Eugenio Turri (Il paesaggio degli uomini. La natura, la cultura, la storia, Zanichelli, Bologna, 2003, pp. 22-23) argues that those who design, administer and plan should hold the keys to understanding the historical and geographical features of the territory in which they work, its geo-physical character and the historical and anthropological forms through which people have, over time, sought a balance between nature and culture. Ever new modes of development should not disregard, but rather should draw on, the heritage of knowledge that reaches us from the past. Were we to ignore the rules by which people have built and, over time, organised their action on the land, we would be building in a void. There is no worse project than one that produces a mismatch between the work carried out and the stage that receives it, all the more so when that project fails to involve the resident population, disregarding what has settled in the historical landscape, in shared feeling, in local traditions. In this vein I should like to point out two interesting elements of the historical landscape of Lago Trasimeno that can offer useful cues for rereading certain passages in the economic history of this territory and making good use of them. The first of these “iconemes” is a tree, which today can still be found in the countryside around the lake: the mulberry, in its varieties Morus alba and Morus nigra, known in the local dialect as moróne or mróne. Its presence is bound to the world of sharecropping and to the traditional methods of working the land and regulating the waters.

Rows of these trees lined the roads and were also planted along fields of wheat or other cereals: typical is the formula “moronato a grano in piano” that we find in the maps of the Perugian Cadastre of 1729 and in those of the Perusina Pedatarum collection of 1758. These latter, very beautiful maps, drawn in colour and at large scale by Domenico Cervellati, have recently been restored and are held at the Historical Archive of the Municipality of Tuoro sul Trasimeno. They depict, very accurately, the lakeshore lands, the so-called pedate. The maps cover 15 communities (only the territory of the present-day Municipality of Castiglione del Lago is excluded). The Perusina Pedatarum series records the landowners, the traditional crops grown, the main watercourses and terms of ancient tradition.
The considerable presence of the mulberry in the Trasimeno basin, in particular in the territory of the Municipality of Tuoro, which borders the Municipality of Cortona to the west, was linked first of all to sericulture.

Its branches were stripped of the leaves that, between late April and throughout May, formed the exclusive diet of the silkworm larvae (Bombyx mori). The plant was then able to put out new foliage without suffering any harm from the first stripping.
Medici legislation proved particularly attentive in this regard. In a document of 27 June 1652 (Bando sopra la conservazione de’ gelsi, o mori, che per buon servizio di S.A.S. par necessario deva mandarsi, A.S.F., LBA, 96, 49) we find confirmation of repeated measures by the Government which, from 1576 onwards, moved towards the introduction and protection of these trees [planted, among other places, in great quantity in the Valdichiana, along the public roads, from 1638-1644, in the territories of the communities of Arezzo, Cortona, Montepulciano, Castiglion Fiorentino, Lucignano, Foiano, Valiano and Marciano (Rinnovazione del bando et provisione per conto de’ gelsi, o vero mori delle communità d’Arezzo , et altre, etc., ASF, Cons. 9, 169)] in order to increase local silk production. It states that it is strictly forbidden to cut or damage the mulberries, and equally forbidden to pick the new leaves they have put out, since this greatly harms both young and mature plants [see: Pratilli G. C., Zangheri L., La legislazione medicea sull’ambiente, II, I bandi (1621-1737), (L. Zangheri, ed.), Istituto per la documentazione giuridica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Firenze, Leo S. Olschki, 1994, pp. 512-514, 536-537].

The rearing of the silkworm certainly encouraged the spread of this tree species, which we still find, with large mature specimens, not only along the roads but also as supports along the rows of vines or at their ends, in particular near the built-up area of Borghetto. In the traditional pergola, that is the Tuscan alberata typical of our border territory, the plants used as supports for the vine shoots were the mulberry, the elm and above all the common maple (the stucchio). The use of mulberries as vine supports on the plain of Tuoro struck, in the early twentieth century, the historian of antiquity Josef Fuchs, who visited these places in the course of his research on the Battle of Trasimeno of 217 BC (Fuchs J., Hannibal in Mittelitalien, “Wiener Studien”, 25, Wien, 1903, p. 142).
The promiscuous cultivation of the vine has been studied in great depth by the French geographer Henri Desplanques, with particular regard to the Umbrian territory, in a major work published in Paris in 1969 (Desplanques H., Campagne umbre. Contributo allo studio dei paesaggi rurali dell’Italia centrale, (trans. A. Melelli), “Quaderni della Regione dell’Umbria”, 10, IV, Perugia, Guerra, 1975, pp. 559-626). Around the mid-1950s this cultivation method was practised intensively in our country, above all in Campania, in the northern part of Abruzzo, in Tuscany, in Umbria, in the Marche, in Emilia and in Veneto. In the Province of Perugia, as Desplanques again notes, even in 1955 98.8% of the vine-growing area belonged to promiscuous cultivation, the remaining 1.2% to specialised cultivation. The vine shoots were trained to a height well above the ground in order to limit damage from animals and late frosts and to aid the ripening of the cereal crop sown in the strip of land between the two rows of the pergola. The narrow, elongated fields, bounded by ditches that almost always followed the drainage lines, protected the wheat from excessive moisture.
In the eighteenth-century maps mentioned above the following formulas recur: “pergolato a grano in piano”, “pergolato a grano in costa”, “pergolato e olivato a grano in piano” and “pergolato e olivato a grano in costa”.
The yield this method guaranteed was very abundant, but not always of the finest quality. At the Trasimeno, the abbot Bartolomeo Borghi recalls (see: Danzetta Alfani G., Vita di Bartolomeo Borghi e notizie sul Lago Trasimeno e suo circondario, Perugia, V. Bartelli, 1882, p. 58), only white grapes were harvested at the end of the eighteenth century; the wine made from vines planted on the best-exposed slopes was highly prized; among the varieties present he mentions the “Leatico” (the Vitis vinifera L. subsp. sativa cv Aleatico is a variety probably introduced into Italy by the Greeks. The white-berried Aleatico, mentioned by Crescenzi as early as 1495, is still found in some areas of Tuscany) and the “Canaiolo” (the Vitis vinifera L. subsp. sativa cv Canaiolo is a variety native to Tuscany that has had a limited and sporadic spread in central Italy).
The Perusina Pedatarum series of 1758 shows that the pergolas are found above all along the coastal strips with the best exposure (the northern and eastern ones). Near the shores they give way to bare arable land (the recurring formula is “nudo a grano in piano”), to hay meadow, to hemp, to fodder crops, to beans, to broad beans and to uncultivated ground rich in marsh plants used for various purposes [see on this: Cattuto C., Gambini E. & Marinelli C., Il Trasimeno. La complessa gestione di un lago laminare (with contributions by A. Batinti and O. Fillanti), Perugia, EFFE Fabrizio Fabbri Editore, 2011, pp. 17-37].
In the 1940s the traditional planting model tied to the promiscuous cultivation of the vine is still well attested in the Trasimeno basin. It is concentrated in particular in the territory of the Municipality of Tuoro, on the lower hill slopes and on the plain to the south and west of the main town (see on this: the IGM map sheet, Tuoro sul Trasimeno: F.122 – IV, S.O, of the Carta d’Italia, surveyed in 1942). The extent reached by the pergolas can be read clearly in Desplanques’ study (op. cit., p. 585, figs. IV, 5 and IV, 6). The figures for the Trasimeno basin, drawn from the Papal Cadastre, that he gives for 1833 substantially confirm those that emerge for the previous century from Cervellati’s maps. In the early twentieth century the Municipality of Tuoro sees an increase in these plantings compared with the first half of the nineteenth century: in particular the figures for 1929 and 1951 show this territory standing out within the Trasimeno basin and ranking among the top five in Umbria, with proportions of vine-planted arable to total arable, respectively, above 80% and between 70 and 80%.
During the first half of the last century a tendency appears in the lake basin to reduce the living supports in the promiscuous cultivation of the vine, introducing wooden poles, small stone and later also concrete posts, and to expand fodder crops.
The rearing of the silkworm, in difficulty because of competition from new yarns and foreign production, was abandoned as early as the first half of the 1950s. The crisis and the end of sharecropping in this part of our region too coincide with the beginning of the slow process of the mechanisation of agriculture. During the 1960s oxen still coexist with the first tractors, then the machines take over: the standing trees, having become an obstacle to mechanical equipment, are progressively uprooted; the many drainage ditches set beside the single pergolas or in the middle of the paired ones, now disused, are partly filled in to enlarge the fields. In step with this, new specialised espalier vineyards are planted. From the early 1980s the surviving network of channels, still able to carry rainwater to the lake adequately, is further reduced; deprived of proper maintenance, it thus tends to lose its continuity and structure, no longer able to fulfil that role, so important for the health of the Trasimeno, which had been entrusted to it in previous centuries. As a result, the lake’s theoretical drainage basin today is far larger than the actual one.
The construction of the Perugia-A1 link road, along the northern shore of the Trasimeno, created a further obstacle to the outflow of water: very often, after heavy rains, it stagnates on the fields. In 1992, after prolonged rainfall, the breaching of the left bank of the Macerone stream flooded the industrial estate of the Municipality of Tuoro. The water remained trapped for a long time, unable to drain downstream because the channels were buried and insufficient.
This laminar lake is the oldest we have in Italy. Its origin dates back about 2 million years. The Trasimeno is living the final moments (geologically speaking) of its long life. Against a surface of about 124 sq km, its average depth currently reaches only 3.50 m: the lake is reduced to a blade of water suspended over an enormous pile of sediments up to 600 m thick. Over the last millennia the relationship between the body of water, settlement and the activities of human communities has often been difficult. Given the gentle slope of the shores, the level need only rise or fall by a very few metres to cause a considerable shift in the shoreline, with consequences everyone can imagine. Managing the lake environment is therefore very complex. In recent times this difficulty has grown sharper since the coming into operation of the new late-nineteenth-century outlet, a hydraulic work of considerable scale, perhaps not suited to the particular character of the Trasimeno, built with no thought for rebalancing works. The reckless use made of it in the 25 years after it entered service caused serious harm to the environment and to the fishing economy, which on this lake boasted a long tradition of fixed catching installations. What prevailed then were the interests of the lakeshore landowners, to whom the management of the work was in effect entrusted. In those years the lake lost about one third of the volume of its water and 10 sq km of surface. The spillway threshold of the new outlet was lowered first by 26 cm, then by a further 79, from the level of the late-medieval outlet, set at 258.68 m a.s.l. On the new lakefront, in the 1920s, the SAI factory was built at Passignano and the Eleuteri airfield at Castiglione del Lago, on a coastal strip previously occupied in large part by the lake. Later, along this new shoreline, harbour and tourist facilities and new roads found room. This belt of constraint, tied to a very low overflow level (currently set at 257.50 m a.s.l.), has prevented the Trasimeno, a laminar lake with very particular environmental features that expose it to critical shifts into the pond phase, from storing water in abundance in rainy periods, as it did before. In these conditions the Trasimeno suffered a very serious crisis of falling levels in the fifteen years after the Second World War, a period of scant rainfall, reaching the stage of a swamp. The enlargement of the drainage basin, so long delayed, was finally accomplished by channelling four streams into the lake: the Tresa, the Rio Maggiore, the Moiano and the Maranzano. Before the mid-1960s, thanks to this measure, the lake levels returned to balance. Unfortunately, taking no account of its natural features and its recent hydrological history, from the late 1980s and for about fifteen years an enormous quantity of water was drawn from the Trasimeno to irrigate the land of the basin, while awaiting the pipelines from the basin of the Montedoglio dam on the Tevere, without any precise knowledge of the actual withdrawals and the harm caused. For more than 20 years the lake level has fluctuated well below the outlet threshold; this crisis, though less dramatic than the previous one, is still far from resolved. Leaving aside new external inputs, the time has come to restore order to the water management of this territory, over which control has been lost. It would then be useful to recover what is good in the legacy our sharecropping tradition has left us, rebuilding and keeping efficient, with the involvement of private owners, a sufficient network of drainage channels, thus helping the lake to maintain acceptable levels (see on this theme: Cattuto, Gambini, Marinelli 2011, op. cit.).
The large mulberries still present in the countryside around the Trasimeno are the last witnesses of this tradition, made of good practices and of careful, sound stewardship of the land.
Alberto Clementi (Clementi A., La rigenerazione dei paesaggi italiani, in Il paesaggio italiano. Idee, contributi, immagini, Milano, Touring Editore, 2000, p. 216) points to the need for farmers, in particularly sensitive areas, to be called upon to become producers of services for the conservation of nature and landscape as well. In his view “[…] as gardeners of nature they will have to be brought within active policies for the protection of the soil and the safeguarding of ecosystem balances, to be promoted through public action” […] “Proof of this is what is being done in the Chianti valley, where an innovative Landscape Programme drawn up within the Territorial Coordination Plan of the Province of Florence makes it possible to guide the hydraulic and agrarian arrangements while respecting the historical character of the local sharecropping landscape”.
The other “iconeme”, a fourteenth-century mansion, the Casa del Capitano del Popolo di Perugia, stands on Isola Maggiore in Lago Trasimeno.

It offers perceptions and prompts to the more sensitive observer for rereading a most interesting page in the economic and social history of this territory. The very strong bond that tied the island and the lake to the city of Perugia in the Late Middle Ages is well summed up in this name that has come down to us by tradition.
As is well known, in the second half of the thirteenth century, and not only then, the commune’s wealth rested essentially on two elements: the cereal revenues of the territory of the Chiugi Perugino (which corresponds to that of the present-day Municipality of Castiglione del Lago) and those from the leasing of fishing rights on the Trasimeno. This idea is well summed up in the Fontana Maggiore of Perugia (1276-1278). On the outside of the upper basin, on the south side facing the Palazzo del Comune and Corso Vannucci, three sculptures stand out among the decoration of the fountain, the work of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano: at the centre we see the female personification of the city (Augusta Perusia); at her sides, not by chance, we find the Lady of the Chiugi (Domina Clusii) and the Lady of the Lake (Domina Laci). The first brings the city a bunch of wheat ears, the second holds in her lap some lasche and tench, the fish in which the Trasimeno was then richest.

In Chapter 167 of the Statute of the Commune of Perugia of 1279 (Caprioli S., Statuto del Comune di Perugia del 1279, Deputazione di Storia Patria per l’Umbria, “Fonti per la Storia dell’Umbria”, 22, Vol. I, Perugia, 1996, pp. 177-178), headed “Qualiter procedatur super opere aqueductus Montis Paçani”, we read that all the expenses needed for the works of the Monte Pazano aqueduct and of the Fountain must be met especially from the receipts, revenues and proceeds of the fruit of the lake’s waters, of the pedate, of the tolls and of the lands of Monte Gualandro.
The fishing of the tori or tuori was at that time the main activity of the lakeside communities. These fixed catching installations consisted of large underwater structures of pyramidal shape, made of piles of bundles of oak branches from the surrounding woods, stacked on muddy bottoms a few hundred metres from the shore, on the lee side with respect to the north-easterly winds.
The name of this heap of faggots derives from the Latin word torus, -i, which originally meant “swelling, protrusion” and, during the Middle Ages, took on that of “small rise”, to which many place-name elements still present in south-central Italy refer.
In winter the fish (above all tench, pike and eels) sought shelter in the recesses among the branches and in the warm mud, and were caught in great numbers by the fishermen with large, very close-meshed encircling nets made of twisted hemp threads (the whole production cycle tied to this herbaceous plant took place on site). The so-called travencole or travincole were hung from palisades of trunks driven into the bottom all around the toro.
This technique developed on the Trasimeno during the Early Middle Ages to meet a pressing need, brought about by progressive Christianisation and linked to an increase in fish consumption
concentrated in particular in the Lenten period. (see: Gambini E., Pasquali E., I Tori. La Gran Pesca del Medioevo al Lago Trasimeno, Perugia, Guerra, 1996 and fig.).

We have information about these grand fixed catching installations from various Perugian and papal documents; it is treated by the Thrasimeni descriptio, a long letter in Latin written in 1457-’58 to Pandolfo Baglioni by Giannantonio de Teolis, known as Il Campano, a professor at the Perugian Studium who had taken refuge at the lake to escape the plague raging in the city, and, at much greater length, by the Trasimenide of 1537, a poetic work in Latin hexameters, in three books, written by a humanist man of letters, Matteo dall’Isola Maggiore, enriched with numerous and interesting annotations and a few drawings. Nothing, on the other hand, emerges from oral tradition. This great fishery was in fact abandoned about 4 centuries ago, after a slow decline that followed the marked rise in the lake’s levels. This was a climatic shift that began at the Trasimeno, with an appreciable increase in average rainfall, in the second decade of the fifteenth century and led, between 1421 and ’22, to the building of the outlet ordered by Braccio da Montone, Lord of Perugia. From the early seventeenth century we have no further record of this fishery, which had marked the economy of the Trasimeno for many centuries, either in written documents or in cartographic depictions.
Above all from the mid-fourteenth century, for at least a century, Perugia sought to exploit the lake’s revenues to the utmost in order to replenish the communal coffers, drained by huge outlays for the payment of mercenary troops and by plagues and famines. The average annual yields nearly doubled compared with previous decades: the peak was reached in 1404 with 13,850 gold florins. It was precisely in this phase that Isola Maggiore formed the central core of the Trasimeno’s fishing economy: a considerable part of the fleet of cargo barges, the so-called navi, used in the annual cycle of activities tied to the fishing of the tori, belonged to it. Il Campano writes that shortly after the mid-fifteenth century there were 40 of these barges on the Trasimeno. Still in the time of Pope Sixtus IV, as Matteo dall’Isola recalls, their number was reduced to 36 (12 navi, with their crews, belonged to Isola Maggiore, 8 to Passignano and Isola Polvese, 4 to Monte del Lago, 2 to S. Feliciano and as many to Zocco).
What remains to mark the importance of the role played by Isola Maggiore in this historical phase is this fourteenth-century mansion, tied to the city of Perugia, which still stands out today, after the recent restoration, with its elegant Gothic mullioned windows along Via Guglielmi. It houses the documentation centre on the history of the island (see on this: Gambini E., Santanicchia M., Isola Museo. Isola Maggiore del Lago Trasimeno: storia, economia e arte, Perugia, EFFE Fabrizio Fabbri Editore, 2010).
On this small strip of land, visited by the saint of Assisi and hence tied to the presence of the Franciscans, 5 devotional and charitable confraternities arose and as many as 8 religious buildings were erected. The most important confraternity, that of S. Maria dei Disciplinati, is documented as early as the first half of the fourteenth century. It owned much property on the mainland, the fruit of bequests from the devout. “Around the mid-fifteenth century works and painters fully versed in the Renaissance idiom will reach the island, workshops from Foligno, artists from Perugia, the Marche and Siena, proof of a truly favourable economic conjuncture”, set within a span running from the twelfth century to the end of the sixteenth: for this community this phase represents the period of greatest development, in demographic terms too (Gambini E., Santanicchia M., Isola Maggiore. Guida storico-artistica, Edizioni Associazione Turistica Pro-Loco di Isola Maggiore, 2007).
Today fishing on the Trasimeno is in serious crisis. The decline in the economic and social importance of this activity began as early as the later nineteenth century, when the rules that had guaranteed a perfect balance between exploitation and protection of this most delicate environment started to be neglected. After the end of the Papal Government, a start was made by turning a blind eye to the fishing of fry in the summer period. The number of lasche fell appreciably, throwing the great fixed catching installations into crisis. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, as Borghi again reports, more than 500,000 libre were still caught in the lake each year, out of a total of over 1 million of various species; in a single half-day 16,000 libre were caught at Passignano, in a single pòrto.
After the new outlet came into operation, following the marked lowering of the lake levels, the crisis of the lasca grew sharper. The wide bands of foreshore that surrounded the lake, where this species reproduced, were rapidly reduced and put under cultivation. In 1917 the fishing of lasche with fixed installations was abandoned by the Lake Administration and then by all the concession-holders. From then on the landowners abandoned the lake and its care entirely: the private investment that might have contributed to modernising professional fishing, developing the sectors of fish farming, processing, promotion and marketing of the catch, thus fell away. The lasca, which had been, together with the tench, so important in the economy of Perugia and its lake, disappeared from these waters half a century ago.
The reduction in the number of workers, currently about 50 fishermen are active, holds back the prospects for development of the fishing sector. The unexpressed potential of this productive sector is closely tied to the health of the lake shores where the fish reproduce (this residual wetland strip is in a state of deep degradation due to 25 years of neglect and abandonment), to the maintenance of adequate levels, to the restoration and upkeep of the rainwater drainage channels, and therefore to those forms of care and those rules, written and handed down orally, that in recent decades have all too hastily been forgotten. In particular the marsh reeds and the underwater vegetation that accumulates along the shores at the end of summer used once to be cut and removed by the fishermen, with beneficial effects on the environment; tomorrow these materials could find new uses linked to animal feed and to the production of electricity, bioethanol and hot water…
The archaeological materials found show that fishing was practised at Lago Trasimeno at least from the Upper Palaeolithic-Mesolithic; in the Final Bronze Age it was already carried out at a professional level; during the Etruscan-Roman period it spread widely; in the communal and papal age it reached its greatest development, of which a considerable heritage of rules survives, deposited in the statutes and the cedole (in this regard it is worth visiting the Fishing Museum of Lago Trasimeno at S. Feliciano).
If investment does not return quickly to this sector, in the coming years professional fishing on this lake will increasingly become a marginal activity: in effect a productive sector of millennia-old tradition, which as recently as the early 1960s gave work to 500 families, will close.
To sustain this ancient profession with vital lifeblood it would be necessary to move beyond the constraint of capture fishing alone, which certainly offers a higher-quality product but is tied to the seasons, to the lunar cycle…, by adding a further fish production, with fish-farming facilities able to raise large quantities of fish, of the right size, at competitive prices, throughout the year. This choice would certainly favour the entry of a new generation of operators, with secure wages and working hours similar to those of a factory worker. To reach these goals, private and public actors will have to invest once again, as in the past, in professional fishing: with a fish production at last sufficient and assured, it will be possible to rely on a small processing industry able to guarantee a variety of offerings for a wider distribution that justifies the investment. The contribution that the fish-breeding centre of the Province of Perugia could make to this initiative would certainly be very important. Today the fish species of our lake are rarely found in the local supermarkets, where instead there is freshwater fish farmed abroad. A meagre quantity of processed product, suitable for trade and of excellent quality, is available only at S. Feliciano.
Bold initiatives are needed to adapt farming and livestock rearing to this territory, so delicate, in which the tourism sector is ever more important and rich in offerings, closely tied to the values of this particular wetland environment and to its characteristic historical landscape, which offers cultural evidence both tangible and intangible, of learned and popular tradition.
Choices are called for that will lastingly save the Trasimeno from turning into a marsh and from environmental degradation, without distorting its nature: winning this challenge may give a brighter future to the economy of the district, laying solid foundations for a new development of the sector tied to professional fishing.
This territory must, as in part it is already doing, invest in a more unified way in projects that foster a development model suited to its characteristics, recovering the good practices and vocations of the past, without neglecting to broaden scientific knowledge of this very ancient lake, which from a physical-geographical standpoint is little known.

Ermanno Gambini is Secretary of ALLI (Atlante Linguistico dei Laghi Italiani), a geo-linguistic project based at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Literatures of the University of Perugia. He has studied in particular the territory of Lago Trasimeno, carrying out ethno-linguistic, geographical-historical and pre- and proto-historic archaeological research.