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With the name "buffalo" are denoted some species of cattle indigenous to the tropical regions of Africa and Asia.

Buffalos are accustomed to living especially in damp and marshy zones, even if today, some ancestral behaviours have been modified by modern cattle-breeding. In spite of the shortage of bibliographic sources, in Italy, the presence of these animals can be placed between the XII and the XIII century, in a sure and documented way.

At the beginning of the second Millennium, the breeding of the buffalo developed mainly inside of the big monastic orders; during the Middle Ages, they operated actively in the field of the breeding and in the agricultural one. These facts are testified by some documents between which that discovered in the Episcopal Archives of the XII century; moreover, this document had reported in the writing of the historian Monsignore Alicandri of the Metropolitan Church of Capua, and it was named "Il mazzone nell'antichita' e nei tempi moderni"; from this document we can deduce that the consumption of cow-buffalo cheeses became a part of ecclesiastic and laic customs in this period.

From another document, "Acta Imperia Seculi XIII e XIV", we can learn that the commercial valuation of buffalo animal was superior to that of other bovines.

In 1300, therefore, the breeding of buffalos was an economic reality very much rooted in the south of Italy, in the Pontifical State and also outside Lazio; so that there are records related to a set of regulations which disciplined the commerce of buffalos and of buffalo leather in 1360 in Rome. {quotes}From this period, cow-buffalos became the uncontested queen of the marshy zones, when to the impossibility of cultivation united the malaria which provoked the progressive depopulation of these territories from man.{/quotes}

The hydrologic disorder and the turn into a swamp of a lot of coastal areas of the peninsula created the favorable conditions to the diffusion of the breeding of the buffalos which started his expansion in Campania, in Puglia, in Calabria, in Lazio and in Marche.

Buffalos spread, rapidly, in Low Volturno and in Sele Plain; they exploited the pastures otherwise not utilizable because of the periodic floods of the two rivers.

Buffalos were strong animals, resistant to diseases, able to provide their own contribution to the work of the man with quite null costs and in very hard conditions.

Other wealth of these animals was the production of milk in abundance in the winter periods; from milk they produced appreciated cheeses: casicaballus ("caciocavallo"), butyrus (butter), recocta (buttermilk curd or "ricotta"), and provaturo ("provola").

In the Sforzesco Archives of Milan are preserved some documents, which testify the presence of the buffalo also in some north regions; but here, they didn't find the same environment which allowed the spreading of them to the South. In the half of the second millennium, the breeding of buffalos became an economic and social reality diffused especially in the marshy zones of the central and south Italy. The breeding was based on transhumance and on the wild aspect of the behaviour of the animals.