The constant seasonal movements of shepherds and their sheep created a network of natural roads throughout Italy. One of these sheep tracks passed nearby Fallascoso.

Migrant Sheep and the Abruzzi

On the Move – It’s time to be away.

by Vittorio Emiliani

If not for Gabriele D’Annunzio’s verses  – ‘September, on the move! It’s time to be away…’ – the ancient pre Roman rite of the transumanza, herding the sheep from the Abruzzi mountains to the coast of the Apulia where they spend winter, would be virtually unknown.

One reason is that for most Italians, the economy based on sheep has been expunged from memory.

This is especially true in the north, where it has been revived recently by shepherds from Sardinia. However, the transumanza from the Abruzzi and Molise to Apulia is not the only one that takes place in our country, nor has it been only sheep that were involved.

In Tuscany, the shepherds took their flocks as far as the marshlands and then the sea in the Maremma, and even today herds of the most ancient breed of sheep on our soil – the Podolic – are brought down from the mountains of Avellino to spend the harsh winters in the sheep folds and pastures of the coastlands.

But the sheep herding from the bleak mountains of the Abruzzi, from the fields of Pescasseroli down to the lands of the Capitanata and the Tavoliere, is the most massive movement of animals recorded, from century to century.

It is a double transfer – there and back - which takes place step by step, along sheep tracks and narrow paths, along a network of routes which are so closely woven that it extends for as many as three thousand kilometres between the area around L’Aquila and the region of Matera, all aimed at bringing the sheep close to the sea for the cold and dreary winter time.

Gabriele D’Annunzio, native of Pescara, places the scasata, the shepherds leaving their homes in the high villages, in September.

But historians of the transumanza (including the inevitable German scholar, Spengel of Manburg), give the month of October as the time of farewell to the mountains, when the ciavarre – sheep under two years old – began to tremble because of the severe cold.

Abruzzi folklore is full of mocking songs about sheep and their shepherds. The farewells were quite melancholy, even resented by the womenfolk who had to remain at home for months without their men. “Go, and may you not come back,” “You love your sheep more than me,” sang the women. And the shepherd would reply, possibly with too much realism, “May we not meet again; the sheep give me my living.”

They proceeded to count their sheep, and then the long procession took the road for the south, with the droves of sheep of all ages, and goats, donkeys, and mules in a long line, patrolled, of course by the big sheep dogs which, tireless and intelligent, were always the greatest help to shepherds and drovers, as to some extent they still are today.

The broad tracks – some of them still largely visible today – were one hundred and eleven metres wide and might be as long as seventy kilometres; they were marked by the passing and repassing and grazing and resting of thousands of beasts each year.

The last transumanza carried out on foot (today the animals are transported back and forth in trucks) was in 1968. Along the tracks and paths there were above all the ‘riposi’, where the beasts could be rested in the evening.

Here there were proper sheepfolds and trulli huts for the shepherds and mounted herdsmen. But in ancient times there were also fortified towns which offered some sort of protection and defence from the brigands obviously charging the herdsman a by no means nominal toll for the privilege.

At Saepinum near Campobasso, founded by the Consul Neratius Pansa – a fine Roman site, recovered by the archaeologist Adrino La Regina – there is still an inscription, De grege ovarico, in which the Imperial tax officials (the year is 169 A.D.) are ordered not to harass the conductors of the flocks excessively.

Along the most important drovers’ track between the High Abruzzi and the Tavoliere (for instance along the axis between Pescasseroli and Candela), the service structures for the drovers and the herdsmen were to be found. There were taverns where everyone could get something hot to eat and drink.

There were also brothels for the shepherds whose blood was hot, but also sanctuaries for the pious and faithful during their long abstinence.

Some of these buildings still remain today, but they risk ruin if provision is not made for their restoration. They stand along the southern routes which are really unknown and unusual – some of them still only can be travelled to on horseback.

There are some imposing taverns, for instance, along the stretch from Castel di Sangro to Lucera, famous for its wool. The pasturing of the sheep in Apulia lasted for the whole winter and a good part of the spring as well, until the historic fair of Foggia in the middle of May.

Only then did they again take the road to the mountains, back along the tracks and paths they had trodden the previous October.

The return to the village was a happy event, a feast day. But it did not last long as the sheep soon had to be taken to higher up, though this time not to any great distance from the villages where the shepherds lived.

I said above that around the sheep droving a particular landscape had been created which has remained almost untouched; service centres have existed ever since the times of Italic civilisation; there has always been refreshment for body and soul, a special line of craftsmanship, a ritual stratification with dates, customs, songs, ways of speech, typical costumes, fairs, markets and forms of ethnic integration.

Even in the malaria-ridden countryside around Rome, the nomad shepherds of the Abruzzi were a long time the only inhabitants – albeit temporary – of the typical huts and cabins made of reeds.

So there is a whole world linked to the Abruzzi and its migrant shepherds. It needs better documentation, wider knowledge among the young people of today, who only see sheep as they speed by on the motorways.

A small museum dedicated to the transumanza was inaugurated recently in Picciano, near Teramo. Another richer one is planned for Sulmona, where important purchases of materials and documents have been made, destined eventually for the former convent of Santa Chiara.

by Vittorio Emiliani, writer and editorialist for the daily Il Tempo and Il Secolo XIX.

Click here to see great photos by Vincenzo Battista of sheep migrating thru the hills of Abruzzo.

Clich here for information on how to Adopt an Abruzzo Sheep from nearby Anversa.