Studying “useful plants” from Maria Theresa to Napoleon: Continuity and invisibility in agricultural science,northern Italy,the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century

Introduction

Undoubtedly, one of the main merits of the French First Republic and the Empire was to promote improvement in science and technology. The goal was to strengthen the national economy, making it autonomous, and offering alternatives to British and colonial products after the Continental Blockade of 1806. Particular interest was dedicated to the strengthening of agriculture, livestock breeding, and manufacturing. In these fields, the new French regime took advantage of the greater possibility of exchange between various European areas unified by the conquests of the Napoleonic armies and the association of satellite states. ¹

“Frenchified Europe” thus overcame the high level of fragmentation previously existing in the Old Regime. For example, most of central and northern Italy was progressively unified in the so-called “Italian departments” – directly annexed to France and administered by Paris – and the geopolitical entity known as the Cisalpine Republic (1797–1802), which then became the Italian Republic (1802–5), and finally the Kingdom of Italy (1805–14), with Milan as political and administrative capital. ² The third main geopolitical entity was the Kingdom of Naples, ruled by Napoleon’s brother and then by his brother-in-law, while the former Bourbon rulers had taken refuge in Sicily under the protection of the British. ³

Among its other diversities, the “new” Italy embraced a wide variety of plant and animal species, with all the related crops, breeding techniques, and derived products. Moreover, the greater geopolitical unity and homogeneity of Napoleonic dominion also benefited the network of scientific institutions, allowing them to work in a more coordinated and organized fashion and improving scientific communication. ⁴

However, the possibilities offered to agricultural science by the new Napoleonic regime – in France and Italy, as well as in other European areas – did not mark a clear breaking point with the scientific and technical development of the Old Regime. As Peter Jones points out, we witness “the evolution of the ‘encyclopedic’ spirit of the Enlightenment across the watershed of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic imperium in Europe” while “visions of total social transformation receded and were replaced with more pragmatic concerns.” ⁵ In Italy, many of the Old Regime advances in the natural sciences, exact sciences, and technology were adopted into “Napoleonic” agricultural science, which adapted them to the needs of the new Europe and used them as a basis for new research.

Significant in highlighting these dynamics is the case of cotton cultivation introduced and promoted by the Napoleonic Empire in southern France, various Italian areas, and Malta. This case has been a particular area of study by Joseph Horan in recent times; he highlighted how the spread of these crops was possible – albeit with a hitch here and there – thanks to the extension and centralization of the Napoleonic system. Nonetheless, Horan has also underscored how these experiments rested on previous, more “territorial” experiences and expertise, some of which date back to the sixteenth century. ⁶

A first thematic nucleus in this paper analyzes points of continuity between Italian agricultural science and its antecedents in the Old Regime and the Napoleonic era, expanding on the historiographical work of Jones and Horan with new case studies. It focuses not only on the economic development of plant husbandry but also other outcomes: improved knowledge of northern Italian flora, a tighter Italian agricultural science network, and greater interchange with the international scientific community in the fields of botany and agriculture.

A second thematic nucleus is the role of “invisible” agents in scientific agricultural experimentation: people who contributed greatly, working behind the scenes, to the development of agricultural science in the Old Regime and the Napoleonic era. For example, outside of agricultural science, Stephen Shapin studied the technicians – whom scientists at the time reductively termed “assistants” – who played a fundamental role in Robert Boyle’s chemical experiments in the seventeenth century. Many other such technicians were active in the scientific community, supporting some of the most recognized scholars, but we know few of them by name. ⁷ Another hidden agent was Jeanne Baret, housekeeper and nurse for the naturalist Philibert Commerçon. She accompanied him, disguised as a man, on Bougainville’s scientific circumnavigation of the globe in 1766–69. Commerçon was in poor health, and it was Baret who did most of the practical research work, collecting plants, minerals, and sometimes animal samples during the explorations. When Commerçon stopped in Mauritius in 1768, residing there until his death in 1773, Baret stayed with the naturalist, taking part in nature expeditions to nearby islands and helping him in classification operations. ⁸

We seldom know how these invisible agents developed the specific skills they needed to conduct experiments, collect specimens, and produce scientific results acknowledged by the world’s foremost scientists. ⁹ Did an analogous situation exist in agricultural experimentation in Italy in the late eighteenth century and the Napoleonic era?

Peter Jones recently considered the effective understanding and application by farmers of agricultural experiments sponsored by scientific centers in the eighteenth century. He focused also on the debate that developed in the nineteenth century and the strengthening of the agronomist role:

Should ordinary farmers be entrusted with the responsibility of carrying out trials and securing the harvest of science, or should these tasks be carried out for them—by experts and specialized institutions? The procedures associated with the analysis of soils and manures and the nutrition of plants were now becoming so complex that voices were raised in support of the idea of corps of “professional experimenters.” ¹⁰

Jones also pointed out that there were natural fodder shortages in the late Old Regime due to a concomitance of causes. Only a few regions reacted by experimenting with new artificial fodder crops: these areas were the ones that guided French agricultural and industrial change in the nineteenth century. In many other locations, however, landowners and farmers remained fixed in pre-capitalist mindsets, scarcely forward-looking or inclined to invest in innovation. ¹¹

This paper examines the role of this hidden, or at least relatively invisible, component of scientific experimentation: technicians on the one hand, and landowners, farmers, and peasants on the other. In developing our case studies we have had to cope with a scarcity of direct information in reconstructing the relationships between these actors and the agriculturalists leading the experiments. Technicians and actors from rural society represented a hinge between the community of the learned – operating for the most part in institutions, laboratories, or botanical/agricultural gardens – and the local community and the concrete needs of everyday life. Our goal in this paper is thus to reconstruct this “dark matter” of agricultural science and experimentation, the problem being, of course, that it does not give off much light in primary sources.

After describing the institutional framework of the Napoleonic Italian context and the Old-Regime substratum on which it developed, this paper presents a number of examples of scientific experiments on oil and sugar crops, specifically peanut and radish, and date-plum and American persimmon, respectively. The latter are also compared with beekeeping experiments, thus drawing the animal kingdom into the scope of our research. In each case, this paper analyzes experimental strategies and goals, focusing on the two aforementioned thematic concepts: continuity and invisibility. These are the two fundamental features of the agrarian experimentation we will examine in this article: experimentation that would lay the groundwork for the agricultural science, food research, and more advanced food industry that would develop in the nineteenth century in Italy.

The documental sources analyzed in this paper belong to two main categories. The first includes handwritten letters and reports, printed collections of essays, and published books produced by scientific institutions such as agricultural societies, scientific academies, and university botanical gardens. The second group comprises articles in scientific agriculture journals published in the Italian language during the Napoleonic period. Furthermore, to better understand the influence that the extremely cosmopolitan scientific context of the Napoleonic era had on Italian research, this paper also compares sources coming from French and Spanish areas.

Agricultural science: Continuity and change

In Italy, continuity with the agricultural science institutions of the eighteenth century was clear from the beginning of the Napoleonic era. Indeed, the approach of many Old-Regime research and teaching centers was echoed in Napoleon’s science policies in the Italian departments, as well as in the Italian Republic/Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Naples.

Noteworthy among these centers were the Agricultural Society of Turin and the Professorship of Agricultural Science at the University of Padua (I will discuss these later in this paper). Another exemplary case is the Accademia dei Georgofili in Florence and the agricultural garden assigned to it in 1793 by Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. In the Napoleonic era, under the direction of the physician and botanist Ottaviano Targioni Tozzetti, the Academy extended its studies on vegetable substitutes for olive oil, such as castor oil (Ricinus communis L.) and sesame oil (Sesamum indicum L.), and on herbaceous dyes, such as those obtained from woad (Isatis tinctoria L.), dyer’s rocket (Reseda luteola L.), and rose madder (Rubia tinctorum L.). ¹² At the University of Naples, the “French government” created a new teaching post in Agriculture in 1808. It was entrusted to the Franciscan friar Niccola Onorati, who had been Professor of Agriculture and Natural Law at the Bourbon Schools in the nearby city of Salerno between 1788 and 1798. ¹³ Napoleon also reorganized secondary schools and smaller universities in cities such as Milan, Mantua, and Modena – institutes that had already offered relevant courses in the natural sciences during the Old Regime – into high schools (licei – singular liceo) with professorships in botany and agricultural science. ¹⁴

On the regulatory level, the education law of September 4, 1802 – enacted during the Italian Republic and continuing, with amendments, to provide the legislative framework for the Kingdom of Italy – standardized all these institutes and provided both an agricultural society and a liceo in each departmental capital, replicating in part an organization that was present in France. Society members in particular were urged to conduct research and experimentation on local agricultural improvement. At the same time, sharing and comparison of results was encouraged with other departments through the circulation of essays and reports. Societies and licei were assigned spaces that they used mainly for research on plant species, including new cultivation methods, non-native plant species that could be acclimatized, and their uses as foods or textiles. ¹⁵

In the realm of higher education, the three national universities were the main centers of research and teaching in the Italian Republic/Kingdom of Italy. Each of them was expected to have a chair in botany and one in agricultural science, each with its own research or teaching garden. In some cases existing facilities were improved, in others they were built ex novo. As established by the educational and disciplinary plan for the national universities promulgated on October 31, 1803, the chair of botany was assigned to the department of medical professions, while agricultural science fell under physics and mathematics. Agricultural science was compulsory in the training of engineers, architects, and surveyors: professional figures that were expected to have a direct connection with agriculture and livestock breeding, but also with the manufacturing sector. ¹⁶

Likewise, the agricultural gardens of national universities – with their professors, assistants, and gardeners – did more to expand teaching in cataloguing, acclimatizing, hybridizing, and processing than did societies and licei. The Directorate of Public Education of the Ministry of Internal Affairs made a number of important choices regarding agricultural education.

We will examine two universities where opposite strategies were adopted. After the annexation of northeastern Italy to the Kingdom with the peace of Pressburg (December 26, 1805), Luigi Arduino was confirmed Professor of Agricultural Science at the University of Padua, replacing his father Pietro, who had established the agricultural garden in the 1760s under the former Republic of Venice. In this case, Napoleonic policy maintained the status quo, confirming a teacher who came from a lineage of botanical and agrarian specialists and who already had experience in that specific university. The choice of the Agricultural Science Professor in Pavia was completely different: Giuseppe Bayle Barelle was a Milanese of Swiss origin, and a government official loyal to the new regime with a bookish knowledge of botany and agriculture. Nevertheless, Bayle Barelle proved fully equal to the task, actively contributing to the creation of the agricultural garden in Pavia, and to the teaching and research programs assigned to him. ¹⁷

Northern Italy also comprised Piedmont and its agriculture, an area that, as already stated, was annexed to France (with the exception of the Novara area, which was part of “nominal” Italy). In French Piedmont, the Agricultural Society of Turin distinguished itself among scientific institutions: it was the continuation of the society founded in 1785 during the reign of Victor Amadeus III of Savoy. In contrast, the attempts to introduce the teaching of rural economy and agricultural science at the University of Turin were less successful. Of course, this university was not part of the Italian Republic but under the French Sorbonne, which was characterized by remarkable regulatory instability throughout the Napoleonic regime. ¹⁸

Finally, in addition to the abovementioned collections of essays published by agricultural societies and scientific academies, it is important to complete this institutional framework with the description of another important channel for the circulation of scientific knowledge in the agricultural sector: the first Italian specialized journals. ¹⁹ They reported on experiments run by institutions or private citizens, described the research conducted in the scientific gardens, provided the titles of newly or soon-to-be published monographs, and presented statistical results. In the geographical area under consideration in this paper, there were three main agricultural magazines forming a sort of continuum through the years: the Biblioteca di campagna (Country Digest), published between 1804 and 1807; the Giornale d’agricoltura (Journal of Agriculture), between 1807 and 1808; and the Annali dell’agricoltura del Regno d’Italia (Annals of Agriculture of the Kingdom of Italy), between 1809 and 1814. Each one of these journals was directed by renowned agriculturists and botanists and followed the path laid out by the previous publications, adjusting their content to the development of agricultural science.

The oil rush: Success and failure

During the Napoleonic era, Italian scientific institutions and scholars developed a deep interest in oil- and sugar-producing plants. The two main examples of the former are studies and experiments on peanuts (Arachis hypogaea L., family Fabaceae) and radishes (Raphanus sativus L., family Brassicaceae) that had begun during the Old Regime, when a third alternative was also considered: the launch – or relaunch, as we shall see – of olive tree cultivation (Olea europaea L., family Oleaceae). Hence, let us consider the aspects of continuity between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries that characterized experiments on these plants.

As regards peanut cultivation and oil extraction, it is important to remember that some of the most pioneering experiments were those sponsored by the Economic Society of Valencia, Spain, which mobilized local experimenters, agriculturists, and farmers for this purpose in the final years of the eighteenth century. ²⁰ On the contrary, in late-eighteenth-century northern Italy, “Austrian Lombardy” – while feeling the need to find an alternative to the import of expensive olives and oil – did not invest in peanut cultivation. Instead, the government opted for olive acclimatization in the Lake Como area.

The experiments were started by the Sienese agricultural inspector Eraclio Landi in the mid-1770s and continued with the support of the Patriotic Society of Milan, “directed to the advancement of agriculture, arts, and manufacturing,” founded by Maria Theresa in the late 1770s and closed in the late 1790s, following the arrival of the French army. Olive cultivation was also present in Lombardy in previous centuries, but after the late eighteenth century it survived sporadically, with no positive impact on the state economy. After the experiments conducted by Landi and his staff, olive tree growing in the Como area reached such stability and diffusion that it became part of the local agriculture relatively quickly. For example in 1840, after less than a century, writer and traveler Mary Shelley could still admire luxuriant olive tree groves in that area, alongside vineyards, mulberries for silk production, and natural woods. ²¹ Landi had selected a Tuscan variety that was resistant to northern winds for the project and had it brought to northern Lombardy. Once again, the goal was to provide the region with an independent source of material – olive oil was used as a fuel, but also in soap and silk manufacturing – that normally was imported at a high price. For example, the price on the Milanese stock exchange had risen seventy-seven percent in the decade 1791–1800. ²² Other experiments of the Patriotic Society had instead focused on perfecting the cultivation of alternatives, such as the radish, and the safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L., family Asteraceae), whose oils were used for several purposes, for example as a fuel and in textile manufacturing. ²³

The multifunctionality of oil was therefore a particularly important object of study in agricultural science and technical experimentation in the late eighteenth century and in the Napoleonic era. Obviously, depending on the conformation and environmental characteristics of a region – Italy is particularly varied, even over short geographical distances – it was possible to opt either for the acclimatization of the olive tree, as in the Lake Como area, or for a study on alternatives, some more appropriate than others in specific uses.

Later, pointing in an apparently different direction, interesting studies on the peanut and its oil were conducted in the agrarian garden of the University of Pavia, southwestern Lombardy, during the period of the Italian Republic and, especially, during the Kingdom of Italy. The course in Agricultural Science was introduced in 1804, after the university reform of 1803, but the garden had to wait until 1806 because of difficulties in finding suitable land. ²⁴ The first professor was Giuseppe Bayle Barelle, who, during his short career at the University of Pavia (1804–11), experimented on the hybridization of cereals and the use of the common woad (Isatis tinctoria L., family Brassicaceae) as a dye source to replace the exotic true indigo, which was difficult to acclimatize (Indigofera tinctoria L., family Fabaceae). In addition, he was also involved in the cultivation of the peanut to study the properties of its oil. ²⁵

Bayle Barelle had already studied the peanut in an amateur capacity before becoming a professor. When living in Milan, he had asked the botanist of the Royal Gymnasium of Brera, abbot Fulgenzio Vitman, for seeds. It was what Bayle Barelle called the “African variety,” with dark leaves and long loments. Subsequently, shortly after becoming a professor in Pavia, he received some seeds from André Thouin, gardener and professor at the Jardin des Plantes of Paris. This variety was called “Indian,” and had lighter leaves and smaller loments. Once the garden of Pavia and some farmers’ fields near the town of Lodi were available, Bayle Barelle did not hesitate to cultivate both varieties, comparing the morphological and physiological aspects, but above all, evaluating which one was the most advantageous in terms of ease of cultivation and quality of product. He concluded that the so-called Indian variety was preferable, having been acclimatized to northern Italy for about thirty years and also since each plant had produced, on average, a greater quantity of seeds than the African variety, meaning a greater amount of oil. Bayle Barelle promptly described the results of his research in an article for the Annali dell’agricoltura, leaving some technical questions open related to oil extraction, for example the design of an oil mill that was more suitable for the crushing of peanut seeds than the common machines. ²⁶ He did not give particular details on the oil mill project, but in a letter dated 1811 and published in the Giornale di Fisica, Chimica e Storia Naturale (Journal of Physics, Chemistry and Natural History) he described another project of his: a pedal-operated machine to shell peanuts, accompanied by the sketch shown in Figure 1. ²⁷

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Sketch of the pedal-operated peanut shelling machine designed by Bayle Barelle.

In 1807, Bayle Barelle had communicated the success he was beginning to have with his experiments to Thouin, informing him that the A. hypogaea in the Pavia garden “m’a donné des graines aussi grosses qu’un haricot comun” (gave me seeds as big as a common bean), plausibly referring to the Indian variety. ²⁸ Finally, the importance given by Bayle Barelle to the experimentation on A. hypogaea was reflected in his decision to include it as a topic in the final exam for engineering students in 1809. ²⁹ He strongly believed that future engineers should be knowledgeable in the potential benefits to the national economy offered by peanuts.

However, despite Austrian Lombardy’s interest in olive growing and Napoleonic Lombardy’s interest in peanuts, points of continuity between Old Regime agronomic substratum and the research and experimentation of the early nineteenth century were not lacking. In fact, among the criteria that led Bayle Barelle to favor the Indian variety of peanut, we found the acclimatization that had already occurred in northern Italy about three decades earlier. Bayle Barelle also specified that the Indian variety was the most popular one in Europe. Cultivated in the Valencian area, some seeds, collected during a scientific trip to Spain in the late 1790s, had been sent by veterinarian and agronomist François-Hilaire Gilbert to Henri-Alexandre Tessier, agricultural consultant for the Ministry of the Interior in Paris. Lucien Bonaparte, French ambassador in Madrid for about a year from 1800 to 1801, had sent some seeds to the prefect of the Landes in southwestern France. ³⁰ Although the timeframe and geographical areas concerned are smaller than in the case of cotton studied by Horan, there is also clear continuity in the cultivation of peanuts between the experimental paths of the Old Regime and the new “mass approach” of the Napoleonic era.

On the other hand, in Piedmont – next to Lombardy – the interest of the scientific community focused more decisively on peanut cultivation and oil. Important experiments were conducted by the Agricultural Society of Turin, then in a territory that was officially part of the Italian departments annexed directly to France. The society conducted some peanut cultivation attempts in its experimental garden in Turin. Noting the favorable response of the A. hypogaea, it encouraged large-scale planting on major landholdings, some of which belonged to the Agricultural Society itself. Peanut cultivation spread in such a way within Piedmont to be considered, at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, as perfectly naturalized. In those years, some landowners collected “quelque millier de livres” (a few thousand pounds) of peanut seeds, and sometimes they considered the oil extracted from them as even better than “common” oil, meaning olive oil. The main goal was in fact to remedy the expensive transport of both olive oil and olives from Liguria, or even the importation from the distant Lake Garda. ³¹ We have no confirmation that the variety at the core of the Agricultural Society of Turin’s experiments was the alleged Indian one in Bayle Barelle’s experiments. However, given the relatively fast acclimatization across large areas of Piedmont, we may assume this was the case.

Why was there more interest in peanuts in Piedmont than in Lombardy? In Piedmont, large-scale acclimatization of the olive tree was very difficult. Small groves existed in the hills near Turin, where the climate was relatively favorable. There were also mills for pressing olives, but they did not meet the needs of the entire region. Herbaceous plants such as peanuts seemed to find the soil and climate of Piedmont quite suitable. ³² It might be imagined that the preference for peanuts was the result of war-related issues. For example, as David Gentilcore recently reiterated, edible tubers like potatoes were appealing in some European areas in the eighteenth century because they grew underground, and would thus, in theory, be more difficult for an army to claim or destroy. ³³ Oil-bearing trees such as the olive would take a long time to grow back if damaged by an invading army and were thus a difficult resource to regenerate. The peanut would seem more resilient in this regard. We may thus hypothesize that successful adaptation to the environment and geography was the main selection criterion in Piedmont’s case.

Other important experiments in olive tree growing and, later, oil surrogates were conducted in southeastern Lombardy, in a quite different environmental and agricultural context. Mantua was a town belonging to Austrian Lombardy in the eighteenth century, and capital of the Italian Department of Mincio in the Napoleonic era. There, the Accademia Virgiliana tried to relaunch olive tree growing in the 1780s and conducted experiments on radish as an oil plant at the beginning of the first decade of the nineteenth century, during the last years of the Cisalpine Republic inspired by the French revolutionary ideals. The name Accademia Virgiliana itself was the new denomination of the Academy of Sciences, Fine Letters and Arts founded in the late 1760s under the auspices of Maria Theresa and the Habsburg authorities. In particular, in 1770–71 the Academy aggregated a section of agricultural science to apply scientific and technical expertise to crops and livestock breeding and derived products useful to the state. Despite the fact that the Academy of Mantua went through a period of decline during the Napoleonic era, it continued to work to improve the productivity and economy of the Department of Mincio. ³⁴

Seeking to develop its own olive cultivation project in the 1780s, the Academy of Mantua consulted experiments carried out by its Milanese counterpart near Lake Como in the latter period of the Old Regime. Interested in reestablishing olive cultivation and oil production in the Cavriana hills north of Mantua (Alto Mantovano) near Lake Garda, it took the acclimatization of Tuscan olive trees in the Lake Como area as an example. The Cavriana project was mainly in the hands of the agricultural inspector of the Mantua area, Angelo Gualandris. During surveys of the Cavriana hills in 1786, he noticed the abandoned oil mills and what remained of the olive groves that had been cultivated there until the 1730s. Wishing to learn more about the potentials of revitalizing oil and olive production in that area, Gualandris visited the more distant hills near the city of Verona, in the Republic of Venice, which had environmental conditions similar to those in Cavriana, observing lush olive groves similar to those that grew on Lake Garda. Later that year he published his Dialoghi agrarj tenuti in Cavriana (Agricultural Dialogues Held in Cavriana) using a schematic, dialectical structure that was easy to understand in order to sensitize Lombard institutions and rural society. ³⁵

The Dialogues made many references to Eraclio Landi’s experiments on Lake Como, as well as including in the appendix the most recent edition of Landi’s Metodo chiaro e facile per formare vivaj di ulivi per uso della Lombardia austriaca (Clear and Easy Method for Olive Tree Nurseries for Use in Austrian Lombardy), sponsored by the Patriotic Society, first published in Milan in 1784. ³⁶ After Gualandris’s death in December 1788, the Patriotic Society continued as a reference point for the Academy of Mantua in olive cultivation, boasting the primacy of Landi’s experiences in the Lake Como area and reporting on other studies, such as those conducted in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany by Jacopo Ambrogio Tartini, secretary of the Accademia dei Georgofili of Florence. ³⁷

In the Napoleonic era, experiments to revive olive cultivation in the Mantua area came to a halt. However, interest in developing oil plants continued, and the advanced state of experimentation evidences the solid foundation provided to the Napoleonic “technocracy” by previous studies and experiments. While Mantua was not known for peanut experiments, unlike Piedmont and the Pavia area, the Academy continued research on the radish, reprising experiments conducted by the former Patriotic Society of Milan. Marquis Luigi Fassati, director of the Academy’s agricultural activities at the beginning of the nineteenth century, organized radish cultivation experiments on his own lands. On March 8, 1802, he announced to his colleagues that the experiments he supervised had not provided the best results, although he admitted that the cause was perhaps related to poor lighting on the plots in which he had planted his radishes. Nor did he exclude the possibility that the operational personnel had not cared for them properly. The results, he concluded, were very different from those obtained years before in Milan. ³⁸

Despite the obvious failure of the radish experiments, the connection between the Academy of Mantua and the defunct Society of Milan evidenced a strong continuum between the knowledge consolidated in the Old Regime and the possibilities that the new Napoleonic dynamism could have given to agriculture and its products.

When you run out of sugar. . .

After the Continental Blockade of 1806 and the interruption of imports of cane sugar from the Caribbean, a strong impulse was given to agricultural research into sugar production. Unlike their policy regarding oil plants, the Napoleonic government intervened more directly on the issue of sugar, especially starting from 1810, when it commissioned agricultural societies and academies to extract sugar from grape juice, beets, and other autochthonous plants. ³⁹

Research was conducted on the date-plum (Diospyros lotus L.) and the American persimmon (Diospyros virginiana L.) – both Ebenaceae – in the Friuli region in northeastern Italy by professor and scientist Giovanni Mazzucato from Padua. He was the grandnephew of the late agronomy pioneer and professor Pietro Arduino. Since 1808, Mazzucato had been a lecturer in agricultural science at the University of Padua and later became Professor of Botany and Agriculture at the prestigious liceo in Udine. He was also a member of several Italian agricultural academies and societies. During his stay in Udine, Mazzucato devoted himself to the analysis of the local area, both cataloguing autochthonous plant species and studying local agriculture. ⁴⁰

The Annali dell’agricoltura, published in 1810, presented his considerations on the potential of the two aforementioned species of Diospyros as sugar sources. Mazzucato described them in detail, partly based on his own direct observations and partly referring to the work of other botanists. With regard to the date-plum, he indicated France and the Barbary Coast among the several areas to which it had become acclimatized. In northern Italy, he listed the Friulan countryside, the Berici Hills near the town of Vicenza, and the forests not far from Turin, but would eventually include all hilly and wooded regions in France and northern Italy. He then provided a description of the date-plum based on his own observations, those collected in the Friuli and Veneto areas, and on French (Olivier de Serres, Rozier, and Thierriat) and Scottish (Forsyth) technical and scientific literature. Finally, he described the ways that the sugary pulp of the fruits could be processed to obtain a sweet syrup. Obviously, in the case of the more exotic American persimmon, the sources of information were principally the botanists and agronomists who had been able to study the species and its uses. These included, for example, Duhamel du Monceau’s arboriculture texts, and Louis-Augustin Bosc d’Antic, who described North American nature during his diplomatic career. ⁴¹

Mazzucato described the conservation of date-plum seeds and the techniques he thought were best for preparing a seedbed. After separating the seeds from the fruit pulp and letting them dry in a ventilated environment, he recommended keeping them in boxes of sand that should be kept wet for the whole winter. In March or early April, they could be sown in special soil that had been properly cleaned, plowed, and fertilized. The soil had to be sandier than clay, with a small limestone component, low moisture content, and only a small amount of humus. The seeds were placed in the furrows and covered with two fingers of soil. Mazzucato also proposed a technique to protect the first summer saplings from the scorching sun: sowing some barley, oats, or rye together with the date-plums in order to shade the saplings. These cereals had shallow roots that would not damage the date-plums. After ripening, the cereals were to be cut at a height of one foot above the ground, so that the stalk would rot and turn into humus, enriching the soil. ⁴²

After two years, once the date-plum saplings had reached a certain robustness, they were to be transplanted into a nursery, into more calcareous soil than before, spaced at a distance of about three feet. The shrubs were to remain in the nursery until they had reached 4–5 feet in height. At that point, the date-plums could be moved to their final location: holes that had already been prepared the autumn before the transplant. Mazzucato criticized the custom of cutting the tree taproot at the time of transplantation so as to strengthen the growth of the lateral roots. According to the professor, this practice destabilized the balance of the tree, reduced its ability to absorb nourishment from the soil, and risked causing rot at the cutting point. He showed peasants and farmers the disadvantages of this choice, trying to stop the harmful ancestral practice. ⁴³

He then evaluated techniques for extracting the sugar from the berries. He specified that, on average, each tree produced sixty pounds of berries fully ripening in late November. In 1806, Mazzucato had collected twenty pounds, to which he added water to reduce them to a liquid paste. With a skimmer, he removed the seeds and peel and left the purified paste to rest for twenty-four hours. After that, he pressed the water out of it through a dense mesh fabric, which was followed by a second rest of twenty-four hours and at least two other pressings. The sugar water was then put to boil on a low fire and purified with egg whites and eggshells, lime, calcium carbonate, and charcoal. The heat slowly made the syrup condense, while making it sweeter and sweeter. From twenty pounds of fruit, the professor made only two pints of syrup, albeit of excellent quality. He filled a glass jar with it and left it to rest for eight months in an environment sheltered from the cold. By that time, the syrup had partially crystallized: Mazzucato filtered the substance in a flask, retaining the sugar crystals to be refined, which were reddish in color and of very good quality. Of course, he admitted, the amount of sugar obtained was quite small, but it could also substitute honey, and the same fruits could be used for the production of spirits and vinegar. ⁴⁴

Luigi Arduino, Mazzucato’s uncle, Professor of Agricultural Science at the University of Padua, was another family member who studied the sugar-producing properties of some plant species. From 1779 to 1805 he was his father Pietro’s assistant in the agricultural garden of Padua and then his successor to the chair and the direction of the garden itself. He worked above all on exotic plants, which were not lacking in the rich agricultural garden of Padua, which had been established in the 1760s. Therefore, he had a different approach from that of his nephew, who preferred to study the potential of native species, possibly using the exotic ones as a reference for comparison, as stated before. In particular, in a memoire published in 1811, the Napoleonic government publicized the results of Luigi Arduino’s experiments on the sugar extracted from the pith of a variety of sorghum presumed to be from South Africa, known as “sorghum of Kaffraria,” along with other foods that could be obtained from it, such as flour made from its seeds. ⁴⁵

The Arduino–Mazzucato family case provides yet another example of continuity between Old-Regime botanical–agrarian tradition and Napoleonic-era large-scale innovations. Pietro Arduino and his brother Giovanni had been two key figures in the great impulse given to agronomic research and experimentation by the former Republic of Venice between the 1760s and the mid-1790s. ⁴⁶ Luigi Arduino and Giovanni Mazzucato continued this tradition, adapting it to the needs of the new Europe, such as the search for new sources of sugar.

Culminating the Napoleonic interest in experimentation on sugar plants was a long article by Domenico Nocca in the Giornale di Fisica, Chimica e Storia Naturale in 1812. Nocca was Botany Professor at the University of Pavia and director of the botanical garden, which was distinct from the agricultural garden directed by Bayle Barelle and later by physician and agriculturist Giovanni Biroli. ⁴⁷ Nocca’s article mentioned all the studies conducted on the Italian peninsula in that field, from sugar beets and grape juice to Arduino’s sorghum. Like Mazzucato, Nocca proposed comparisons among many European examples, but most of all with exotic production techniques, such as the extraction of sugar by the inhabitants of Java from the flowers of the Palmyra palm (Borassus flabellifer L., family Arecaceae) and the derivation of a sweet syrup from the century plant (Agave americana L., family Agavaceae) in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The latter was well known by Nocca because of its presence in the botanical garden of Pavia, but also because it was grown in the mild climates around Lake Como and Lake Garda. ⁴⁸

It is also interesting to review a dispute taking place in the years 1812–14 between Nocca and Giovanni Battista Gagliardo, director of the Biblioteca di campagna (Country Digest) and now General Inspector of Waters and Forests in the Kingdom of Naples, which was another satellite state of the French regime, like the Kingdom of Italy. The object of the debate was whether sugarcane cultivation and associated sugar production had been already practiced in central and southern Calabria in the second half of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Nocca argued against it in the Giornale, Gagliardo in favor in the Annals, claiming that cane sugar production had been interrupted in southern Italy due to the extremely competitive price of the product imported from America. He supported this with a report by the director of the General Archive of the Kingdom of Naples, on request of the Ministry of the Interior. In addition to the archival documentation, Gagliardo had collected the testimony of some Calabrian landowners whose fields had previously been used for sugar cane crops and now featured excellent vineyards. Giuseppe Melograni, a high-level geologist and mineralogist interested in agricultural issues, was also interviewed. ⁴⁹

The debate that had developed between Pavia and Naples brought greater knowledge of the historical flora in Calabria. It was an investigation that went far beyond the bounds of a simple academic disagreement. Both sides shared the interests of the Royal Institute of Encouragement to Natural Sciences of Naples in sugar cane crops, with the Institute being dedicated to the enhancement of agriculture, manufacturing, and industry through the study of natural resources. ⁵⁰ Documented knowledge of the past potentialities of Italian lands was therefore considered as useful as current information on their nature and crops. It was part of an extremely modern debate, in which Naples was evaluating the feasibility of relaunching Saccharum officinarum L. crops, while estimating which varieties suited the climates of southern Italy. ⁵¹

Therefore, as in the experiments on oil sources in northern Italy and the studies on sugar substitutes by the Arduino–Mazzucato family, the debate between Nocca and Gagliardo also evidences the importance given by the “Napoleonic” scientific community to the recovery – or at least the attempted recovery – of archaic crops and to knowledge of the flora and environment of the past.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, experimentation on sugar sources also included beekeeping and honey production. The aforementioned Patriotic Society of Milan and the Academy of Mantua had already conducted research in these areas during the Old Regime. ⁵² A scientist widely interested in the subject was the Hungarian priest Gaetano Harasti, who worked with the Patriotic Society of Milan, the Agricultural Academy of Vicenza, and the Accademia dei Georgofili of Florence. In his essays, Harasti described his technical experiments on the management of hives, but, above all, he insisted on the importance of educating the rural community to more fruitful beekeeping practices and a deeper knowledge of bees’ habits. ⁵³

Interest in beekeeping also developed in other European areas. For instance, Lusatian pastor Adam Gottlob Schirach was quite successful in beekeeping on an international scale. A collection of his essays translated into French was published in 1771 with the title of Histoire naturelle de la reine des abeilles, avec l’art de former des essaims (Natural history of the queen bee and the art of creating colonies). In 1774, an Italian version was printed in Brescia with the title Storia naturale della regina delle api coll’arte di formare gli sciami (see Figure 2). ⁵⁴ Another example was found in Spain: in the very last years of Charles III’s rule, the noble jurist Antonio Montero y Santa Colomba proposed a project for agricultural schools to the prime minister, in collaboration with the already existing economic societies. Among the proposed duties of the institutes, Montero y Santa Colomba strongly suggested the teaching of better-informed and less invasive beekeeping methods. ⁵⁵

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Figure 2.

Some examples of beehives included in the French edition of Schirach’s studies.

The main aim of these efforts was to teach rural society how to plan long-term beekeeping operations and design more functional beehives, eliminating the practice of destroying the beehives and killing the bees at every honey and wax harvest. In the Napoleonic era, the Academy of Sciences, Fine Letters, Agriculture and Arts of Brescia – renamed Ateneo after 1810 – distinguished itself in this zootechnical field. In 1806, it started a collaboration with the liceo of Brescia to plan a successful beekeeping course. As part of the educational program, the Academy and the liceo commissioned a set of beehives that served three purposes: a teaching tool, an object of entomological research, and a laboratory to improve the methods of production and collection of honey and wax. The experiments were particularly successful, as demonstrated by the fact that from September 1806 to July 1807 the number of bee colonies increased from 18 to 36. ⁵⁶

The dark matter of agricultural science

Now that we have analyzed the continuity in agricultural science between the Old Regime and the Napoleonic era, we shall examine the same case studies to observe another fundamental aspect of this discipline in northern Italy. We will focus on the concept of “invisibility,” both in Steven Shapin’s sense of the term related to “invisible technicians,” and in rural society. Together with the strong Old-Regime–Napoleonic-era continuity, the “invisibles” formed the backbone of agricultural experimentation and a hinge between learned individuals and the practical realities of the land.

As stated above, in his studies on peanuts, Professor Giuseppe Bayle Barelle sought the opinions and material support of qualified botanists and agronomists, such as the aforementioned Fulgenzio Vitman of Milan and André Thouin of Paris. At the same time, however, both in these and other studies, he was assisted by competent and properly trained “invisible technicians.” In Pavia, they were mainly young graduates with good knowledge of the natural sciences and generally waiting for a stable job elsewhere, who were entrusted with both teaching and the actual processes of experimentation. Bayle Barelle’s two assistants were Carlo Bignami and Carlo Bellardi. For the professor following Barelle, the aforementioned Giovanni Biroli, they were Giuseppe Bergamaschi and Giuseppe Moretti. Bignami, Bellardi, and Bergamaschi were trained doctors; Moretti was a pharmacist. Thanks to the university curriculum for health-related professions, they had extensive knowledge of botany, chemistry, physics, and geology, complemented by a strong interest in agricultural science, which was still taking form epistemologically. ⁵⁷

In particular, Bellardi helped Bayle Barelle with hybridization experiments on cereals, and in 1809 he drew up the only Napoleonic-era catalogue of the agricultural garden in Pavia. He indexed the peanuts, adding the two varieties studied by the professor. Bellardi specified with regard to the African peanut that “it is still not quite naturalized.” ⁵⁸

However, if we were to consider a hypothetical spectrum of invisibility, the four young men had the officially recognized status of lecturers (Bignami, Bellardi, and Bergamaschi) and of assistant professor (Moretti). Furthermore, in the following years they became professors and scholars of agricultural science, botany, and other natural sciences in various licei across northern Italy (Bignami in Zara, Dalmatia). Later, Bergamaschi and Moretti returned to work for the University of Pavia in eminent positions.

We could consider the gardeners and workers involved in the day-to-day management of the Pavia garden as examples of technicians deeper on the invisibility spectrum. It is interesting to note that when Biroli was away from Pavia, he preferred to entrust the management of the area to the gardener Gerolamo Germani, rather than to the lecturer Bergamaschi, whom he did not entirely trust. ⁵⁹ Actually, Germani was not even officially a gardener: both his role and his training deserve some explanation.

In June 1814, Biroli notified the rector of the university that he had entrusted the garden to Germani during his absence, explaining that he had done so many other times “for the intelligence and passion he [Germani] shows in this kind of study, and because, being aware of all the experiments and observations conducted there, he is the only person capable of performing the necessary operations.” ⁶⁰ Biroli’s reference to Germani’s studies suggests that he had some kind of training, even if it was probably empirical rather than theoretical and acquired at the university, since Germani was not recorded in the student rolls of previous years.

Biroli, however, must have had Germani’s training very much at heart, since in the past he had tried to propose him to the rector and the General Direction of Public Education “as a student.” ⁶¹ These words also support the hypothesis that Germani was an expert at the time in the management of the agricultural garden, but that he did not have official theoretical training, unlike assistants such as Bignami, Bellardi, Bergamaschi, and Moretti. Before leaving his chair at the end of 1814 for the chair of Botany at the University of Turin, Biroli may have tried to give him access to higher education by appealing directly to the rector and the General Direction, thus bypassing the strict secondary-education admission prerequisites (Germani probably did not finish his secondary education).

In other letters from Biroli to the rector, it emerges that Gerolamo Germani was not actually employed by the university. He probably supported the salaried staff as an “assistant” and, for at least two years, he worked in the agricultural garden without pay. ⁶² However, the high level of responsibility of the assignments entrusted to him by Biroli speak clearly about his competence and his teamworking skills, as a real gardener or expert custodian.

Another Germani, named Francesco, who lived in a farmhouse not far from the agricultural garden, was already entrusted with the maintenance of the irrigation canals during Bayle Barelle’s tenure, and was allowed to use the water for his family’s needs at a modest price. ⁶³ The shared last name strongly suggests kinship between Gerolamo and Francesco, which would in turn imply a family specialization.

However, not even fifteen years later an engineer named Girolamo Germani was recorded as a resident of Pavia. ⁶⁴ It could be a case of semi homonymy, but it is also plausible to assume that it was the same person spelled with an “i” instead of an “e.” In addition, the engineer Girolamo had attended the second and third year of studies in mathematics at the University of Pavia between 1816 and 1818, when he was close to twenty, passing the exams and obtaining the proper qualifications. ⁶⁵ The fact that he started at the second year, however, and shortly after the events of 1812–14, would bring him closer to the empirical profile of the gardener Gerolamo, reinforcing the hypothesis that it was the same person. And being very young during Biroli’s management of the garden – between fifteen and seventeen years old ⁶⁶ – could explain why the professor tried to get Girolamo/Gerolamo into the university through the intercession of the rector and an appeal to the General Direction.

Assuming Girolamo and Gerolamo were one and the same, Biroli’s firm desire to ensure that his protégé obtained a good theoretical background to complement his empirical aptitude leads us to hypothesize that specialized preparation was also required for some of the personnel involved in the maintenance of the space reserved for scientific experimentation. After all, those fully organized botanical or agricultural gardens, with their research and experimentation facilities, were fully fledged scientific laboratories. In this regard, it is important to note that as “institutionalized sites of knowledge production and knowledge transmission par excellence, [scientific laboratories] are themselves the result of scientific development that took place only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” as stated by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. ⁶⁷ Therefore, it is understandable that the staff responsible for managing these places would be subject to an increasingly stringent evaluation process.

Biroli’s preference for the gardener over the lecturer in the early 1810s reveals that the technician was not so invisible. He did not fall into a category of assistants considered “mere sources of physical energy and muscular extensions of their master’s will,” to use Shapin’s definition in hypothesizing one of the extreme attitudes of seventeenth-century scientists toward their assistants. Biroli’s preference was more similar to Robert Boyle’s recognition of a certain level of expertise in some of his assistants, again recorded by Shapin. ⁶⁸

To corroborate our hypotheses, we can also refer to the experiments led by Bayle Barelle on peanuts and oil extraction, in which a surveyor and a chemical expert were involved. The first, Mr. Bondioli, was commissioned to measure the land in the open countryside where experimental peanut crops were grown. The second, Pietro Bonfico, performed estimates of the oil extracted from the seed harvest. ⁶⁹ Bonfico had a recognized role as chemistry lecturer at the university and later as assistant to Professor Luigi Valentino Brugnatelli in the chemical laboratory. ⁷⁰ Bondioli was instead a provincial agricultural technician, supposedly with a specialized education, but otherwise unknown. However, in 1856 a land surveyor, Giuseppe Bondioli, was registered in Lodi: if it was not the same person, at a very advanced age, we can assume again that the family expertise was handed down through generations. ⁷¹

An even more complex issue is the involvement of rural society, it being very difficult to assess its effective receptivity to the experiments proposed by academies and universities. During the Old Regime, the farmers’ viewpoints were taken into consideration in experiments on the cultivation of “Siberian barley” (probably Hordeum distichon L.), coordinated by the Patriotic Society of Milan and the aforementioned Eraclio Landi in the early 1780s. This trial cultivation was entrusted to a priest and a landowner in Valsassina, in the mountainous area of northern Lombardy. The two men coordinated a series of farmers and obtained a good product from the first harvest. The priest reported that the farmers continued to prefer corn, since its cultivation required less time and fewer resources. The landowner, on the other hand, referred to happy farmers asking for new seeds. ⁷²

An example in the Napoleonic era is provided by Giuseppe Bayle Barelle in his experiments on peanuts. After his first trials in the agricultural garden, he moved his research to the fields near the town of Lodi. In his Annals article, Bayle Barelle indicated two specific locations – Canturino, near the village of Lodi Vecchio, and Birga, near the village of Ossago – where he had entrusted the cultivation of peanut varieties to Domenico Stroppa, a “diligent and excellent agronomist.” Stroppa followed the progress of peanut crops “regarding all possible links with rural economy.” ⁷³

Domenico Stroppa was not an agronomist in the current sense of the term. In the subsequent Giornale article, Bayle Barelle redefined Stroppa as “a good landowner and farmer,” therefore correcting the title given to him a couple of years earlier and placing the man outside of the official category of technicians. However, he once again praised his care in conducting the experimental cultivation assigned to him, so much so that in 1810 they had been able to sow 36,000 Indian peanut seeds on almost nine perches of land. ⁷⁴ The cultivation, harvesting, and processing operations produced 472 libbre grosse and 16 ounces of oil, which Bayle Barelle was very satisfied with, above all thanks to the diligence of Stroppa and his workers, both men and women. ⁷⁵ There was therefore a certain understanding between the agriculturalist and the landowner directly involved in agricultural experiments. However, Stroppa was not a tenant farmer nor a peasant and probably could afford a more “entrepreneurial” vision of the crops on his lands, deciding whether and how much to invest in new plants, unlike the average inhabitant of Valsassina.

On the other hand, Peter Jones and Joseph Bettey have noted a certain level of technical expertise on the part of farmers in other areas of Europe. A good example is the case of the “ingenious farmer,” George Boswell of South Dorset, in the late eighteenth century. His ability to create water meadows and systems to produce early grass was known in the surrounding area and beyond, so much so that Boswell received a visit by the agronomists Arthur Young and Robert Bakewell, as well as being contacted by politician Sir John Sinclair from London. Boswell had received a good education, but probably no specialized training, and his technical knowledge seemed to have matured with practice and personal interest. ⁷⁶

There is an undeniable difference between Stroppa’s and Boswell’s profiles. The Italian was a landowner, while the Englishman was a tenant farmer and an agent for local landowners. Stroppa limited himself to being receptive – even with a good dose of enthusiasm – toward Bayle Barelle’s proposals. Boswell was instead eager to provide original contributions to the improvement of agriculture, so much so that in 1779 he published a successful informative account titled Treatise on Watering Meadows, with a second edition in 1790. Both cases, however, offer a good example of “bilateral contribution” to the development of agricultural science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Some had a greater, or in any case, more “aware” scientific preparation – Bayle Barelle, Young, Bakewell – but even those who had more technical and pragmatic knowledge gained information in daily contact with rural matters – Stroppa and Boswell.

By contrast, Peter Jones also provided examples of scientists who were not in favor of experimentation by individual farmers. For example, around the mid-nineteenth century – later than the period studied in this article – the Scottish chemist and mineralogist James Finlay Weir Johnston thought that full-time “professional experimenters” in agricultural trials were necessary, and he did not appreciate experiments conducted by individual farmers. Peter Jones notes that at that time growing processes were increasingly complex, so the Scot’s opinion was reasonable in requiring more professional control. ⁷⁷ However, in the case of Bayle Barelle, the experiment was excellently prepared – with the involvement of the surveyor Bondioli and the chemical expert Bonfico – even if it was limited to two plots of land in the Lodi countryside.

Stroppa’s positive attitude toward novelty also influenced the activity of his subordinates, given the positive results of the experiment. In general, it was an opposite attitude to what the Piedmont farmers showed in the same years when the Agricultural Society of Turin tried to spread sugar beet cultivation (Beta vulgaris L. subsp. vulgaris) with seeds from Silesia. These were the years of the Continental Blockade, and the Napoleonic government was looking for a substitute for cane sugar. At that time, the farmers proved to be refractory to the spread of sugar beet cultivation, preferring not to modify traditional crops, even though the preliminary experiments conducted by the Agricultural Society of Turin had been very promising. ⁷⁸ In this instance, we perceive a mistrust similar to that of the French peasants in the 1790s. They looked suspiciously at the spread of potatoes as a substitute food for humans, even in that decade of famine, continuing to prefer to use the land to grow fodder for livestock. ⁷⁹

Bayle Barelle also used to compare his own results with the ones of Giovanni Biroli, at the time an active member of the not-so-distant Agricultural Society of Novara, Professor of Botany and Agricultural Science at the local liceo, and, as noted before, Professor of Agricultural Science at the University of Pavia after Bayle Barelle died of fever in the summer of 1811. ⁸⁰ Moreover, Biroli’s interest in peanuts was quite varied, even more than Bayle Barelle’s. This allows us to deepen our knowledge of the “dark matter” of agricultural science.

Before becoming Professor of Botany at the University of Turin at the end of 1814, Biroli concluded some studies on A. hypogaea, more as a substitute for cocoa than a source of oil, and he used the Annals to publish the results of his research. In particular, he described an experiment conducted with a chocolatier from his birthplace, Novara. The experiment consisted in serving cups of hot chocolate to six customers: however, the drink was not entirely of cocoa, it contained a percentage of properly processed peanut. The unsuspecting customers praised the hot drink as particularly tasty and, according to Biroli himself, the fact sparked a heated competition among several chocolate shops. The chocolatier who had joined Biroli in the first experiment decided to continue serving the new cocoa and peanut drink secretly. Biroli also claimed that the peanut-containing chocolate was much more digestible than that made entirely with cocoa, not to mention that the latter was priced at 117 lire per rubbo. ⁸¹ We may therefore guess that Biroli considered the drink made partially with peanuts as more “democratic,” since a broader range of people could produce and consume it. Furthermore, according to the professor, even if only a third of the cocoa had been replaced with peanuts, the state would have reaped significant savings on cocoa imports. ⁸²

In the report, Biroli demonstrated a clear conception of progress in everyday life, in which scientists had to collaborate with other professional figures and common people to obtain results of public utility. He praised the growing spread of agronomic literature and commended the fact that “landowners, tenant farmers, and land agents are starting to savor this science, and this is the century of agriculture.” Nonetheless, at that time, many of the scientific notions in circulation were not applied to everyday life, and one of the causes for this was the diffidence – not always unjustified, admitted the professor – of people toward the scientists. However, it was important to urge farmers to increase peanut cultivation, as this was a source of multiple products: oil, cocoa substitute, as well as hazelnut and almond substitute in sweets. ⁸³ The attitude observed by Biroli was the same as that seen among Italian farmers toward sugar beets and partially hull-less barley crops, or among French peasants toward potatoes as a food source.

Another interesting aspect is the description that Biroli gave of the technical details of the experiment. After the peanuts had been shelled, he chose the best ones and dried them in the sun. Then he roasted them over a slow fire, as was done with cocoa beans, until they had turned a chestnut color. If not roasted enough, “a certain grassy smell” remained. If too roasted, they took on a toasted flavor. The subsequent steps were not specified by Biroli, but we can assume that the roasted peanuts were then crushed and combined with cocoa paste to create a solidified mass. At that point, the professor recommended letting it harden in molds in a cool place, such as a cellar, and wrapping it in greased paper. Only one third of the cocoa could be replaced by peanuts in order to ensure a drink of the right consistency. ⁸⁴

On the contrary, if we consider Mazzucato’s detailed account relating to the extraction of sugar from date-plum fruits and compare it with Bayle Barelle and Biroli’s more concise peanut-related accounts, we notice a big difference in the way technicians and rural society were considered. In fact, in the first account they disappear into thin air. With the exception of the harvesting of the fruit, which Mazzucato had assigned to unidentified parties, the entire report is practically in the first person, with no reference to labor, although it remains uncertain whether the professor had carried out all aspects of the experiment alone. Shapin’s “invisible technician” remained unmentioned, in contrast with the acknowledgment shown by Biroli, and above all by Bayle Barelle, in their work on peanuts.

As for rural society – peasants and farmers – Mazzucato seemed to consider them to be a community rooted in antiquated and often harmful customs, to which the scientist must bring the light of progress. Biroli, instead, admitted that sometimes the common people had good reason to be diffident and that agronomy texts sometimes contained errors. Bayle Barelle – the least pedigreed of the three scientists – collaborated with technicians, landowners, farmers, and workers in the name of national progress.

However, if Mazzucato did not give the deserved recognition to his assistants and proved rather snobbish toward rural society and its contribution to the progress of agriculture and the processing of its products, he nevertheless gave importance to popular knowledge in his mapping of the natural and anthropic environment that accommodated the date-plum, maintaining a certain respect for the vernacular culture. It is no secret that the techniques for extracting the sugary substance from the date-plum did not play an important role in the Napoleonic search for the “perfect substitute” for cane sugar. Of greater relevance were the data that Mazzucato recorded about the distribution of the species in the regions near the town where he lived. In fact, in addition to recording the widespread presence of the date-plum in the aforementioned areas, both Italian and non-Italian, he recorded a 110-year-old specimen on a hill close to the village of Moruzzo, near Udine. Few peasants distinguished it from other fruit trees, calling it in those cases poma santa (holy apple). However, they knew the berries were edible, and they ate them both freshly picked and dried. Mazzucato also recorded the presence of some younger specimens in the village of Spilimbergo, on the Tagliamento river, at the foot of the Carnic Alps. Here, it was cultivated in gardens for ornamental purposes or as a botanical curiosity, and called by the vernacular name sclopizigner. ⁸⁵

Mazzucato’s contribution to the mapping of the Friulian flora also contributed to greater awareness of Italy’s natural heritage. For example, in June 1811 he undertook a scientific exploration of the Julian Alps, on the border between the current countries of Italy and Slovenia. He was accompanied by the aforementioned Giuseppe Moretti from Pavia, who at the time was his chemistry and natural history colleague at the liceo in Udine. Mazzucato made a detailed report of the exploration, published with the title Viaggio botanico alle Alpi Giulie (Botanical Trip to the Julian Alps), an epistolary essay addressed to his uncle, Professor of Agricultural Science at the University of Padua, as stated above. Mazzucato recorded the species identified with Moretti using binomial nomenclature, but he also gave a picturesque and romantic description of the alpine landscape and its beauty. ⁸⁶

The text may have seemed to be of little economic utility: Mazzucato and Moretti’s exploration did not specifically record particular plants that were useful for human purposes. They did not record the date-plum, probably because the mountain climate and altitude were not conducive to its growth. However, even if concentrated on one plant species only, the article on the date-plum had the same value as a more complete “mapping” such as that in the Viaggio Botanico, evaluating both the resources potentially useful to the Kingdom’s economy and also the relationship between the local population and the environment.

The Annals article recorded the presence of a plant species – the date-plum – that was almost unknown in the Friulian area to both the “scientific community” and rural society. As we have seen, it reported vernacular names alongside the scientific description, even noting the existence of a specimen over 100 years old. From this point of view, albeit in a more detached and under-the-microscope way if compared to the more communicative style of Bayle Barelle and Biroli, Mazzucato gave as much importance to the knowledge or ignorance of rural society as he did to the knowledge or ignorance of the learned, including the viewpoint of the former in the description – albeit filtered – of the territory.

Conclusions

The concepts of “continuity” and “invisibility” were two key elements in agricultural experimentation and the mapping of Italy’s natural resources in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The experiments in peanut cultivation and peanut oil extraction conducted in Turin and Pavia – Piedmont and southwestern Lombardy, respectively – were successful and the plant acclimatized to northwestern Italy in the space of a few decades. It resulted in satisfactory oil production, at least as regarded the autarkic goals of the Napoleonic regime, and even a good cocoa replacement. The methodological framework for these experiments was that formulated in the attempt to revive olive cultivation and the acclimatization of particular varieties, although this turned out to be achievable only where the environmental and climatic context allowed it. Continuity of goals from the Old Regime to the Napoleonic era was therefore fundamental in terms of learning from failures, reprising earlier plans, and proposing new innovations.

Although their outcomes were less clearly defined, the experiments on other oil plants conducted by the Patriotic Society of Milan in the late eighteenth century and by the Academy of Mantua in the first years of the Napoleonic era perpetuated this continuity, seeking to enhance earlier initiatives with the new possibilities provided by the Napoleonic “technocracy.” These efforts contributed to the spread of some species in Lombardy, such as olive trees in the area near Lake Como, and new varieties of radish in the Mantua area. ⁸⁷

In other cases – as in Mazzucato’s work on sugar surrogates or Gagliardo’s reconstruction of the history of sugar cane crops – there were no tangible economic results. Nevertheless, this scientific work enriched the general knowledge of Italian flora, adding information from specific geographic areas – northeastern Italy and southern Italy in our case – and contributed to broader and more detailed mappings. Two examples are Mazzucato’s Viaggio Botanico and the many volumes of the Flora Napolitana (Neapolitan Flora) begun in 1810 by Michele Tenore, Botany Professor at the University of Naples. ⁸⁸ Napoleonic-era natural studies also reinforced the Italian scientific community’s readiness to explore geographically distant botanical and agronomical alternatives, as we have seen for the American persimmon, the Palmyra palm, and the century plant – which was actually already acclimatized to the northern Italian lake regions. Lastly, progress in beekeeping in Brescia led to improvements in a form of animal husbandry to which many pages of technical and scientific treatises had already been dedicated, while also promoting the entomological study of bees. All of these studies, loosely associated with sugar production, were based on research conducted during the Old Regime and on the epistemological development of agricultural science in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The policies ushered in by the Napoleonic regime, the opening up of boundaries, and the new means available – such as more sophisticated scientific institutions and specialized journals – enhanced circulation of agronomic knowledge, plant species, and also animal species, as exemplified by the Italian buffalo, the Ottoman and Prussian horses, and the Merino sheep, which have already been studied by estimable historians. ⁸⁹ The Napoleonic experience brought progress in agricultural science to northern Italy well beyond that achieved in the Old Regime. It was something new, something original, but at the same time it drew on the heritage of an age – the second half of the eighteenth century – marked by great scientific and technical growth and specialized educational programs. New professorships and scientific gardens, vast plans for the exploration and classification of local territories, and a modern way of conceiving the circulation of agronomic knowledge were all aimed at achieving material benefit for the state. Marked both by continuity and innovation, this progress played an important role in the general framework of European agronomic studies around the turn of the nineteenth century, as highlighted by Peter Jones.

In the Napoleonic era in Italy, there was both a greater appreciation of the contribution of the assistants – the “invisible” technicians – and a deeper interest in rural society’s viewpoint on progress. The former included young lecturers and assistant professors, but above all gardeners, surveyors, minor engineers, chemical experts, and even men and women employed in the harvesting and mechanical processing of plant products. This progressive recognition was certainly not linear and, while promoted by Bayle Barelle and Biroli, still encountered some resistance, as exemplified by Mazzucato’s refusal to acknowledge “underqualified” contributors.

The process of recognition of these various agents had already started in the Old Regime. In the case of gardeners, an excellent example is Giosuè Scannagatta. Originally from Varenna (on the eastern shore of Lake Como), the son of an expert naturalist, he trained as a gardener in Padua under botanist Giovanni Marsili. In Austrian Lombardy, he had been a gardener in the botanical garden in Pavia. Working to enrich it, he traveled as far as Strasbourg to exchange seeds with the botanist Jacques Spielmann. As a collaborator of Professor Fulgenzio Vitman and of the “agricultural” Patriotic Society, he served as a consultant and supplier of plant species for Brera’s botanical garden in Milan. In 1801, the Cisalpine government gave him a post as Vitman’s lecturer and assistant professor. In 1802, at the age of sixty, he became Professor of Agricultural Science at the University of Bologna, moving over in 1803 to take the chair of Botany. ⁹⁰ Although the academic recognition arrived at a late age and in a context where knowledge of “pure botany” was held to be the loftiest goal, Scannagatta’s technical expertise was of great value throughout his career and allowed him to contribute to the field of agricultural science.

We have presented several cases that demonstrate the greater interest in rural society shown by institutions and learned individuals: in Valsassina, Piedmont, southwestern Lombardy, Veneto, and Friuli. They focus on landowners, land agents, farmers, and peasants, whose interest or mistrust could facilitate or slow down large-scale experimentation. In Biroli’s experiment using peanuts as a partial substitute for cocoa, the chocolatiers played the double role of assistants and representatives of the commercial segment in which the surrogate was proposed.

Other examples of the relationship between rural society and innovation come from the partially negative French cases described by Jones, and the positive English cases reported by Bettey. In South Dorset, the figure of the “ingenious farmer,” George Boswell, is somewhat hybrid in that he represented both the technocracy and rural society, in a similar way to the Novara chocolatiers who worked with Biroli. If Mazzucato describes rural society as rather suspicious of novelty in his reports, it is also true that he recorded both its ignorance and its interaction with the environment in an objective and unbiased manner as knowledge of the Italian territory, its resources, and their exploitation.

Even if direct involvement by rural society in plans for agricultural and manufacturing development was still problematic in the late nineteenth century after Italian unification,91 its point of view – whether negative, positive, appreciated, criticized, or tolerated – in the decades analyzed herein began to be an integral part of the experiments, the mapping of resources, and perhaps the actual epistemological development of agricultural science.