From the middle ages, Tavoliere plain in Apulia Region was the center of the wool industrial and customs for the sheep farming was placed. Sheeps had moved looking for grass from the settlements of Apennnes during for winter. Tavoliere plain was a grain-growing district in Italy. A peculiarity of agriculture in southern Italy were land-use of extensive agriculture and an existence of a large land owner.
The purpose of this study is to clarify the spatial structure of Tavoliere plain where grazing and cultivation coexisted in pre-modern times. In this paper, we look at the atlas of the pasture land in detail, and analyze the spatial structure while comparing it with the statistics and drawings of farmland.
In this plain, the sheep tracks and pasture lands for migration were developed by the kingdom of Naples. Three kinds of sheep tracks are decided, the thickest roads extended from the mountains to Foggia. The narrow roads were stretched in Tavoliere plain to move to the assigned pasture land. The grazing area set in 23 blocks was about 15,400 carri (3802.5 km2) in total, of which about 8930 carri (2,205 km2) was pasture. Other than that it was crop cultivated land, vineyard, vegetable field and pasture ground for dairy animals etc. In the atlas “Atlante delle locazioni del Tavoliere di Puglia di Antonio e Nunzio di Michele di Rovere” (1686), roads for movement of sheep, lodging with livestock houses (posta), large-scale farmers (masseria) and dairy pastures (mezzana) ware drawn, but crop cultivation (portata) was hardly drawn. Compared with the drawing of the individual cultivated land, it turns out that there was also rotatable cultivated land in fact. On the other hand, there were few settlements in the plains, many in the surrounding hills. And around the village there were subdivided vegetable fields and fruit tree plantations.
In conclusion, there were not only grazing lands for sheeps and posta in Tavoliere plain, fragmented land use including cereal crop rotation cultivated lands, pasture grounds for domestic animals, vegetable gardens and fruit tree plantations were done. And it was the movement of people and sheep from other areas that supported the development of the large-scale farm in the plain and the wool industry in southern Italy.
