This succession, however, can only be pursued in a rich soil, which is manured every three years. There is one article we beg leave to notice particularly. We imagine that the winter bean might easily be introduced among us, and with great advantage, as it is capable of supporting the cold of the severest winter. It is sown in the beginning of September, and it must have considerable growth before autumn to resist the attacks of the cold. The stalk then perishes by the frost, but at the moment the genial warmth of the spring is felt, two or three new stalks arise, which bloom in the month of May, and the beans are fit to gather at the end of July. The management of this important vegetable we give in the words of the author. 'La culture est extrêmement simple; aprés a récolte du blé fumé, on retourne la terre par un seul labour et on la laisse émietter par l'influence de la saison. Aux premiers jours de Septembre on séme les féves, soit en les enterrant á la charrue, soit en les recoverant á la herse, soit enfin avec le semoire, qui les place par rangées, de manière à pouvoir au printemps les sarcler avec la houe à cheval. Si on ne suit pas cette dernière méthode, il faut les sarcler à la main, dans le courant d'avril.' The culture of the winter bean is suited to argillaceous soils, and while it allows the proper intervals between ploughing the ground and sowing wheat which succeeds, it is admirably calculated to maintain the fertility of the ground.
The plains which border on the Po, in the vicinity of Parma and Lodi, support those fine animals, whose milk is converted into the celebrated Parmesan cheese. The grass is here far more valuable than any crop of grain. In the summer the cows are housed and fed with the green grass of the first and second mowings: that of the third is converted into hay. At the end of autumn the cows are allowed to pick up whatever may be left in the fields. These meadows are perhaps the most fertile on earth; they are generally mowed four times a year. The cheese is here never made from less than fifty cows, and as the farms are small, there is one common establishment, to which the milk is brought twice during the day; an account of it is kept by the cheesemaker and settled in cheese every six months. The same plan has been introduced in Switzerland.
In the Milanese, the farms are larger than in other parts of Italy, because the culture of the grasses demands less care and labour than other branches of farming, and fewer advances. Irrigation is here carried to such an extent, that every two or three arpents can be inundated by its own canal. The good quality of the grass, however, in time becomes deteriorated, other plants gradually spring up in the place of the grasses; the sluices are then closed, and the ground is ploughed for hemp; after which, and a crop of legumes, oats, and wheat, it is again laid down in grass. A meadow will generally last fifteen years, and the course of harvests returns every five. M. de Chateauvieux gives the following remarkable outline:
1st year, Hemp, followed by legumes.
2d year, Oats.
3d year, Wheat, followed by legumes.
4th year, Indian corn.
5th year, Wheat.
15th year, Natural meadow, dunged every 3 years, and mowed 4 times a year.
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20 years 67
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Of these sixty-seven crops from the same ground there are sixty-one for the use of animals, five for the sustenance of man, and only one for his clothing. There is, perhaps, no country on the face of the earth which can boast such a proportion of agricultural products. To obtain this result, the ground is manured, very profusely however, five times in twenty years, and it is a singular fact that this manure is applied always to the grass and never to the grain.
The culture of rice occupies a part of Italy, and is a source of great profit to the owner of the soil. The difficulties in its cultivation are so trifling, that, contrary to the usual custom, the ground is let out at a fixed rent of one hundred and sixty francs the arpent; three crops are received every five years. As with us, these rice grounds are most unhealthy, and the stagnant water which covers them produces disease in all the surrounding country. The unfortunate peasant rarely escapes its deleterious effect, and the government, sensible of this constant draft on human life, have prohibited the further extension of the culture of this grain.
One of the most singular features in the physical character of Italy, is the constant elevation of the beds of rivers, particularly the Arno and the Po, by means of depositions of earth and stones, brought down by the heavy rains from the mountains.—This had become so alarming, that the raising of dykes yielded to a very ingenious operation called Colmata, by which the water of the river was allowed to overflow a certain space, and this very deposition, about three or four inches in a year, made to raise the level of the adjacent shores. But this process, which is fully described by Sismondi, must necessarily have a limit. Embankments are resorted to, and in some places the bed of the Po is absolutely thirty feet above the level country. The Po even now frequently overflows and devastates its banks; the inhabitants, provided always for the calamity which unfortunately is not unfrequent, take to their boats and wait till the inundation has subsided. There would seem to be little doubt that at some day not far distant, the whole delta of the Po, or Polesino, as it is called, will become one wide and wretched marsh. Even now the roads are often impassable. Ferara, consecrated by the genius of Ariosto and Tasso, will be extinguished, and Revenna, already fallen from its high honours, be known only as the deserted capital of a potentate of the lower empire.
M. de Chateauvieux, climbing the mountains which separate Tuscany from Modena, and leaving behind him the fertile plains of Lombardy, entered those lofty regions, where the earth does not produce sufficient sustenance for the inhabitants, who are employed with their flocks of goats and sheep, in constantly traversing the mountains in a manner somewhat similar to that of the Spanish shepherds. The author employs himself in describing the scenery of the Corniche, and though it is perhaps among the finest in Europe, and he might have felt all its changeful beauty and sublimity, still we think he is far more fortunate in his delineations of rural economy.
The agriculture of Tuscany has been so fully and ably investigated by Sismondi,[2] that little was left to M. de Chateauvieux. The valley of the Arno, in truth the only fertile part of the dukedom, (for the rest is composed of precipitous mountains, or that silent and hideous district the Maremma) stretches from Cortona to Pisa, and forms about one-sixth of its whole territory. The farms are very small, being from three to six arpents, so that one pair of oxen supplies the necessities of ten or twelve metayers, in the working of their little plat of ground. They manifest, however, their extravagance in maintaining a horse, which may transport their produce to market, and their wives and daughters to mass or a rustic ball.—The most general rotation of crops is here: