Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat - Hardcover

Murray, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312355351 ISBN 13: 9780312355357

Verlag: St Martins Pr, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

An international and historical survey of the world's food travel practices covers such topics as ancient Rome's transport of olive oil using ceramic pots, canning technology development during Napoleon's campaigns, and the lunch runners of modern Mumbai. 25,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah Murray is author of Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat. A longtime Financial Times contributor, she lives in New York City.

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Chapter 1

 

Professor José Remesal Rodríguez holds a piece of pottery up to the sunlight. He is standing at the top of Monte Testaccio, a small, unassuming hill on the southern fringe of the Aventine, a short ride from Rome’s city center and within sight of some of Europe’s greatest monuments. The Pyramid of Cestius and the Protestant Cemetery are nearby. In the distance, the majestic dome of the Pantheon, Borromini’s extraordinary spiral tower at the Church of St. Ivo, and the pompous Monument to Victor Emmanuel II rise up above the low-slung buildings of the city. It is an impressive display—a visual excursion through Italian history from Roman times via the Renaissance and on to nineteenth-century unification.

But the professor is not paying much attention to the view. He is too busy examining the chunk of clay in his hand. It is pale brown and bears a deep mark that appears to have been stamped into the clay while wet. There is nothing refined about this thick fragment of earthenware. Its form is clumsy; its surface rough. It was clearly not part of any sort of decorative or ceremonial object. It is in fact a piece of a Roman transport amphora—a ceramic pot about the size of a small barrel that almost two thousand years ago carried food to Rome, capital of an empire stretching from the lowlands of Scotland to the deserts of Africa, from Spain to the Persian Gulf.

“It is Baetican, of course,” pronounces the professor. Baetica is today’s Spanish province of Andalusia, the southernmost region of the Iberian Peninsula, home to flamenco and known for a simple, unpretentious cuisine that includes gazpacho, fried fish, and cured ham. Spectacular Andalusian architecture such as the Mezquita in Córdoba, a cathedral that was once a mosque, provides a reminder of the presence of the Moors, the Muslims who ruled from the eighth century to the fifteenth.

Long before that, however, the Romans were in charge. That was when Baetica was part of Hispania—an area now occupied by Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and Gibraltar. Roman soldiers first arrived there in 218 b.c., and as direct imperial rule was established, Hispania became a prized part of the empire. Three emperors—Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius I—would be born there.

As one of Hispania’s imperial provinces, Baetica was an important source of food for the empire. And this dry, mountainous swathe of land was the starting point for the piece of pottery Remesal is holding. The fragment is part of a second-century transport jar that set out to Italy from a vast agricultural estate owned by a wealthy senator at a time when Rome was at the height of its power. Produce from this fertile land would have been loaded into the jar, heaved onto a vessel by bonded laborers, and shipped to Rome. There, it ended up in the homes and palaces of everyone from philosophers and politicians to manual workers and freed slaves. It may be small and dusty, but this fragment of pottery is part of the endless patchwork that is the history of the Roman Empire. The story it has to tell is one of immense wealth built on trade in an essential commodity: olive oil.

 

Gathered around the professor on Monte Testaccio are students and archaeologists who have traveled from the United States, Spain, and Poland to join Remesal in his ambitious archaeological investigation of this modest-looking hill. It is not the best day for it. On an uncharacteristically soggy October morning, most of those present are wrapped in brightly colored plastic raincoats and fleece jackets. Umbrellas are at the ready. Below, the hum of traffic is accompanied by a cacophony of barking dogs, crowing roosters, and pealing church bells as the city slowly wakes. A rainbow arches briefly across the tempestuous sky as the sun attempts to break through the clouds. Softly, the rain starts to fall.

But a spot of bad weather does not trouble the professor. He is far too interested in what lies beneath his feet to worry about what is happening in the sky. A bearded, bespectacled Spaniard who seems at his happiest with a cigarette in one hand and a piece of pottery in the other, Remesal has spent the past couple of decades uncovering the stories hidden beneath Monte Testaccio’s grassy slopes. This is his stomping ground and, in blue jeans and khaki safari jacket, he looks entirely at home clambering over the uneven ground on the broken pieces of Roman amphorae scattered underfoot. “I spend a month here each year and every time we come, we find something different,” he says, speaking in heavily accented French. “I’ve gotten to know this hill pretty well, but there are always surprises.” Remesal talks with a deep, gravelly voice. It sounds as if, over the years, particles of dust from the pots he studies have become lodged in his throat.

The archaeological dig on Monte Testaccio is like no other. While most archaeologists spend days scrabbling about in the dirt in the hopes of finding something of interest, here they have no such worries. This is because the entire hill is made of archaeological material—there is no dirt here. What lies beneath the thin layer of topsoil is nothing but millions of broken pots. Each year, Remesal and his colleagues come here to carve a large square pit about ten feet deep into this archaic mound and study what they excavate.

Like the rings of a tree, each layer of pottery corresponds to a moment in time. In this year’s pit, they have got down as far as the reign of Marcus Aurelius, around a.d. 175. As the dig progresses, Italian contract workers in white plastic hard hats stand at the bottom of the hole, carefully chipping away at it and filling buckets with pieces of amphorae. Up on the surface, colleagues use a rope to heave load after load of fragments out into the fresh air and over to the center of activity—a collection of large plastic tubs filled with muddy water around which students and academics sit and gossip as they wash two-thousand-year-old layers of dust from the chunks of earthenware in their hands.

It is a busy scene. Dotted about the place are bright orange, yellow, and green plastic crates into which the shards are thrown—one box for each category of fragment. Some boxes contain those with “form” (handles, necks, or bases). Others store pieces on which stamped marks, rough scratches, or painted inscriptions are visible. Then there are boxes for the bulk of the pieces—shards without recognizable shape or markings known as “no form.” At a large table, several archaeologists are working on what must be one of the world’s more difficult jigsaw puzzles as they try, mostly in vain, to re-create entire pots by fitting together some of the larger pieces retrieved from the same excavation level.

At the end of the dig, much of what has been heaved up from below the hill’s surface will be thrown back into the hole. It is a strange phenomenon. A single one of these shards found in a field anywhere else would generate great excitement among historians and archaeologists. Here on Monte Testaccio, however, pieces of Roman amphorae are being heaved up from below the hill’s surface in bucketloads throughout the day. After washing the fragments, the volunteers casually throw them into the plastic boxes as if they were vegetables, scrubbed and ready for cooking. It looks as if they are preparing for a mammoth vegetarian feast.

 

 

Monte Testaccio is one of the world’s more curious ancient relics. It is actually a vast rubbish heap. For more than two centuries, olive oil amphorae were dumped here after their contents had...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martins Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312355351
• ISBN 13: 9780312355357
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 2007
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar