And now, while the snow lasts, let us take one look at Messer Pietro Crescenzi, a Bolognese of the fourteenth century. My copy of him is a little, fat, unctuous, parchment-bound book of 1534, bought upon a street stall under the walls of the University of Bologna.
Through whose hands may it not have passed since its printing! Sometimes I seem to snuff in it the taint of a dirty-handed friar, who loved his pot-herbs better than his breviary, and plotted his yearly garden on some shelf of the hills that look down on Castagnolo: other times I scent only the mould and the damp of some monastery shelf, that guarded it quietly and cleanly, while red-handed war raged around the walls.
Crescenzi was a man of good family in Bologna, being nephew of Crescenzi di Crescenzo, who died in 1268, an ambassador in Venice. Pietro was educated to the law, and, wearying of the civil commotions in his native town, accepted judicial positions in the independent cities of Italy,--Pisa and Asti among others; and after thirty years of absence, in which, as he says, he had read many authors,[21] and seen many sorts of farming, he gives his book to the world.
Its arrangement is very similar to that of Palladius, to which he makes frequent reference. There is long and quaint talk of situations, breezes, cellar-digging, and wells; but in the matter of irrigation and pipe-laying he is clearly in advance of the Roman writers. He discourses upon tiles, and gives a cement for making water-tight their junction,--"_Calcina viva intrisa con olio_." (Lib. I. Cap. ix.) He adds good rules for mortar-making, and advises that the timber for house-building be cut in November or December in the old of the moon.
In matters of physiology he shows a near approach to modern views: he insists that food for plants must be in a liquid form.[22]
He quotes Columella's rule for twenty-four loads (_carrette_) of manure to hill-lands per acre, and eighteen to level land; and adds,--"Our people put the double of this,"--"_I nostri mettano più chel doppio._"
But the book of our friend Crescenzi is interesting, not so much for its maxims of agronomic wisdom as for its association with one of the most eventful periods o£ Italian history. The new language of the Peninsula[23] was just now crystallizing into shape, and was presently to receive the stamp of currency from the hands of Dante and Boccaccio. A thriving commerce through the ports of Venice and Amalfi demanded all the products of the hill-sides. Milan, then having a population of two hundred thousand, had turned a great river into the fields,--which to this day irrigates thousands of acres of rice-lands. Wheat was grown in profusion, at that time, on fields which are now desolated by the malaria, or by indolence. In the days of Crescenzi, gunpowder was burned for the first time in battle; and for the first time crops of grain were paid for in bills of exchange. All the Peninsula was vibrating with the throbs of a new and more splendid life. The art that had cropped out of the fashionable schools of Byzantium was fast putting them in eclipse; and before Crescenzi died, if he loved art on canvas as he loved art in gardens, he must have heard admiringly of Cimabue, and Giotto, and Orcagna.