The Abbadia di Fiastra

So I guess you’ll have gathered the family and I were on holiday in the Marche region last week. One of the cooler places we visited was the Abbadia di Fiastra (that’s its cloister above). This is a romanesque abbey nestled in the middle of an ancient wood, which is now a protected area. Cistercian monks built the place in the 12th Century, reclaimed some of the land for agriculture by changing the course of the river Entogge, and also made use of the nearby forest, of course.  You can still buy natural products made on the abbey’s land in the little shop in the visitors’ centre.

There’s an interesting Museum of Peasant Culture at the abbey. Actually it mainly consists of old farm machinery and utensils. This was one of the more interesting exhibit, a seminatrice, or seed sower.

I talked to my friend the farmer about it. He remembers when tractors first came into the region, in the sixties. He remembers sowing and harvesting using machines such as this, pulled by horses or cows. He had heard of the museum, but didn’t think much of the idea.

Schomburgk on bananas and breadfruit

Sir Robert Hermann Schomburgk (1804-1865) was a British botanist and explorer, perhaps most famous for fixing the boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela. I only mention the fact because the Stabroek News, a Guyanese paper, recently reprinted an extract from the description of his travels to the interior of that country. It’s of interest to us here at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog because it includes a fascinating description of banana cultivation, as well as a somewhat gratuitous, but pithy and elegant, summary of the events surrounding the mutiny on the Bounty. A bit further down the production chain, the Liverpool Echo has a short piece on how bananas first got to that city in particular and the UK in general, though from West Africa.