This is a voyage back in the peasant memory, to rediscover the landscape of transhumance (cattle summer grazing at high altitude).
The pastures that will be reached at 800m, are frequented by many animals: horses, cows, sheeps and goats are often found together with pigs in the wild. The site is called "Casette di Cottanello" and it is an almost unique case of pastoral village in Lazio (it comes to a kind of settlement that is more common in mountain regions like Abruzzo). This village is a place where a particular kind of brief transhumance was practised by herdsmen/farmers of the lower villages around. They used to spend the winter down in their homes and in the good season they used to move up with cattle, flocks and the whole family to the pastoral village of Casette, where they used to settle temporarily in the stone houses/stables, cultivating summer crops, wheat, vegetables, etc. and obviously talking care of animals that where basically left grazing free. Now very few of that world remains but the village, although semi-abandoned, still hosts free grazing livestock that uses the stone houses as shelters. The path through this landscape winds through century old trees, lawns made by grazing animals, woods and karst ponds. The whole territory of Cottanello tells us a very ancient story, strongly marked from the imprint left by the Romans: very evocative in this regard are the remains of the Roman Rural Villa we will visit owned by the Aurelii Cotta family that, by the way, gave the name to the site of Cottanello. Here in Cottanello, in addition to oil, wine and foodstuffs the Romans used to extract, from Quarries of which still it remains a testimony, the pink marble that was used further on in the XVII century for Vatican St. Peter Cathedral’s interior.
DOES THIS PLACE INSPIRE YOU?
