OLIVES.

STATE OF VENICE.... On the banks of the Lago di Guarda are the only olives I have seen since I left the country of Nice; but the number is not considerable, and most of them are dead or nearly so, by the frost of last winter, which made such destruction likewise in France.

Tuscany....Near Florence, at Martelli, the product of a farm of 190 stiori was as follows: in 1786, thirty barrils. In 1787, it was no more than three. In 1788, it yielded eight. In 1789, it was twenty-five but on an average ten; for which produce there are two hundred trees. They are dunged every two or three years, and dug about once in three years. They are reckoned to lessen the product of corn one fifth ; this is a notion of the country, but I believe very far from accurate. The average price of oil is 5 scudi per barril, of one hundred and fifty pounds (11. 8s. 4d.;) ten barrils amount to 141. 3s. 4d.; and as there are about thirty-four acres in one hundred and ninety stiori, the product of oil is 8s. to 9s. per acre: a sum that yields no very favourable impression of the culture: and, divided amongst two hundred trees, it does not amount to 1s. 6d.

a tree.

The plain of Florence is all lined into rows of these trees, with vines between and upon them; in some places, an espalier of vines between the rows of olives; and when all are well cultivated, the olives yield the greatest produce, next the wine, and then the corn. I viewed, near Florence, some fields, in which I found twenty olives on a stiora of land, but this is not common : and on a very bad stony soil, though in the plain, I found that it took twenty trees of twenty-five years growth to yield a barril of oil. But in a fine soil, and with very old trees, a barril a tree has been known. Vines are suffered here also to run up the trees, but they reckon it a bad custom. The price of oil is more than doubled in forty years. Very few olives were lost by the last hard frost, but great numbers by that of 1709. Landlord's half produce of some fields I viewed: oil, 10 pauls; grain, 7; wine, 1; in all 18 pauls per stiora (21. 5s. per English acre.)

This year, 1789, the grand duke, for the first time, has given a gold medal, of the value of 25 zecchini, for the greatest number of olives planted; no claimant to be admitted for less than five thousand: in consequence of this premium above forty thousand trees have been planted. It will be continued annually.

There is, in the Maremma some remarkable instances of the vast age to which olives will attain: Sig. Zucchino, professor of agriculture at Florence, informed me that, upon examining the hills in the middle of that tract, he found in the midst of woods, and almost over-run with rubbish, olives of so immense an age and magnitude that he conjectures them to have been planted by the ancient Hetruscans, before the Romans were in possession of the country; there must, of course, be much uncertainty in any conjectures of this kind, but a great antiquity of these trees is undoubted.

RICE.

PIEDMONT.... Ciglione to Verceil.... They are now threshing rice with horses, as wheat in Languedoc; thresh as much in the night as in the day: meet also gleaners going home loaded with it. About five miles before Verceil the rice-grounds are in great quantities: their culture, however, of this crop seems to want explanations. Here is, for instance, a great field, which was under rice last year, now left to weeds, with hogs feeding. Why not sown with clover among or after the rice? They never plough but once for rice. The peasants are unhealthy from the culture, yet their pay not more than 24s. to 30s. a day. The soil of the rice-grounds here is that of a fine loamy turnip sand; there is a mound raised around them, for the convenience of flooding at will.

Vercelli....Rice is here reckoned the most profitable of all the cultivation of Piedmont; for it yields a greater value than wheat, and at a less expence. It demands only one ploughing instead of several. Seed only four mine, at 1 livre. Watering at 2 livres 5s. Cutting, the end of July, 10s. The product is sixty mine rough, or twenty-one white; the latter at 4 livres, or 84 livres; and four mine of a sort of bran, at 15s. or 3 livres, in all 87 livres (something under 51. an acre.) It is sown three years in succession, and the fourth a fallow, during which the land is dunged. The price of these lands 500 livres or 600 livres the giornata. As rice can be sown only on land that admits watering at pleasure, I do not fully comprehend this account. Why, for instance, is not the land laid down for meadow, which evidently pays much better, and sells at a higher price? I suppose rice is ready money on demand, and meadows must be converted to cash circuitously. Good wheat land sells at 800 livres.

To Novara....Passing the Sesia, which exhibits a bed of five times as much gravel as water, in three or four miles the quantity of rice is considerable: the stubble is green, and in wet mud; the sheaves thin. It extends on both sides the road for some distance; the whole inclosed by ditches, and rows of willow poplar pollards, as bad to the eye as it can be to the health. One or two fields are not yet cut; it looks like a good crop of barley, being bearded. After Novara, see no more of it..

MILANESE.... Milan to Pavia.... The rice-grounds receive but one ploughing, which is given in the middle of March, and the seeds sown at the end of the same month, in water to the seedsman's knees, which is left on the ground till the beginning of June, when the crop is weeded by hand, by women half naked, with their petticoats tucked to their waists wading in the water; and they make so droll a figure, that parties in pleasantry, at that season, view the rice-grounds. When the weeding is finished, the water is drawn off for eight days; and it is again drawn off when the ear begins to form, till formed; after which it is let in again till the rice is nearly ripe, which is about the end of August, when it is reaped, or in the beginning of September; and by the end of that month, all is finished. Quantity of seed, the eighth of a moggio per pertica, produce twenty-five to thirty moggio rough, or eleven and a half or twelve white. Price 371⁄2 livres the moggio (171. 8s. per English acre) which produce is so large, that this minute I suspect the highest crop gained, and not an average one. The moggio of rice weighs one hundred and sixty pounds of twenty-eight ounces. The straw is of use only for littering cows; and the chaff, like that of all other grain, from a notion of its being unwholesome, is thrown on to the dunghill. They sow rice three years in succession, and then a course of something else. See Courses of Crops. The rice is rendered merchantable by being pounded in a mill by stampers, turned by a water-wheel.

In the great road there is a stone, at five miles from Milan, nearer than which it is prohibited to sow rice.

STATE OF VENICE.... Verona.... Of the produce of the rice-grounds in the Veronese, they reckon one-third for expences, one-third for water, and one-third profit.

PARMA....Count Schaffienatti has sown rice, at Vicomero, eighteen years in succession on the same land, without any rest or manure. Sow on fifty-four biolchi ninety staji; and the produce eighteen for one. He digs the ground, as it is too marshy to plough it well; this costs 3000 livres (each 21⁄2d.) The straw sells at 80 livres the load, of eighty pesi, of twenty-five pounds (three-fourths of a pound English.) Oxen also eat it. Rice is reckoned to yield four times over more nett profit than any other husbandry, more even than watered meadows.

VINES.

PIEDMONT....Antibes to Nice.... A singular cultivation of this plant surrounding very small pieces from six to twenty perches, trained up willow trees; and the scraps of lands within them cultivated. What a sun must shine in a country where thick inclosures are counted by perches and not by acres.

Chentale to Racconis....In rows at twelve to twenty feet, and appear like those of hops in Kent, supported on willow poles, twelve feet high, some of which take root, but are afterwards pulled up.

Chivasco.... Vines fastened from mulberry to mulberry, but not running up these trees, only up willows, &c. that are between them.

MILANESE.... Mozzatta.... Half this country is lined with vines, and it is reckoned that they will damage to the amount of one-tenth of the produce: each pertica of vines, in a common year, will give fifty pounds of grapes, worth 6 livres the one hundred pounds of twenty-eight ounces, hail allowed for; and of this half is the peasant's share for the expence of culture. At Leinate I viewed some wine presses, which are enormous machines; the beam of one is forty-five feet long and four feet square, and at the end where the screw is, a stone of vast weight, for which there is a paved hole in the pavement, that it may keep suspended; the cuves, casks, and all the apparatus great: the quanty of vines one thousand pertica. The seeds of the pressed grapes are kept till dry, and then pressed for oil; the seed of the grapes that yielded seventy brenta of wine will give ten pounds of oil: it is used for lamps. The poor people who bring their grapes to be pressed pay one-twelfth of the wine. Price at present 6 livres the brenta, but only 3 livres for what is last pressed. The first flow is trod out by men's feet. Cominon price 10 or 12 livres the Brenta.

VENETIAN STATE.... Bergamo.... From entering the Venetian territory, near Vaprio, the country is almost all planted in lines of vines, and the spaces between tilled for corn. To Brescia....This country, inclosed with hedges, besides which it is lined in stripes of vines that are trained to low ash and maple trees, with mulberries at the end of every row; but the vines are not trained up these trees, though fastened to their trunks.

Vicenza....The country, for thirty-two miles from Verona to Vicenza, except the watered parts, which are not a tenth of the whole, is lined into rows of pollards, each with three or four spreading branches, and the foot of each two vines, many of them very old, with stems as thick as the calf of a man's leg; and many of the elms, maples, &c. are also old. They stand about a rod asunder, and the rows from twenty-five to thirty yards, and around the whole mulberries. Where the vintage is not finished, the vines hang in festoons from tree to tree, garnished with an astonishing quantity of bunches of grapes.

Vines near Vicenza, produce two mastati, each of two hundred and forty bottles, per campo; the price 16 livres the mastato; the campo here is larger than at Verona, amounting to near an English acre; this is about 17s. an acre, a produce very easily lost in the damage done to the corn.

Padua....The same husbandry of pollards and vines continues hither. They reckon that vines pay better than mulberries; but in the districts of Verona and Vicenza mulberries are more advantageous than vines. This does not correspond with soil, for that of Padua is deeper and richer, for the most part, than the other, and therefore less adapted to vines. In conversation with Abbate Fortis, on the wine of the Paduan, &c.

being so bad, he says, it is owing merely to bad management in making. They tread the grapes with their feet; and will keep it fermenting there even so long as fifteen days, adding every day more and more, till the strength is exhausted, and the wine spoiled; no cleanliness in any part of the operation, nor the least attention in the gathering, or in the choice of the grapes. He further added, that Sig. Modena, a Vicentino cultivator at Vancimuglio adjoining the rice grounds, and consequently as little adapted as possible to vineyards, provided the soil and trees were the cause of bad wines, makes that which is excellent, and which sell for so high as 30s. French per bottle: that Sig. Marzari, and Sig. il Conte di Porto, in the high Vicentino, with many others, as well as he himself, Abbate Fortis, has done the same with raisins from vines that run up the highest trees, such wine as sells from 20s. to 35s. French the bottle : and that some of these wines are so good, that the Venetian ambassadors, at different courts, use them instead of Madeira, &c.; and the wines of Friuli as those of Hungary, which they resemble; yet these vines are all on trees. He also observed, that it has been found, by experiment, that vines in these rich lands, trained near the ground, as in France, have yielded raisins and wine good for nothing; that the grapes even rot; that the land is too rich for vines to have all the nourishment, unrivalled by the root of the trecs. It is very much to be questioned, if the experiments here alluded to have been made with due attention : if the land is too rich for vines, plant them upon soils that are proper; and keep these low districts for grass and corn; but that vines, hidden from the sun amongst the branches of trees, can ripen properly to give a well-concocted juice, appears very dubious; and the fact of all the wine, commonly met with in this country, being bad, seem to confirm the reasoning.

ECCLESIASTICAL STATE.... Bologna... All this country, where I have viewed it, is lined into rows of trees for vines, ten or twelve yards asunder on the mountain, but more in the plain. But Sig. Bignami has his vineyard planted with echalats (poles) in the French way, about four or five feet square, and he finds that these always give better wine than the vines trained to trees, and the land by tornatura gives a great deal more wine, though each vine separately on trees gives more than each in this method. The object in this instance was the goodness of wine; Sig. Bignami thinks the common method five or six feet and tied; if allowed to mount, they yield much fewer grapes. Vines on the mountains yield thrice the value of the wheat, and the double of all other productions, wheat included.

TUSCANY.... Bologna to Florence.... Vines in this route are planted different from any I have yet seen. Some are in espaliers, drawn thinly across the fields; others are trained to small posts, through which at top are two or three sticks fixed to hold them up; others are in squares of five or six feet, and six or seven high, without such posts; but all in the arable fields are, generally speaking, in lines.

Florence....I here met with a case absolutely in point to prove how mischievous trees are to corn, even in this hot climate. A field under olives, which yielded in corn six and a half for one sown, was grubbed, after which the common produce was fourteen for one. Now, as the olives is by no means one of the worst trees for corn, this shews the great loss that accrues from the practices I have noted throughout Lombardy. Yet in common conversation here as elsewhere, they tell you the injury is small, except from wal. nuts, which do more mischief than any other.

MODENA....It appears to be a singular circumstance, that in the parts of this territory, near the hills, corn pays better than wine, but in the plain, wine better than corn: I suspect that some mismanagement occasions this apparent contradiction. From Modena to Reggio the country is planted in rows, as in the Venetian state, &c. and the trees that support the vines being large, the whole has the appearance of a forest.

PARMA....From Reggio to Parma, the same system holds, but executed in an inferior manner. And from Parma to Vicomero, the trees that support the vines are pollards, with old heads, like many we have in England, contrary to the practice of the Venetian state, where they are kept young. To Firenzuola, the vines are all buried in like manner; some here are planted for props, and the poles which serve as such are set in rows: in both methods the shoots are equally buried. A scattering of golden willow in the rows, I suppose for attaching the vines to the props. From Borgo St. Domino to Firenzuola, there is a decline both of vines and wood; the country is not as hitherto, regularly lined, and many large fields are without any; this is the more to be remarked, as here begin some inequalities of the country, the gentle ramifications of the Appenines. To Castel Giovanne, most of the fields have no vines, only a scattering; shoots buried as before, but the inclosures have many pollards in the hedges, like the woodlands of Suffolk. From Piacenza, after passing the Trebbia, the rows of vines are thirty to forty yards asunder, with heaps of props ten feet long, set like hop-poles; very few or no vines trained to trees.

PIEDMONT.... Pavese*....The country is all the way hill and dale, the flat of Lombardy finishing with the dutchy of Piacenza. It is about half inclosed, and half with rows of vines. There are also vineyards planted in a new method; single row of vines, with a double row of poles, with others flat, so as to occupy four ridges and then four to ten of corn. Some vine shoots buried for a few miles, but afterwards none. Near Stradella the props appear like a wood of poles.

SAVOY.... The vineyards of Montmelian yield one and a half tonneau per journal, which sell at 41⁄2 louis the tonneau : all, not in the hands of peasant proprietors, is at half produce.

SECT. IV.... OF IMPLEMENTS AND TILLAGE.

Coni.... The ploughs have a single handle, twelve or thirteen feet long, which throws the ploughman to such a distance behind, that his goad is fixed in a long light pole. The oxen are yoked in the same manner as ours, but the bow is of iron under the neck, and the pressure is received by two bits of wood. Some ploughs drawn by a yoke, others by two yokes of oxen.

Chentale.... The names which are given to the parts of a plough here are-long handle of fourteen feet, stiva; beam, bura; head, cannonlia; coulter rivetted to the share, cultor; share, massa; ground-rest, on which the share sheathes, seven feet long, dentale; earth-board, five feet long, oralia.

The count de Bonaventa, in explaining to me their tillage, shewed the criterion, as old as Columella, of good ploughing, by thrusting his cane across the ridges, to see if rest-baulked. They plough mostly on the three feet ridge, forming and reversing at one bout, i. e. two furrows, the work straight. Use no reins, and have no driver, though the ploughman is above twenty feet from the oxen. Two small beasts cut a good furrow on the top of the old ridge, seven inches deep, and these ploughs, long as they are in the ground, certainly do not draw heavily.

The oxen whether at plough or in the waggons, do not draw, as I conceived at first sight, by the shoulder, but in a method I never saw before, nor read of; they draw by

* The country ceded by Austria to Sardinia, part of the district of Pavia.