![]() It’s an event: a kind of livestock Giro d’Italia, with small flashes of drama.Ī sheep collapses from exhaustion - too tired to make the journey - and is hauled away on a little truck another takes off down a pasture and is wrestled down by an out-of-breath shepherd after a sharp turn up a rocky path, cows charge, kept at bay by a wire fence.Īs we walk along, Daniele Berlingieri, a cigarette still dangling from his lips, grasps a tablet, pulling up information he shares with Veronique Ancy, a French transhumance research scientist from the Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome. Townspeople gather at crossroads the carabinieri officers help negotiate railway tracks and bottlenecks. Traveling between the two regions with her 300 or so mostly Podolica cows on horseback, she sleeps out in the open to keep an eye on the cattle during the week-long, almost 200-kilometre journey. She spends the summer in Molise, a mountainous, sparsely populated region, and the winter in Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot. As do diseases.Ĭarmelina Colantuono is a cattle herder who produces award-winning caciocavallo, a buttery cheese fragrant with wild herbs and grasses. Milk and cheese, where farmers can charge more for the superior quality, are not only the main product, but usually the only one.Īnd climate change, with extended droughts putting pastures at risk, poses an ever-increasing danger. ![]() Selling wool was once a profitable enterprise, but with global market prices bottoming out, shepherds can’t even give it away for free. The industrialization of livestock farming, with its economies of scale, and urban spread have made the practice both financially challenging and logistically complicated, requiring endless permits. In Italy, and elsewhere throughout Europe, the number of sheep and cows taking part in transhumance has shrunk from millions up until the 1950s, to just tens of thousands today. “It’s been seen as people just moving around with animals with no fixed base, an inefficient use of the land and unpredictable,” said Eugene Costello, an archeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden and lecturer in environmental history at University College Cork in Ireland.ĭespite the UN recognition, the future of transhumance is far from secure. The UN recognition, say shepherds and experts, reflects a growing awareness about the value of the practice, which for several centuries was dismissed as “primitive.” ![]() The United Nations has declared 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, which transhumance is an integral part of. Three years ago, UNESCO recognized transhumance in the Mediterranean and Alps as a vital element of human culture, putting it on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It can traverse fields and forests, push through villages and towns, and climb up and over snow-covered mountain peaks. The journey can take days or even months. And its centuries-old knowledge and sustainable practices, they say, are well worth protecting.įor at least 10 millennia, sheep, goats, cows, reindeer, water buffalo and even pigs, each spring have set out with herders in search of fertile pastures, and then back again in the fall. The practice, say pastoralists and experts, preserves precious ecosystems, linking grasslands and forests, even in areas fragmented by development and intensive farming. Its name comes from the Latin “trans,” across, and “humus,” the earth or ground. Transhumance - or la transumanza in Italian - is the twice-yearly, seasonal movement of animals and herders, to and from summer and winter grazing areas. What is about to unfold is an event, today largely overlooked, with ancient roots that has forged a vast network of passages shaping and preserving much of the landscape in this region - and, indeed, much of the world. Inside, the barn is aswarm with 250 or so sheep, their bleats raw and desperate with anticipation. Three o’clock the morning on a moonless night, deep in a valley of the southern Italian region of Molise, a small group of livestock farmers, family and friends, a scientist and carabinieri officers stand in the light of a barn door, sipping espresso out of small plastic cups and chatting excitedly. The documentary and this article tell the last chapter of a long family history of transhumance, an ancient, sustainable - but increasingly fragile - practice of seasonal droving. ![]() His partner, Maria, tried to cope on her own, but couldn’t, and was forced to sell off the flock. With him, an invaluable wealth of knowledge disappeared. UPDATE: Daniele Berlingieri, the shepherd from Italy’s Molise region, whose family had been making a biannual journey with sheep for generations, died shortly a fter the Ideas documentary first aired last fall.
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