Transhumance in the Apennines
What it is
The Apennines — the mountain spine of the Italian peninsula, running from Liguria in the northwest to Calabria in the south — supported a massive transhumance tradition centered primarily on sheep, with the seasonal movement of enormous flocks between the high summer pastures of the central Apennines and the winter lowlands of Puglia (the tavoliere, the great plains of the heel of Italy), Lazio, and Campania. This was the backbone of the Italian sheep economy for millennia and the economic foundation on which the Roman city-state's food supply was partly built.
The Tratturi: Rome's Sheep Highways
The Apennine transhumance routes — the tratturi (singular: tratturo, from Latin tractoria, a dragged path, i.e., the path made by dragged hooves) — were the economic arteries of pre-industrial central and southern Italy. The main tratturo magno (great sheep-walk) ran from L'Aquila in the Abruzzo mountains to Foggia in the Puglia lowlands — a distance of approximately 200 kilometers, walked twice annually by millions of sheep over many centuries. The tratturi were protected by papal and state authority (the state-run Dogana delle pecore di Foggia, the Customs House of the Sheep of Foggia, collected transit tolls from the fourteenth century onward and was one of the most important fiscal institutions of the Kingdom of Naples).
Food uses & preparation
The food traditions that developed along the Apennine transhumance routes reflect the specific ecology of the journey: the foods available at different elevations and seasons, the ingredients that could be preserved and transported by the mobile shepherd community, and the encounters between the herding culture and the settled agricultural communities along the routes.
Arrosticini — small cubes of mutton (specifically from Merino-type sheep) threaded densely on thin wooden skewers and grilled over a narrow channel-shaped charcoal grill (fornacella) — is the quintessential food of the Abruzzo, the mountain region at the heart of the Apennine transhumance. The skewers, about 20–25 centimeters long with 15–20 small cubes of meat each, are sold and consumed in bunches of 20–50, eaten standing from the skewer without additional sauces or condiments. The fat — from the interleaved pieces of sheep tail fat and lean — melts in the heat, basting the lean meat and dripping onto the coals to create the aromatic smoke that characterizes properly cooked arrosticini. They are the emblematic street food of the Abruzzo and have spread widely through Italian cities where Abruzzese emigrant communities settled.
Pecorino di Farindola — a rare and endangered Apennine sheep cheese made from the raw milk of Pagliarola sheep, aged using pig rennet (unusual in cheese-making, the vast majority of which uses calf or vegetable rennet), produced in the Gran Sasso highlands of Abruzzo — is one of the last living testimonies to the transhumance cheese tradition of the central Apennines. The use of pig rennet imparts a specific, slightly sweet, and complex flavor note not found in calf-rennet sheep cheeses.
Cacio e ovo (cheese and egg pasta sauce, a Lazio-Abruzzo variant of the carbonara approach) and the robust lamb and mutton ragùs of the Abruzzo, Molise, and Basilicata interiors are the cooking traditions of the transhumance zone — simple preparations of few ingredients that reflect the portable pantry of the shepherd: cured cheese, eggs, dried pasta, salt, pepper, and whatever fresh herbs could be gathered along the route.
The decline and revival of transhumance
Traditional transhumance declined dramatically across Europe in the twentieth century. The combination of improved lowland fodder production (eliminating the need to move animals to find summer feed), motorized transport (which could move animals by truck rather than on foot), changing land ownership patterns, and the economic disadvantages of mobile pastoral labor compared to intensive settled agriculture reduced the practice to a fraction of its historical scale. In Italy, the tratturi were plowed under, built over, or simply absorbed into private property. In France, the mountain dairies supplying Roquefort shifted from transhumant sheep to local lowland flocks.
In the early twenty-first century, transhumance has attracted renewed attention — from agri-environmental policy (the argument that high-altitude sheep grazing maintains biodiversity-rich mountain meadows), from food quality advocates (the argument that transhumant cheese and lamb has superior flavor), and from cultural heritage institutions. In 2019, UNESCO inscribed transhumance as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity — recognizing practices in Spain, Greece, Italy, Austria, Romania, and elsewhere as a shared human tradition deserving protection.
The living transhumance traditions that persist — in the Pyrenees, in parts of the Alps, in the Spanish Sierras, in the Apennines, in the Carpathians, in the highlands of the Balkans — are simultaneously archaic survival, environmental management tool, premium food brand, and cultural memory. The shepherd who walks the same route walked by shepherds a thousand years before carries both a flock and a civilization.
Reference notes
Cross-links: Alpine Cheese (Gruyère, Comté, Beaufort, Raclette); Pyrenean Cheese (Ossau-Iraty, Idiazabal, Roncal); Apennine traditions (Arrosticini, Pecorino di Farindola); Merino Sheep; Mesta; UNESCO Intangible Heritage; Seasonal Cooking; Sheep Breeds; Lamb (seasonal eating). Related cuisines: Swiss, French (Savoie, Jura, Basque), Spanish (Basque, Navarra, Castilian), Italian (Abruzzo, Lazio, Pugliese, Sardinian), Greek, Balkan.
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