and other luxuries. For example, a law enacted in 161 B.C. specified that no more than one chicken per day could be served, and it could not be artificially fattened.63
Bovine meat was still uncommon, and that of the cow was considered more tender than that of the bull. Game was by far the favorite source of meat, however. The Romans built leporaria, sophisticated enclosures for raising hares. By 37 B.C., when M. Terentius Varro wrote his treatise on agriculture, these had become capacious enough to hold deer, wild boar, and other large animals.
The leporarium of the great first century B.C. orator Q. Hortensius Hortalus, on the Via Laurentina just outside Rome, occupied thirty acres (twelve hectares) and was surrounded by a high wall. That of Q. Fulvius Lippinius, built in Tarquinia around 50 B.C., extended over twenty-five acres (ten hectares) and was also used to raise wild sheep captured on the islands of Corsica and Sardinia.
The less wealthy made do by raising dormice (glires) in gliraria, feeding them acorns and chestnuts. Or they raised snails (cocleae) in coclearia set up near ponds, and fed them on grasses and leaves: the most sought-after specimens came from Sabina, as well as from Africa and Illyria (an area on the Adriatic coast of the Balkan Peninsula extending from Slovenia down to northern Greece).
Anyone who had even a small farm could easily raise geese, ducks, and peacocks, as well as chickens, whose tender and flavorful meat (obtained by feeding the animals food soaked in milk) the Romans liked.
Large and small aviaries housed pigeons, doves, beccaficos (fig peckers), thrushes, francolins, peacocks, gray partridges from the Alps, guinea fowl from Numidia (roughly today’s Tunisia), pheasants imported from Colchis (a part of today’s western Caucasus), and the prized alpine wood grouse.
Pork was widely used, as much for its ease of preservation as for its tasty meats. The documents available to us acknowledge the great skill of Roman cooks in transforming pork into salamis, sausages, and pâtés and in salting and drying. Even during the so-called barbarian invasions of the Middle Ages, when consumption of meat was necessarily limited, swine and sheep were still seen on the Latian landscape.
By the Middle Ages, the meat trade was regulated by strict contracts directly between the Camera Apostolica and the boattari (small-scale raisers), whose guild was one of the most powerful in the city. Heavy taxes were levied on the animals, which had to enter town on the hoof with proper documents; these were verified at the entrance by the “custodians of the city gates.”
From the beginning, taxes on food products, which were especially important because they provided the most reliable revenues, were allocated by law to fund public works, health facilities, works of beneficence, and other critical needs.
A 1566 motu proprio of Pope Pius V set a tax on meat (one quattrino64 per libbra) and on table wine65 (five giuli per barrel), provided that the revenues were used for the repair of two bridges, the Ponte dei Quattro Capi (Fabricio), leading to the Tiber Island, and the Ponte Sisto.
Meat was butchered in the Forum Boarium and sold in the markets. The actual butchering was done by vaccinari (literally, “cow men”) and as compensation they received the hide, with the tail and cheeks. Here undoubtedly lies the origin of the famous dish coda alla vaccinara, one of the most typical dishes of popular Roman cooking.
A document from the end of the sixteenth century describes how the vaccinari had their own quarter, near the city’s main slaughterhouse in Testaccio. The neighborhood, called scortichiaria (skinnery), was centered around a street that connected the Ponte dei Quattro Capi with the “site, popularly called ‘of the cow tanners.’” They tanned the hides in the quarter itself and hung them to dry in the sun from the walls of the houses.
But people ate less beef than lamb, poultry, and pork, which most people raised in the city. Both sheep and pigs were driven through the city streets to graze on the banks of the Tiber or on undeveloped urban land, thus making the city’s already precarious sanitary conditions even worse. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Enrico Caetani, the camerlengo (the cardinal in charge of the city administration), issued a widely disregarded edict prohibiting sheep grazing within the city walls.
Of all meats, lamb (abbacchio) occupied the place of honor. The name probably derives from the bacchio, or “stick,” with which the animals were struck on the head and killed. Dictionaries of Roman dialect define abbacchio as a baby lamb just weaned whose season lasts all spring, roughly from Easter to the feast of Saint John (June 24). For the next three centuries, consumption was so high that the papal government halted slaughtering between October and the end of April each year.
Every part of the lamb was eaten: head, innards, and flavorful flesh. All are still represented in the rich heritage of classic recipes of genuine Roman and Latian cooking, often in conjunction with the wonderful vegetables of the Roman gardens.
The considerable diffusion of lamb consumption was due to the enormous expansion of the pastures on which sheep raising was concentrated. Sheep husbandry was already widespread in the pre-Roman and Roman periods and continued uninterruptedly during the subsequent centuries, making it the most important food-related activity in the agro romano. The pastoral life of tenth-century Farfa is found in registers66 that document the norms regulating the sheepfolds and shelters and the working of the milk. The first town statues of Rieti, Guarcino, and Aspra67 established rigid norms for pastoral activities, with precise times set for pasturage. The statutes of Tivoli, which had always been on one of the routes the flocks traveled from and to Abruzzo, dictated precise rules on when the flocks could stop, on the obligation to pay taxes, on the use of the pens, and so forth.
Starting in the twelfth century, improved security in the countryside heightened the rivalry between the farmer and the shepherd, and from exactly then dates the Roman Dogana dei pascoli, or “customs office for pasture,” whose duty was to check the number of head in transit at the Mammolo, Nomentano, and Salario bridges.68 The livestock must then have set off on the Via Tiburtina, toward Sant’Antimo and thence toward the mountain pastures. From there the supervisors of Tivoli and Carsoli had charge of the passage of the sheep and the organization of the pens. From all this complicated legislation, we infer that the flocks must have been numerous. One of the first documents written about pasturage, dated 1402, during the pontificate of Boniface IX (1389–1404), describes the comings and goings of the livestock in the agro and refers to the transit permit for the flocks and the grant of a safe conduct to the shepherds. The tax on sheep and the working of the milk were a precious contribution of money to the always exhausted coffers of the Camera Apostolica.
Between the end of the 1300s and the beginning of the 1400s, the agro romano was practically entirely devoted to pasture and cheese making. At mid-century, the registers of the Dogana dei pascoli record about 250,000 head of sheep in the Dominion of St. Peter. In 1629, the agro romano was home to 115,500 souls and 165,797 lambs! And, later, according to the evaluation of the agrarian condition of the campagna romana drafted by the French prefect De Tournon69 between 1810 and 1815, for every three humans in the agro there lived four sheep. This explains why Rome had the highest consumption of fresh meat of all the great European cities. The most common types were lamb and castrato, pork, poultry, and water buffalo. Having become an important branch of the food business, the shepherds, in 1622, formed a universitas,70 with headquarters in Rome at the Church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, in Piazza Campitelli, and in the city, next to the Annona dei grani, was formed the Grascia for the meat trade.71
The protagonist of all this enormous business was the shepherd, the figure with the solitary life, who spent his day leaning on his stick, watching the sheep, and contemplating the sky and the mountains, indifferent to rain or summer heat, dressed in a leather garment he himself had sewn. During the long solitary hours, he learned to read and read the adventure books of the moment, which, in the sixteenth century, might be epic poems, such as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso or Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Many shepherds knew entire passages by heart and named their sheep for the main characters. The sheep dog, with his ruffly white coat, might thus bear a grandiose name such as Argante or Tancredi.
Many passed the time playing the zampogna, shepherds’ bagpipes made of wood and sheepskin, and in the evening,