Cultivating the City in Early Medieval Italy

Abstract

Urban Gardens and GardenersGrowing your own food in early medieval Italy was both a necessity and a luxury. To feed a family, you needed land to grow things on. Sometimes you found that land in the ruins or abandoned lots next to you. And sometimes those ruins and that garden plot were prestigious and highly valued. Property documents from tenth-century Rome reveal a bustling city, living and working around its past. In 965, Leo, a priest of the church of SS. Quattro Coronati, located on the Caelian hill, and Helena, daughter of Petrus and Ursa, sold to Crescentius, son of Petrus: a whole two-story house roofed with tiles, 1 with a courtyard in front of it, in which there is a pergola and a well and a marble stair. And also a large garden next to it and behind it. Wholly planted with vine. With different fruiting trees, and likewise the ruins 2 with use of water, and with all of the things pertaining to them, located in Rome, Regio 2, next to the Decennias [i.e. marshland in the southeast of the city]. And between the boundaries on two sides are public roads, one to the Porta Metrovia, the other to the Lateran Palace next to Decennias. On the third and fourth sides . . . and prepared ground of the monastery of the holy martyr of Christ Erasmus, and a vineyard, in which is the slope of the heirs of Ursa, of good memory. 3 4 On the Caelian Hill and other cultivated properties there, see p. 88, Chapter 3. 5 'inter Iohannem . . . archidiaconum summae sanctae Apostolicae Sedis et praepositum venerabili diaconiae sanctae Dei genitricis Mariae domin[ae nostrae] quae appellatur Noba, consentientem sibi cuncto clero et serbitores eidem venerabili diaconiae, et te diverso Leonem humilem religiosumque presbiterum venerabili diaconiae sanctorum martirum Cosme et Damiani quae ponitur in Via Sacra . . . condutionis titulo. Idest domum solarata

The Falerii Novi Project

“…While urban spaces for agriculture are less traditionally the focus of urban archaeology, recent work shows their importance to city life (e.g. Goodson, 2021;Dodd and Van Limbergen, in press b).…”