The Maremma — the low coastal plain extending from southern Tuscany into northern Lazio — has one of the longer-documented fallow histories in peninsular Italy. Unlike the intensively irrigated Po Valley or the terraced hillsides of Liguria, the Maremma was for much of the medieval and early modern period a sparsely inhabited zone where large estates, known as latifondi, dominated the agricultural calendar. The periodic abandonment of fields here was not always a deliberate agronomic choice; it was frequently a consequence of seasonal depopulation forced by endemic malaria.
Malaria, Depopulation, and Accidental Fallow
Between roughly the 13th and 19th centuries, the coastal Maremma experienced a marked seasonal migration pattern. Permanent residents retreated to hilltop towns — Pitigliano, Sorano, Massa Marittima — during the summer months, when stagnant water on the plain provided ideal conditions for Anopheles mosquitoes. The land below was left to transhumant shepherds who moved in after the first autumn frosts.
This pattern produced fallow intervals measured not in growing seasons but in entire years. Fields might go unploughed for two or three consecutive seasons before a wave of Sienese or Florentine estate managers attempted cultivation. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany's land surveys from the 17th century record extensive areas described as maremma inculta — uncultivated plain — interspersed with worked strips along the more elevated ground.
"...il terreno della Maremma, lasciato a sé per due stagioni, riprende una fertilità che stupisce il colono che vi torna."
Relazione agraria toscana, c. 1748, Archivio di Stato di Firenze
Soil Characteristics and the Value of Rest
The Maremma's soils vary considerably across the plain. The heavier clay soils near the river mouths — particularly those draining into the Ombrone and Albegna river systems — tend to compact badly under repeated ploughing without a rest interval. Historical estate records note that wheat yields on these soils dropped sharply after the third consecutive year of cultivation and recovered significantly after two years of unmanaged fallow, even without deliberate legume cover.
Lighter volcanic-derived soils on the inland margins, particularly those around Monte Amiata's foothills, showed different behaviour. These retained nitrogen better but were susceptible to erosion on the steeper slopes when surface cover was removed. Estate managers in these areas tended to adopt shorter fallow intervals, frequently sowing grass or leaving natural regeneration to stabilise the surface between grain crops.
The Role of Transhumant Grazing
Seasonal grazing by Maremman cattle and sheep on fallow land was not incidental — it was integral to the soil recovery process. The Ufficio dei Pascoli, a Florentine administrative body responsible for regulating pasture rights from the 14th century, maintained detailed records of which estates had registered fallow land available for grazing in a given season. Animal manure deposited during the grazing period represented the primary source of nitrogen return to these soils.
The overlap between fallow management and transhumance rights created a set of contractual arrangements — livelli and affittanze — that bound livestock owners to specific fields at specific times. Some of these arrangements persisted into the 20th century in modified forms, long after the drainage works of the 1930s had largely ended the malaria cycle and allowed permanent year-round settlement.
19th-Century Reclamation and the Disruption of Fallow Rhythms
The Leopoldine land reclamation projects of the late 18th century and the more aggressive Fascist-era bonifica integrale of the 1920s–30s fundamentally altered the Maremma's land use patterns. Drainage canals eliminated stagnant water and, with it, the seasonal population retreat. Permanent settlement became viable across the plain, and estates were subdivided into smaller tenanted units under the mezzadria sharecropping system.
Under mezzadria, the economic pressure on tenant families discouraged long fallow intervals. Fields were kept in near-continuous production, relying on chemical fertilisers rather than rest. Agronomic surveys from the 1950s and 1960s documented a measurable decline in topsoil organic matter on the heavy clay soils of the lower plain — a direct consequence of the abandonment of multi-season fallow cycles that had, however inadvertently, sustained soil structure for centuries.
Post-Reform Landscapes
The land reform of 1950–51, which broke up large estates and distributed land to former sharecroppers and landless labourers, created a fragmented pattern of small holdings across the Maremma. This parcellation made coordinated fallow management across a watershed — as the old estate system had implicitly provided — structurally impossible. Each small holding operated independently, often ploughed to the margin.
By the 1980s, agronomists working with the Regione Toscana were documenting what some described as a "soil memory" deficit: fields that had been under continuous cereal cultivation for thirty years showed compaction and reduced water retention compared to marginal areas that had retained intermittent fallow or permanent grass cover. Field trials in the Grosseto province demonstrated that a two-year legume fallow, reintroduced on selected plots, restored measurable organic matter levels within five growing seasons.
Contemporary Status
EU agri-environment scheme payments have reintroduced a financial rationale for fallow on some Maremman holdings, particularly for those meeting biodiversity conservation conditions. The fields left under set-aside in the 1990s and 2000s — though controversial among farmers at the time — produced a visible recovery in soil structure on the lighter inland soils. Heavier lowland soils have proved more resistant to short-term improvement.
Researchers at the CREA research institute have conducted long-term plot studies in the Grosseto area comparing continuous cereal systems against rotations incorporating one fallow year in five. Preliminary results suggest a statistically significant improvement in topsoil aggregate stability in the fallow-inclusive rotations after eight years.