenth century as
a product of urbanization and industrialization. in this section, we examine the
opposite process: how agriculture persists, is fostered through habit, or is “redis-
covered” in Rome.
in the first category, persistence, we include tracts of land cultivated by
professional farmers for profit or used as pastures.7 These rather large urban
agricultural estates are thick with archaeological remains and are of immense
naturalistic importance. They were part of the so-called agro Romano (Roman
countryside) described in innumerable texts and painted countless times by ital-
ian and northern european travelers as part of their grand tours in search of the
forgotten roots of western civilization (hodges 2000). since the end of world
war ii in 1945, these areas have been targeted by wild and uncontrolled urban
speculation and many have been buried under millions of cubic feet of reinforced
concrete. The remaining areas all around the ring road are still under attack by