Travels in Italy, : descriptive of the rural manners and economy of that country / by Frederick Lillin de Chateauvieux.

  • Frédéric Lullin de Châteauvieux
Date:
[1819?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Travels in Italy, : descriptive of the rural manners and economy of that country / by Frederick Lillin de Chateauvieux. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    8/110 (page 4)
    spreading in every direction, cover them as it were with a ca¬ nopy, and tali in festoons. The luxuriance of the plantations throughout Lombardy is such, that the eye is unable to penetrate them; the horizon of the traveller is always contracted, and opens only as he ad¬ vances. The succession of landscapes thus presented, which continually excites the imagination with the expectation of something new ; the verdant freshness ; the innumerable ha¬ bitations, uniting a sort of elegance to commodiousness; the fields, whose shady inclosures have an agreeable air of wild¬ ness, while their rich cultivation announces all the economy of rural wealth ; present at once a contrast and an harmony, which no other country possesses in an equal degree. The traveller finds, not the gigantic and monotonous vegetation of India; nor the extensive farms which occupy the uniform plains of the North; nor those savage scenes in which the cooi vales of Switzerland are embosomed; but he traverses a region which partakes of the character of each of these diver¬ sities of scenery, and reminds him of them by seeming to unite them all. Such are the fields which Lombardy thus invitingly offers to the art of the husbandman. The system pursued is simple, because it has been brought to great perfection, and because judicious practices in rural economy are become familiar, and as it were habitual, to all the farmers. The density of the population, and the great variety of the objects of cultivation, have naturally thrown the land into small farms ; as is the case in all countries where the soil is highly fertile, and where the produce requires that minute and daily attention, which can be obtained only from a direct and individual interest in it. Those of Lombardy are seldom less than ten, or more than sixty acres in extent. From the want of other employment for capital, all the landed property of the country has long been in the posses¬ sion of the higher classes, who inhabit the towns. Scarcely any of the farmers are proprietors ; they all occupy on the condition of paying half the produce to the landlord. This tenure is universal: leases at a fixed rent being nearly un¬ known. Hence, though Lombardy seems destined by nature for farming on a large scale, it has become, through the effect of its social institutions, exclusively, a country of agriculture in detail. In order to render the different operations of this system more intelligible, I shall give a description of the situation and rural economy of the charming estate of Santenas, situated