2024-03-07 20:06:08
Italy has always been considered a sort of “Garden of Eden” because it has the widest biodiversity in the Mediterranean. This unique condition, according to many nineteenth-century historians, would be the prerequisite that allowed numerous civilizations such as that of the Etruscans, the Greeks of Magna Graecia, the Samnites, the Ligurians, the Sicans etc., and finally the Romans, to prosper. But it was not so. And Elio Cadelo clarifies this in his new book “American Plants (and not only) in Imperial Rome – The transoceanic journeys of the Romans” (AllAround Edizioni) which comes out in bookstores tomorrow.
The biodiversity that Italy still enjoys today was “built” by importing “alien plants” from everywhere, especially from the Middle and Far East, and by the work of Roman farmers who acclimatized them, hybridized them and cultivated them, creating, for the first time, a variety of agricultural products unique in history. And, among the hundreds of plants that arrived in Italy during the long history of Rome, some are native to the Americas. Elio Cadelo’s volume examines over a hundred plants – not only food but also medicinal and hallucinogenic – which, in Roman times, crossed the oceans and were moved from one continent to another.
The book demonstrates that the presence in the Roman world of plants of American origin such as corn, pineapple, pepper, pumpkin, sunflower and many others is amply proven not only by a large number of classical authors but is also well depicted in frescoes, mosaics, bas-reliefs and statues exhibited in museums throughout Europe. Furthermore, long before the voyage of Christopher Columbus, numerous plants of Mediterranean origin, such as water lily and jimsonweed, had been widespread in America, as confirmed by Mayan archeology and iconography.
In this new essay Elio Cadelo, for the first time, places navigation at the center of the economic and technological development of ancient civilizations and does so by reconstructing numerous transoceanic routes not only of the Romans but also of most ancient civilizations: exchanges that are testimony of how trade already took place over very long distances thousands of years ago. By following the routes, the author reconstructs a completely unexpected geography of trade: Roman merchants, on board their ships, reached all the continents of the globe and came into contact with many of the civilizations of the time. Rome’s economy was an expansive one, leading it to assimilate philosophical, scientific and technological knowledge which was reworked and redirected, becoming the key to its success.
Roman civilization was based on a state and economic organization which, for its time, was absolutely innovative so much so that it influenced, and continues to influence today, administrative policies, processes of formation and organization of states. Rome was the most important mercantile civilization in ancient history. Its economy was based on the free market and competition. In many respects it was the first, and perhaps the only, “liberal and quasi-capitalist” economy of antiquity where the State had a central role limited to the administration and organization of services. The construction of approximately 80 thousand kilometers of roads and hundreds of ports became necessary, more than for the legions, for trade which constituted the main economic and political basis of the empire’s success.
Botanists, ornithologists, historians of Roman civilization, archaeologists, personalities and institutions from the scientific world, in particular from the National Research Council and the Enea, who followed the development of the research which has among its main sources publications from numerous universities, especially American ones.
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