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.
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.
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.
Between the XVII and the XIX
century, the breeding of the cow-buffalos was diffused firmly in
a great many of the south zones of the peninsula.
While before milk had been worked and transformed in cheese in the same
place where the milking took place, from 1600, it was worked in the
"bufalare": buildings in masonry of a circular
shape, with a central chimney which allowed whether to heat milk for the
curdling, or to provide hot water for the modelling of the forms.
 Of this period, we can find records regarding the slaughter of buffaloes,
of their price, confirming the use of the cow-buffalo
meat in that period; generally, their meat wasn't much appreciated,
because the animals were slaughtered in advanced age, and therefore
their meat resulted very hard and it had a marked taste of musk. The hide
of the buffalo, instead, had been sold well in Constantinople and
on the coasts of North Africa, where important tannery rose.
At the beginning of the XIX century the breeding of the buffalos
was tied still to systems of primitive breeding; in fact it used a
half-wild system which required investments, expenses and risks reduced
to the minimum, giving birth to a real fortune for the marshy regions
which could not have found another form of exploitation and therefore of
income.
The different productions of
milk, hide and meat were used differently in the peninsula, where
the breeding was practiced; in the South of the areas of Caserta
and of Salerno, the buffalos were bred exclusively for milk production, transformed then subsequently in cheese; in the
zones of Toscana, meat and hide production were the most in demand.
In the XX century, with the advancing of the work of reclamation, the
breeding of the buffalos contracted, but its half-wild and primitive
characteristics were not modified.
The
reclamation of Agro Pontino, of Low Valley of Sele, of Volturno and of
other zones of Italy in the pre-war period, and the agrarian reform of
the second post-war period contracted the area of breeding of the cow-buffalos
to a few zones of Campania, of Lazio and of Puglia.
 In this period, the breeding
had a decisive turning-point of renewal, changing from a traditional
half-wild and travelling form, to another one compatible with the new
territorial order.
The experimentation accomplished in the first post-war period, and
subsequently in the 40s, showed that the transformation of the breeding
of cow-buffalos was possible without excessive difficulty and without
the need of the animals to bathe in summer, provided they had been
sheltered from the solar radiations and from the punctures of the bugs;
these experimentation were possible thanks to the intuition of Maymone,
before in Salerno and then to the experimental Institute of the zoo-techniques in Rome.
So, the modern breeding of the
cow-buffalos began asserting and bettering; today, techniques and
machineries more and more modern make of it a sector in the van and
ready to new challenges and horizons. |
