| Environment and landscape |
The feudal system and the latifundia
After the fall of the Empire the countryside saw a rapid change both in terms of production and of population. The most evident phenomenon was the transformation of the large estates and their change of hands to become church property. Cultivated land reverted to the wild, watercourses ran unmanaged, the ruin of many houses and monuments or their conversion and adaptation, created what was soon to be the prototype of Roman landscape.
This process was accelerated in the eleventh century by the adoption of feudal management of the land around the Via Appia when imposing castles sprang up, and the depopulated surroundings were marked by the barons' towers. The evolution from the feudal system to the nobles' latifundium (which began in the fifteenth century) came to a crisis point in the seventeenth century: the settlements around the via Appia territory were depopulating and there was an almost total abandon of any production.
|
|
|
Credits
