In the early Renaissance Tuscan and Venetian humanists believing in a balance between utility and pleasure warned against the development of luxurious villas divorced from the agricultural landscapes in which they grew. But by the late sixteenth century their advice was being ignored and villas were surrounded by more and more grandiose gardens. Unfortunately too many historians of landscape design also ignore this balance and focus almost entirely on the “swept” rather than the “plowed.” This is evident in nearly all the literature on Italian landscapes published in English. That is reason enough to welcome this translation of Sereni’s classic text. It was written in the 1950s at the same time as W.G. Hoskins was writing The Making of the English Landscape. Both were pioneering efforts that summarized about two and a half millennia of history and while some of their generalizations may now be questioned, they remain excellent introductions that enable readers to begin to “read” these landscapes.

Italy possesses a great variety of agricultural landscapes, some of which astonish by their intricate and ingenious design. Reflecting this variety Italians have a large vocabulary of terms to distinguish one agricultural pattern from another. These patterns are the product of a complex history, some of the major themes being—ebbs and flows in the colonization of the countryside; the introduction of new plants; the development of systems of interculture and crop rotation; and the elaboration of methods for controlling the flows of water in irrigation and drainage systems—with all of these developments being affected by changes in the social and economic orders overlaid on the unchanging natural foundation of the land. Among the most remarkable achievements are the “sistemazioni collinari” of Tuscany, Umbria and the Marche, where forms of interculture involving the interplanting of trees, vines and field crops have been elaborated into a rich variety of field patterns reflecting the many ways flows of water can be controlled on hillsides in those regions.

Sereni outlines these themes in short chapters of two or three pages, each illustrated from contemporary sources, some by maps or topographic illustrations, but many by paintings and mosaics. The use of works of art as topographic evidence is questionable—and I wish the reproductions in this edition were clearer—but a bonus is the presentation of well known works in a new light. So, for example, Sereni bemoans the extension of pastoralism in the seventeenth century recorded by Poussin, and he interprets Salvator Rosa’s work as “an open polemic against the new feudalism.” Sereni was a leading Marxist intellectual, and his social concerns are very evident, but one may now wish he had said as much about ecological issues.

Since Sereni’s history was first published, the spread of modern agribusiness in Italy has led to the alteration or abandonment of many of the labor intensive, highly crafted landscapes. In recent years there has been a growing appreciation of this vanishing inheritance, but its preservation remains highly problematic. An essential starting point is to be able to identify and evaluate what remains, so in this way Sereni’s work is more, not less relevant after 40 years.

Ian Firth is a professor in the School of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia. He has written on the agricultural landscapes of Tuscany.