e fruit-chamber lined with marble
was not unfrequently fitted up at the same time as a dining-room,
and sometimes fine fruit acquired by purchase was exhibited there
as of home growth. At this period the cherry from Asia Minor
and other foreign fruit-trees were first planted in the gardens of Italy.
The vegetable gardens, the beds of roses and violets in Latium
and Campania, yielded rich produce, and the "market for dainties"
(-forum cupedinis-) by the side of the Via Sacra, where fruits,
honey, and chaplets were wont to be exposed for sale,
played an important part in the life of the capital. Generally
the management of estates, worked as they were on the planter-system,
had reached in an economic point of view a height scarcely
to be surpassed. The valley of Rieti, the region round the Fucine lake,
the districts on the Liris and Volturnus, and indeed Central Italy
in general, were as respects husbandry in the most flourishing condition;
even certain branches of industry, which were suitable accompaniments
of the management of an estate by means of slaves, were taken up
by intelligent landlords, and, where the circumstances were favourable,
inns, weaving factories, and especially brickworks were constructed
on the estate. The Italian producers of wine and oil in particular
not only supplied the Italian markets, but carried on also
in both articles a considerable business of transmarine exportation.
A homely professional treatise of this period compares Italy
to a great fruit-garden; and the pictures which a contemporary poet
gives of his beautiful native land, where the well-watered meadow,
the luxuriant corn-field, the pleasant vine-covered hill are fringed
by the dark line of the olive-trees--where the "ornament" of the land,
smiling in varied charms, cherishes the loveliest gardens
in its bosom and is itself wreathed round by food-producing trees--
these descriptions, evidently faithful pictures of the landscape
daily presented to the eye of the poet, transplant us
into the most flourishing districts of Tuscany and Terra di Lavoro.
The pastoral husbandry, it is true, which for reasons formerly explained
was always spreading farther especially in the south and south-east
of Italy, was in every respect a retrograde movement; but it too
participated to a certain degree in the general progress of agriculture;
much was done for the improvement of the breeds, e. g. asses for breeding
brought 60,000 sesterces (600 poun