Ethnobotanical remarks on Central and Southern Italy

The sudden evolution of society towards technological patterns and the increasing use of synthetic remedies, has seen a consequent erosion of a rich cultural heritage regarding popular phyto-therapy, that had developed over the centuries. In fact, from the end of XIX century onwards, people engaged in agricultural activities started to leave the countryside and an irreversible process of urbanization began. In the same period the first works on popular medicine were published by anthropologists who were also doctors ([1‐8] etc.) These researchers highlighted the superstitious and ritual aspects of folk medicine but, on the other hand, reported several recipes involving medicinal plants, some of which (such as some vernacular names) still remain valid today (e.g. [3, 9]). Nevertheless these first works are sometimes lacking in details regarding the manipulation or the drugs involved, and sometimes even the scientific name of the species is incorrect. The aim of these first works was to highlight local customs as national values. At the beginning of the XX century the ethnologist Lamberto Loria (1855–1913), founder of the National Museum of Arts and Folk Traditions in Rome, already realized that the progressive abandoning of the rural way of life could have a marked negative impact on folk traditions. So, he started to collect numerous documents of material culture such as folk costumes, pottery and many artefacts made from plants such as baskets, amulets, work tools, shepherd's crooks etc. In the National Museum of Arts and Folk Traditions in Rome many artefacts made with plant materials are preserved, but it is not always possible to trace back to the botanical species from which they were made. Loria intended the collection of artefacts to serve as a tool for gaining knowledge of people's lives and traditions. On the contrary, Pitré [10] (professor of Demopsychology at Palermo University) considered it more important to gather stories, fairy tales, superstitions and recipes, that is to say those oral traditions that are today defined as "immaterial goods". Today, modern research holds these two lines of folk traditions to be equally important in order to be able to document the way of life of a people: gathering documents of "material culture" (or portraying these with photos, drawings etc.) and collecting information on the oral traditions. Unfortunately, in the papers of these studies, many plants are often cited only with their vernacular names and they consequently cannot be identified from a scientific, botanical point of view. It is, however, at least possible to attempt to determine the botanical genus from the Italian or vernacular name, but not the species. In the last thirty years, after a long period of oblivion, there has been a reawakening of these studies from the anthropological point of view [11].

In the second half of XX century, the first modern ethnobotanical studies were carried out in Italy ([12‐16] etc.), where the species involved in the folk traditions were precisely determined by their botanical names. Following on the trail of these work, from the late nineteen seventies on, we carried out ethnobotanical studies in different central and southern Italian regions. The studies were mainly focused on medicinal folk uses, ethno-veterinary practices, food uses, handicraft and home-made uses; ritual-magic uses were considered to a marginal extent. These research projects were made in order to highlight the elements of the local ethno-biodiversity and cultural heritage of the past, quickly disappearing in our changing society. The scientific interest of these uses and the relative potential economic applications go well with man's need to maintain a sense of his own identity related to his historical and geographical environment.

In central and southern Italy, the imposing Apennine mountains alternate with flat coastal belts such as the Maremma, the Cilento plain, Salento etc. These areas are surrounded by three sections of the Mediterranean sea: the Tyrrhenian, Ionian and Adriatic seas.

In the coastal areas the climate is typically Mediterranean with dry summers, rainy autumns and springs and temperate winters, whilst in the inland mountainous areas the winter is harsher and longer, and the summer hot. Before Roman domination these territories were first inhabited by local people, while the southern areas were colonized by the Greeks. These different cultural contributions left certain traces, both in the toponyms and in the vernacular names of the plants and, more generally, in the culture as a whole, traces still visible today. Since ancient times, people have been engaged in agricultural activities, in spite of the fact that in some areas the landscape is prevailingly mountainous.

The present paper presents a survey of our studies published from 1981 up to the present day (some of them are still in progress). Our research started in the Vegetal Biology Department of the University "La Sapienza" of Rome.

A series of interviews was conducted, mainly with farmers, shepherds and elderly people, born or living in these areas for a long time. According to the different cases, open, structured or semi-structured interviews were carried out with the purpose of collecting the greatest possible number of data in the various fields since the information was in the process of disappearing. The informants are aware that the information they have provided will be published. Voucher specimens of exsiccata were collected and preserved in the respective herbaria of the Authors, or in the herbarium of Roma Tre" University. Important contributions were made by several students native to the areas in question. The collected data were necessarily supported by a comparative analysis with local specific ethnobotanical literature, when present; and the information about drugs, therapeutic uses and manipulations have been reported for every species recorded, such as the vernacular names. In recording information, care was taken not to "translate" this into medical terms, but to refer exactly whatever was reported, so as to avoid the information being in any way falsified. In the latest studies the number of informants for each use has been also annotated "quantitative ethno-botany". Nevertheless, the authors would also like to stress that data collected with the "ethnographic method" can be significant, if the same uses are reported in different villages and/or regions. The fidelity level (FL) was calculated in only one work, written from precisely this perspective [17], on the major use of plants in Latium, Abruzzo and Marche, as proposed by Friedman et al. [18], considering not the number of informants but of localities, (FL = the ratio between number of localities reported for the primary uses of one species and number of localities where the use of this species is reported).

Our research can be summarised in Table 1.

Twenty-nine miscellaneous papers concerning various aspects of the folk plant traditions have been published, in addition to those in the table 1.

Our studies (often in collaboration with other authors) covered almost all of the Latium, Marche and Abruzzo regions; on the contrary Calabria, Basilicata and Apulia have still been scarcely examined and further studies are still in progress (table 2). The criterion of reporting the number of informants was adopted only in the most recent works, so this datum is not available for each use reported in the present paper.

Phyto-therapy in central and southern Italy is nowadays practised by a few elderly people who resort to medicinal plants for mild complaints, whilst toxic plants are used only externally, if at all.

The principal usual manipulations of traditional remedies are generally simple and easy to prepare: infusion, decoction, maceration, fumigations. Their efficacy can sometimes be justified not by the presence of suitable chemical compounds in the plants involved but also by the widespread practice and even by observation of the benefit drawn by the informant.

Many plants are used for identical purposes but in different ways in different investigated areas, e.g. Leopoldia comosa(L.) Parl. [Liliaceae]: in Calabria the sliced and crushed fresh bulb scales are locally applied for toothache and headache [35], whilst in Basilicata they are grated [32].

These uses, tested down through the centuries, are still considered effective today and many other similar examples can be cited. The therapeutic activities involving the same range of apparatuses almost overlap not only in regions of Italy that are far from each other, but also with uses in other nations. A clear example is given by Marrubium vulgare L. [Lamiaceae], whose manifold Italian uses are confirmed also in Bulgaria [96] and Tunisia (Leporatti, Ghedira a study in progress) where this plant is considered effective in cases of jaundice, gastralgia, haemorrhoids, pulmonary diseases and rheumatism. Other examples are: Sambucus ebulus L. and S. nigra L. [Caprifoliaceae], whose diuretic and anti-rheumatic properties are equally acknowledged in Bulgaria, Tunisia and Italy. Solidago virga-aaurea L. [Asteraceaee] is used as anti-tussive and Rubia tinctorum L. for gallbladder in Italy and Bulgaria.

However, other examples could be given of anti-parasitic [57] or dye uses [84, 85] and even in illegal fishing [88, 89] and so on.

The use of different species in different Italian areas is often justified on the basis of the local availability of plants or of the presence of typical species such as Lupinus luteus and Santolina etrusca in central Italy; Origanum heracleoticum, Ceratonia siliqua and Citrus bergamia in southern Italy.

With regard to the origins of the popular medicine and the other folk uses, only some uses cited by field interviews are reported in the Greek, Roman and Arabic medical texts, e.g. in a famous synthesis by Mattioli [97]. Therefore the uses gathered probably come from other medicines, e.g. from folk experimentation by the Italic people, or from medicines used by dominating or colonizing cultures.

Nowadays the therapeutic uses of plants based on certain medicinal properties prevail and, unlike the past, are far less or not at all linked with superstitious or ritual aspects. Nevertheless some ritual beliefs dating back to the ancient "Theory of the Signature" (where Signature means Symbol) are still interwoven in therapeutic practice in some strictly conservative areas (such as in northern Latium, Abruzzo and, above all, southern Italian regions such as Molise, Basilicata and Calabria), so that some plant uses do not seem to be well founded. On the contrary many other plants deserve to be taken into consideration not only from the anthropological or cultural point of view, but also as meriting further phytochemical investigation.

Ferri and Miraldi [98] in 1999 wrote: "Until about thirty years ago, ethnobotanical studies were considered minor works...Instead, it was precisely in those years that a series of data should have been registered that today have been lost to us.... In the last ten years, ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology have been the object of a renewed interest... Hardly any new pharmacologically active molecules were discovered during these research projects but the situation could be different were ethnopharmaceutical research projects to receive the same kind of funding as that enjoyed today by research into synthetic substances".

Over the thirty years our studies (as well as those of other authors) have sketched an original picture of the local ethno-biodiversity that could still be exploited by the local communities and by an intelligent form of "eco-tourism" in order to promote tenable development (e.g. typical food or herbalist products, cultivation of medicinal herbs and of typical fruit and vegetable varieties, reproduction and sale of artefacts that have fallen into disuse).