Itinerary edited by UNIVERSITY OF PERUGIA 
The itinerary serves to illustrate how the landscape was changed by agrarian activity over the course of centuries, emphasizing how farming has changed in Europe. It has shifted from traditional closed eco-systems whose only input was sunlight and whose output was a product to sell to eco-system farming which is open to the globalized world.
The “greatest milestone in man’s development”That is how experts in the Stone Age revolution in farming described the plough. And indeed a more radical change in life-style habits is hard to find at any other time in history. Mankind passed from living in small groups of hunters and gatherers to more complex societies. A nomadic life gave way to settlements. At that moment in time symbiosis was created between mankind, crops and farm animals, which is still crucial to agriculture. The Stone Age revolution started at the same time in at least nine different areas on Earth, which are known as outbreaks. Crops, animals and tools began to spread out from these outbreaks between 10,000 and 1,000 BC and change the surroundings of human settlements (fig 1).The Stone Age village of Skara Brae in Scotland (fig2) revealed the earliest evidence of mankind’s intervention on the surrounding countryside.
From middens to the first ploughsWhy do men plough the land? To understand why the land needs working we have to go back in time to the earliest farms and address the dunghill theory. In their earliest settlements people realised that some plants grew in areas that had been disturbed. The genesis of crop growing lay in extending these areas artificially, disturbing the soil by means of fire and use of the first agricultural implements like rakes (curved tree branches) which were dragged along the ground. Primitive ploughs were the next step forward. Tree branches were worked into points and dragged by men (fig 3). At Gricignano, near Caserta, a series of lucky coincidences led to the discovery of a pre-historic field dating back to the XVIII century BC which had been buried by an eruption of the Somma-Vesuvius volcano system (fig 4).
Traditional ploughs from ancient times to the 19th centuryWith the domestication of horses and cattle mankind perceived the potentialities of animal drawn implements which increased the size of the land area that could be farmed (fig 5). After 1,000 BC iron started to be used in ploughs, enabling tillage of harder, more compacted soils. Farmers continued to till the land with traditional ploughs, which were not unlike those used in Roman times, right up until the beginning of the 19th century. In the south of Italy they used a mule-drawn single-prong plough (fig 6); in central Italy the land was tilled with a ”symmetrical plough” which shifted the soil on both of its sides (fig 7) or with an “asymmetrical plough” which moved the soil on one side only but penetrated deeper into the earth (fig 8).
Modern ploughsTraditional ploughs were beset with defects. They could not plough at any real depth and they needed constant maintenance because soil stuck to their wooden parts. The Industrial Revolution led to the next technological step forward and, although the first modern ploughs appeared in England, the real breakthrough came in America with its much heavier soil; an Illinois blacksmith named John Deere built the first steel blade plough in 1837 (fig. 9), and shortly thereafter James Oliver patented the chilled plough (fig. 10). In a few years these manufacturers would become world leaders, creating a new industrial panorama alongside the American agricultural landscape (fig. 11).
Modern ploughs in central Europe and ItalyFollowing the example of the British and Americans, who by now mainly used modern equipment (fig. 12), continental Europe also began to produce new ploughs. One of the most important factories was that of Rudolph Sack, founded in 1863 in Plagwitz, near Lipsia (fig. 13). At the end of the nineteenth century, experimentation with new equipment in central Italian farms (fig. 14) also stimulated Italian companies, such as Ansaldo (fig. 15), to produce equipment for the domestic market.
The motorization of agricultureA problem still remained after ploughs had been modernized: the poor performance of animal traction. An early solution was to use enormous steam locomotives (fig. 16) that drew the ploughs with steel ropes from one side of the field to the other, known as funicular ploughing. The engravings of the time show cleared fields (fig. 17) and anticipate the fallout that motorization would have on the agricultural landscape: the felling of the trees in the fields, to be used as stakes for screws. The discovery of large oil deposits in 1901 led to the development of the internal combustion engine, which was lighter and performed better than the old steam engines. Shortly thereafter, Henry Ford put into production the Fordson, the first mass-produced tractor, with an endothermic petrol engine (fig. 18). During the First World War these first tractors were imported into Italy, and they can be seen at work in vintage photos (fig. 19), in the traditional landscapes that were soon to be simplified by the motorization of agriculture.
