History; Earth and Planetary Sciences (miscellaneous); History and Philosophy of Science
Abstract :
[en] This article illustrates the history of an overlooked aspect of the agricultural and scientific modernization plans initiated under Mussolini’s rule of Italy: the Battle of Zootechnics. Launched in 1930 to sustain the imperial schemes of the regime, the modernization of Italian animal husbandry has been one of the constituents of the fascist integral reclamation program. With this article, I want to reflect upon how fascism understood and mobilized zootechnical science as part of its broader political, cultural, economic, and environmental vision to modernize and render fascist Italy and its ephemeral empire. Conversely, I analyze how zootechnicians responded to the fascistization of society and science. By combining history of science, science and technology studies, and environmental history perspectives and methodologies, and focusing on zootechnical and agricultural journals, agrarian policies, and genetics studies, I want to add an animal history perspective to the study of the entanglements between fascism, science, and nature.
Disciplines :
History Agriculture & agronomy
Author, co-author :
Valisena, Daniele ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Cité ; University of California at Berkeley, United States
Language :
English
Title :
The Battle of Zootechnics: Incorporating Race, Technology, and Ideology in Cattle Breeding Practices During Fascism in Italy, 1922–1945
Publication date :
2025
Journal title :
ISIS: Journal of the History of Science in Society
Acknowledgments. I wish to thank the BoS project and the Spiral Research Center at the University of Li\u00E8ge for generously supporting this research. I cannot express enough gratitude to my dear friend and former colleague Nina Ferrante for introducing me to the works of Benedetta Piazzesi, who inspired my whole research and kindly advised and encouraged me to pursue this endeavor. Michele Sollai generously read an early draft and provided me with precious comments, as did Roberta Biasillo. I thank the archivists and librarians at Instituto Zanelli and Biblioteca Panizzi in Reggio Emilia and Biblioteca di Africanistica of Universit\u00E0 Orientale in Naples. A special thanks to the librarians and archivists at Biblioteca di Agraria of Universit\u00E0 Federico II in Portici, who made my research easy and pleasant. Lastly, I wish to thank Silvia Pattuelli, who kindly shared her family archives with me and showed me what it means to care for the land and those who inhabit it. The funding for this research has been provided by European Research Council as part of The Body Societal \u2013 Unfolding Genomics Infrastructure in Cattle Livestock Selection and Reproduction, ERC Starting Grant 949577 in Europe, based at the University of Li\u00E8ge, Belgium. I declare and acknowledge that there are no conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any people, organizations, companies, or institutions connected to the article.
Daniele Valisena is a Visiting Fellow at the German Historical Institute Pacific Office at the University of California at Berkeley. While carrying out the research presented in this article, he was working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liege, Belgium, as part of the ERC-funded project The Body Societal. He has a background in environmental humanities, history of science and technology, and environmental history, and he has written and lectured on human and nonhuman mobilities, walking as a method, fascism, animal studies, political ecology, cultural heritage, and oral history. He is currently finalizing his first monograph entitled Coal Lives: An Environmental History of Migration in the Belgian Coalfields, soon to be published by University of Pittsburgh Press, and he is working on a research project on urban environmental history of migration entitled Wild Around the Corner: Immigrants’ Feral Ecologies in New York, San Francisco, and Naples During the Age of Mass Migration 1870–1924. German Historical Institute Pacific Office, Institute of European Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 254 Philosophy Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-2316
daniele.valisena@berkeley.edu.Acknowledgments. I wish to thank the BoS project and the Spiral Research Center at the University of Liège for generously supporting this research. I cannot express enough gratitude to my dear friend and former colleague Nina Ferrante for introducing me to the works of Benedetta Piazzesi, who inspired my whole research and kindly advised and encouraged me to pursue this endeavor. Michele Sollai generously read an early draft and provided me with precious comments, as did Roberta Biasillo. I thank the archivists and librarians at Instituto Zanelli and Biblioteca Panizzi in Reggio Emilia and Biblioteca di Africanistica of Università Orientale in Naples. A special thanks to the librarians and archivists at Biblioteca di Agraria of Università Federico II in Portici, who made my research easy and pleasant. Lastly, I wish to thank Silvia Pattuelli, who kindly shared her family archives with me and showed me what it means to care for the land and those who inhabit it. The funding for this research has been provided by European Research Council as part of The Body Societal – Unfolding Genomics Infrastructure in Cattle Livestock Selection and Reproduction, ERC Starting Grant 949577 in Europe, based at the University of Liège, Belgium. I declare and acknowledge that there are no conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any people, organizations, companies, or institutions connected to the article.
Throughout the article, I will use the term zootechnics instead of the more common animal husbandry. While animal husbandry refers to the general practice of animal farming, zootechnics is a positive science conceived as such in the mid-nineteenth century to improve the profitability of farm animals through the scientific engineering of their bodies, reproduction processes, and environment. Therefore, zootechnicians are a specific group of animal husbandry scholars–practitioners. I thank Michele Sollai for making me aware of the linguistic issue here.
See Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, Mussolini’s Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022), 24–45, 138
Michele Sollai, “How to Feed an Empire? Agrarian Science, Indigenous Farming, and Wheat Autarky in Italian-Occupied Ethiopia, 1937–1941,” Agricultural History 96, no. 3 (2022): 383–384
Armiero, Biasillo, and Paolo Guimarães, eds., “Environmental Histories of Mediterranean Fascisms,” Perspectivas, Journal of Political Science 25 (2021)
Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco and Santiago Gorostiza, “‘Facing the Sun’: Nature and Nation in Franco’s ‘New Spain’ (1936–51),” Journal of Historical Geography 71 (2021): 73–82
Lino Camprubi, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014)
Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)
Franz-Joseph Brüggheimer, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2005).
A significance exception is Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016).
See also Omar Mazzotti, “The Cattle ‘Rational Breeding’ in Italy: Theory and Practice of a Modernisation Process (Late 19th–Early 20th Centuries),” Opificio della storia 3 (2022):28–39.
See Simone Cinotto, Gastrofascism and Empire Food in Italian East Africa, 1935–1941 (London: Bloomsbury, 2024)
Diana Garvin, Feeding Fascism the Politics of Women’s Food Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022)
Rebecca J. R. Woods, The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire 1800–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
Benedetta Piazzesi, “Domestication,” in Dictionnaire Historique et Critique des Animaux, ed. Pierre Serna, Véronique Le Ru, Malik Mellah, and Piazzesi (Ceyzérieu: Éditions Champ Vallon, 2024), 235–239
John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)
and Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
As the French veterinary Jacques-Henri Magne expressedOne could appreciate the civilization degree of a population by the modification they were able to impress on the zoological species they farm.” See Aliènor Bertrand et al., “Introduction,” Dictionnaire Historique et Critique des Animaux, 6. My translation from French
see also Sollai, “How to Feed an Empire?”
In this I follow Caglioti’s suggestion of the bottom-up fascistization of science in fascist Italy. See Angelo Maria Caglioti, “Science and Fascism, or Fascist Science? Meteorology in Fascist Italy,” Rethinking the History of Italian Fascism, ed. Giulia Albanese (New York: Routledge, 2022), 155–179.
See, for instance, Sam White, “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History,” Environmental History 16, no. 1 (2011): 94–120
Michael Edward Turner, Jo Beckett, and Bethanie Afton, Farm Production in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Julian Wiseman, The Pig: A British History (London: Duckworth, 2000).
Present in over 150 countries, Holstein-Friesian cattle is the most important dairy cow in the world, constituting up to 90% of all dairy cows in the US and 95% of all intensive dairy herds in Europe. See Bert Theunissen, “Breeding for Nobility or for Production? Cultures of Dairy Cattle Breeding in the Netherlands, 1945–1995,” Isis 103, no. 2 (2012): 278–309.
See Tatsuya Mitsuda, “‘Vegetarian Nationalism’: Critiques of Meat Eating for Japanese Bodies, 1880–1938,” in Culinary Nationalism in Asia, ed. Michelle T. King (London: Bloomsbury, 2019)
and Magdalena Eriksroed-Burger, Heidi Hein-Kircher, and Julia Malitska, eds., Consuming and Advertising in Eastern Europe and Russia in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
See Massimo Montanari, La Fame e l’Abbondanza. Storia dell’Alimentazione in Europa (Roma: Laterza, 1997).
Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Cattle: The Rise and Fall of Cattle Culture (New York: Plume, 1993), 55.
See Tamar Novick, Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023), 102–115
Efrat Gilad, “Meat in the Heat: A History of Tel Aviv Under the British Mandate for Palestine (1920–1940s)” (PhD diss., Geneva Institute for Graduate Studies, 2021)
Rifkin, Beyond Cattle, 45–64
Michio Motoyama, Keisuke Sasaki, and Akira Watanabe, “Wagyu and the Factors Contributing to its Beef Quality: A Japanese Industry Overview,” Meat Science 120 (2016): 10–18
and Anton Masterovoy, “Eating Soviet: Food and Culture in the USSR, 1917–1991” (PhD diss., CUNY), 14–19.
See Rosa E. Ficek, “Cattle, Capital, Colonization: Tracking Creatures of the Anthropocene in and out of Human Projects,” Current Anthropology 60, no. 20 (2019): 260–271
and Anderson, Creatures of Empire.
The first two would be opened in Milan in 1870 and in Portici, Naples, in 1872. The Agrarian Committees (Comizi agrari) were established in 1866, while the first Experimental Station in Agriculture (Stazione sperimentale per la chimica agraria) was established in Udine in 1870, following the example of the one established in Möckern, Saxony, in the future Germany, in 1850.
See Saraiva, Fascist Pigs, 3–6.
See, for instance, Armiero, Biasillo, and Hardenberg, Mussolini’s Nature
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, A Monastery for the Ibex: Conservation, State, and Conflicts on the Gran Paradiso, 1919–1949 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
Michele Sollai, “The Fascist Green Revolution,” Plants, People, Planet 6, no. 5 (2024): 1094–1103
Roberta Biasillo, “Socio-Ecological Colonial Transfers: Trajectories of the Fascist Agricultural Enterprise in Libya (1922–43),” Modern Italy 26, no. 2 (2021): 181–198
and Marco Armiero, ed, “Fascism and Nature,” Special issue, Modern Italy 19, no. 2 (2016).
On the concept of Italiannnes, see Roberta Biasillo, Claudio De Majo, and Daniele Valisena, “Environment of Italianness: For an Environmental History of Migration,” in “Environment and Italianness: Socio-Natures on the Move,” Modern Italy 26, no. 2 (2021): 119–124.
In Mario Guardasoni, Standard e perfezionamento della razza bovina reggiana. Relazione della Sezione allevatori della On. Federazione Agricoltori di Reggio Emilia (Reggio Emilia: Anonima Poligrafica Emiliana, 1931), 25. All translations from Italian by the author.
Cattedre ambulanti (itinerant chairs) have been the most important figures in the teaching of agrarian science in Italy from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until 1935. They were charged with the task of “spreading technical knowledge among farmers, to promote all forms of progress in agriculture, and to attend to agrarian statistical and administrative tasks” in the province they were assigned to. Cattedre ambulanti were also sometimes attached to Royal Agricultural Schools, and they played a key role in the introduction of new cultivars, animals, and techniques in Italy, such as in the case of the Battle of Wheat. Arrigo Caleffi and Eugenia Mazzali, A lezione di agricoltura. Le cattedre ambulanti nel passaggio della società mantovana da agricola ad agro-industriale (Sommacampagna: Cierre edizioni, 2006)
and Antonio Saltini, Istituzioni agrarie e progresso delle campagne (Rome: Edizioni Spazio Rurale, 2006). According to the 1926 census, Reggio Emilia province was one of the most productive of the country in terms of dairy, feed, and meat production. The area hosted 98,554 bovines, over 61,000 swine, and some 28,865 ovine, and it was also important for its wine production. See Matteo Guardasoni, “Razza bovina reggiana,” Special issue, Rivista di Zootecnia (1928), 11–19.
See Vera Zamagni, “L’industrializzazione e il modello di sviluppo economico,” in Storia dell’Emilia-Romagna, vol. 2, Dal Seicento ad oggi, ed. Massimo Montanari, Maurizio Ridolfi, and Renato Zangheri (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004), 173–186
and Paolo DAttorre, ed., La Ricostruzione in Emilia-Romagna (Parma: Istituto Gramsci, 1980).
46.4 bovines/km2, also producing 14,700 kg of wheat per hectare, just behind Lombardy with 15,000 kg. In Guardasoni, “Razza bovina reggiana,” 10.
See La Real Scuola di Zootecnia e Caseificio A. Zanelli in Reggio Emilia nel quinquennio 1906–1910 (Reggio Emilia: Coop. fra lavoranti tipografi, 1911). Until World War I, it was the only existing agrarian school providing practical and theoretical education to animal farmers in Italy. Until 1890, only Portici, Palermo, and Reggio Emilia agricultural schools hosted selected elite breedersEd. A. Zanelli), 30.
Guardasoni, “Razza bovina reggiana,” 72–73.
“Disposizione per disciplinare la monta taurina,” Gazzetta Ufficiale 162, no. 15 (1925), legge del 21 giugno 1925, N. 1162.
La Real Scuola di Zootecnia e Caseificio A. Zanelli in Reggio Emilia.
The introduction of the word zootechnie is ascribed to the French Adrien De Gasparin in 1843, while the first chair in zootechnics was created in 1849 at the Institut national agronomique de Versailles. Benedetta Piazzesi, Del governo degli animali. Allevamento e biopolitica (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2023), 197–216
and Benedetta Piazzesi, “Généalogie de la zootechnie: Enquêter la biopolitique au delà de l’espèce humaine,” in Canguilhem face à la biopolitique, ed. Giulia Gandolfi, Gerardo Ienna, and Charles Wolfe (Paris: Éditions Matériologiques, 2023).
Pierre Dechambre, Traité de zootechnie générale (Paris: Asselin & Houzeau, 1913), v.
See, for instance, Alfredo Rocco, “La dottrina politica del fascismo,” in Scritti e discorsi politici di Alfredo Rocco, vol. 3: La formazione dello Stato fascista (1925–1934), prefazione di B. Mussolini (Milan: Giuffré, 1938), 1093–1115. See also Geert Somsen, “Science, Fascism, and Foreign Policy: The Exhibition ‘Scienza Universale’ at the 1942 Rome World’s Fair,” Isis 108, no. 4 (2017)., 776
In Ermenegildo Reggiani, Vademecum dell’allevatore (Catania: Francesco Battiato Editore, 1911), 26. See also Armiero, Biasillo, and Hardenberg, Mussolini’s Nature, 19.
Renzo Giuliani, “Le Basi Scientifiche della Selezione” Special issue, Rivista di Zootecnia 2 (1931), 32
Saraiva, Fascist Pigs, 21–42
and Sollai, The Fascist Green Revolution.
Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista. 1918–1925 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), especially “Introduction” and “Chapter 7”
Patrizia Dogliani, Il Fascismo degli Italiani. Una storia sociale (Turin: UTET, 2022), especially chapter 4
and Saraiva, Fascist Pigs, 12–16.
On Italian eugenics, see Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy (Budapest: Central European University, 2011).
Gabriel Rosenberg, “No Scrubs: Livestock Breeding, Eugenics, and the State in the Early Twentieth-Century United States,” The Journal of American History 107, no. 4 (2020): 363–366.
Renzo Giuliani, “Editoriale,” Rivista di Zootecnia 1 (1924): 2–4.
Giuliani, “Editoriale,” 6.
Robert Griffin famously defined fascism as an “alternative modernity” as opposed to those who retained it to be antimodernist because of its ruralist and traditionalist ideological component. Thiago Saraiva echoes Griffin in defining fascism as an “all-encompassing modernist social experiment with the purpose of inventing a new national community.” Emilio Gentile used the term “modernist nationalism,” a peculiar synthesis of the state-driven nationalist politics and idealist tendencies. Patrizia Dogliani wrote instead that fascism was modern and innovative in its transformative intent and methods but conservationist and backward in its concrete results. Armiero, Biasillo, and Hardenberg underline “fascist modernity” as an original although contradictory construction made of diverse elements. See Robert Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1993)
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
Saraiva, Fascist Pigs, 5
Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista, 32
Dogliani, Il fascismo degli italiani, 129
and Armiero, Biasillo, and Hardenberg, Mussolini’s Nature, 46–47.
Saraiva, Fascist Pigs.
Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 1–4, 8–12.
Giuliani, Rivista di Zootecnia 8 (1926), 276.
Giuliani, “Le Basi Scientifiche della Selezione,” 4.
Sollai, The Fascist Green Revolution, 1096.
Saraiva, Fascist Pigs, 21–42.
Quota 90 refers to the unilateral rivaluation of Italian Lira decided by Mussolini’s government in 1926. According to that decree, one Sterling pound was valued 90 Lire instead of 125.
Giuliani, Rivista di Zootecnia 1 (1924)., 2
The model was Germany and its nationwide network of experimental stations. I did not find many direct references to the US experimental stations system, but Italian zootechnicians were certainly aware of it.
See Nello Fotticchia, “I problemi contingenti della produzione zootecnica italiana,” Rivista di Zootecnia 7 (1930), 38–39.
Art. 1, inDecreto dell’11 Gennaio 193,” Gazzetta Ufficiale, February 13, 1930, 595–596.
Vittorino Vezzani, Progresso zootecnico ed economia montana (Rome: Camera, 1931).
See Fotticchia, “I problemi contingenti della produzione.”
See, for instance, Wilson J. Warren, Meat Makes People Powerful: A Global History of the Modern Era (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021)
Joshua Specht, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof to Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019)
Robert Chiles and Amy Fitzgerald, “Why Is Meat so Important in Western History and Culture? A Genealogical Critique of Biophysical and Political-Economic Explanations,” Agriculture and Human Values 35 (2018): 1–17
and Woods, The Herds Shot Round the World.
See, for instance, Sandra Nakagawa and Chloe Hart, “Where’s the Beef? How Masculinity Exacerbates Gender Disparities in Health Behaviors,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 5 (2019)
and Aaron Hiltner, “Cowboys and the Imperial Ecology of Beef,” Modern American History 5, no. 1 (2022): 109–115.
Giuliani, Rivista Zootecnica 8, no. 1 (1924), 12.
Adam Searle, Jonathon Turnbull, and Catherine Oliver, “Climate Cattle: Metabolic Intervention in the Good Anthropocene,” Environmental Humanities 16, no. 3 (2024): 784–806.
In Telesforo Bonadonna, Zootecnica speciale (Milan: Ed. Cisalpino, 1946), 34–35.
Bonadonna, Zootecnica speciale, 276.
Bonadonna, 275.
Still today the highest medical–technical committee within the Italian state, it works in close collaboration with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Agriculture, also offering qualified opinions on law bills.
In 1925Italians ate 18.12 kg of meat per person on average yearly: 21 kg in the northern regions and just 8 kg in the southern regions of Italy. In comparison, Spaniards consumed 36 kg, Swiss 38.7 kg, Belgians 40 kg, French 47 kg, Germans 59.7 kg, US citizens 68 kg, Australians 105 kg, and Argentinians 115 kg per capita on average. Data from Vittorino Vezzani, Crisi Zootecnica e nuove direttive di miglioramento (Rome: Camera dei Deputati, 1932), 9–10. On the north–south divide in Italy, see Carmine Conelli, Il rovescio della nazione (Naples: Tamu Edizioni, 2023).
Giuliani will come back on the same point multiple times through the years. See, for instance, Renzo Giuliani, Lezioni e zootecnia generale (Florence: Filippini, 1936), 18.
“Belgian climate and mine work require more than a light food regime made of pasta, legumes, and fruits. [Miners’ food] must comprehend a sufficient amount of meat (200gr per day) and fats.” See Federazione Carbonifera Belga, Consigli ai nuovi minatori (Bruxelles: Fedechar, 1954), 50.
Quoted in Daniele Valisena, Coal Lives: An Environmental History of Migration in the Belgian Coalfields (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming, 2026).
Giuliani, Rivista di Zootecnia 8, no. 2 (1925), 283.
Italian Racial Laws were approved between September and December of 1938, and they especially targeted Jewish Italians. Still, they had been long anticipated by a series of discriminatory and segregation policies in the colonial territories. Racial segregation was already occurring in Eritrea since 1908, as Angelica Pesarini showed. See Angelica Pesarini, “Bodies Crossing Borders: Negotiations of Race and Gender in Colonial and Fascist East-Africa,” Rives Méditerranéennes 60 (2020): 21–28.
There had been several attempts to cross Maremmana and other labor and meat purpose cows with indigenous zebus and to introduce Italian cattle in Eritrea, but they were not very productive. In Giuliani, “Le Basi Scientifiche della Selezione25
and G. B. Tarantino, “Lo zebù somalo,” L’Illustrazione Coloniale. Rassegna dell’espansione italica 7 (1929): 25–26.
Guardasoni, “Razza bovina reggiana,” 15
and Giuliani, “Le Basi Scientifiche della Selezione,” 32.
In Italy, the first successful experiment on artificial insemination was conducted by Telesforo Bonadonna in Carvino, Pavia, in March 1937. See Comitato Intersindacale Provinciale Fascista di Pavia – Sezione Agricola Forestale, La Fecondazione Artificiale Degli Animali Domestici (Pavia, 1937).
G. Viggiani, “La consanguineità al lume delle più recenti vedute della genetica,” Rivista di zootecnica 8 (1924), 230.
See, for instance, G. Dondi, “La razza bovina della Val di Chiana,” Rivista di Zootecnia 3 (1925)
Vittorino Vezzani, “Il miglioramento della Razza Bovina Modenese e la Società di allevatori di Correggio,” Rivista di Zootecnica 10 (1926)
and Alberto Romolotti, “I bovini meticci Schwyz-maremmani in Agro Romano,” Roma Agricola 6–7 (1926).
Giuliani, “Le Basi Scientifiche della Selezione,” 32.
Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista. For instance, by trying to back breed the ancient grey cattle believed to have been introduced in Tuscany and central Italy by the Etruscans or the pre-Indo-European indigenous oxen the Etruscans found in Italy on their arrival. See Dondi, “La razza bovina della Val di Chiana,” 6–9.
Casello (plural, caselli) is a cooperative dairy factory that was typical of Emilia-Romagna. Every hamlet had its own casello, which also contained a cooperative grocery shop and played a key role as an economic, social, and political community center. Fascism did not dismantle the caselli system but rather centralized them under the corporative system. See Francesco Cafasi, “Il casello Emiliano. Evoluzione tecnica ed economica,” Rivista di Storia dell’Agricoltura 78, no. 6 (1974): 35–62.
Guardasoni, “Razza bovina reggiana,” 16–19.
Guardasoni, 32.
Guardasoni, 32. The existence of cattle breeds, as for all farm animal breeds, must be sanctioned by the existence of a breed society that defines the standards of the animals belonging to the associate farmers according to certain morphological, biometrical, and productive characteristics. See, for instance, Associazione Nazionale Allevatori Bovini di Razza Reggiana, https://www.razzareggiana.it/en/the-reggiana-breed/morphological-characteristics/.
Thus, Reggiana would be related to the so-called Steppe Red Cow still present in Russia and Ukraine and famous for its milk outputs. See Riccardo Bertani, La vacca rossa (Campegine: Comune di Campegine, 1989), 13.
Bertani, La vacca rossa, 26.
All those possible genealogies are examined by Guardasoni, “Razza bovina reggiana,” 26–32.
See Doris L. Bergen, “The Nazi Concept of ‘Volksdeutsche’ and the Exacerbation of Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, 1939–45,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 4 (1994): 569–582.
See Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003).
See Sandro Terracina, “Genetica, antropologia e medicina. Il razzismo fascista tra scienza e politica” in A 70 anni dalle Leggi razziali. Storia e memoria per costruire una coscienza civile,” ed. Liliana Di Ruscio, Rita Gravina, and Bice Migliau (Rome: Provincia di Roma, 2008).
As stated in the famous “Discorso dell’Ascensione” in 1927.
See Novick, Milk & Honey, 121–123. On the concept of Bodenständigkeit, Thomas Fleischman, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020): 12–16
and Saraiva, Fascist Pigs, 127–135.
See Carlo De Maria, Il “modello emiliano” nella storia d’Italia. Tra culture politiche e pratiche di governo locale (Bologna: Bradypus, 2014)
and Antonio Canovi, “Il ruggito dell’Emilia. Paradigmi storiografici e politiche locali nella Reggio che cambiaUna stagione appassionata. Gli anni ‘60 a Reggio Emilia, ed. Azio Sezzi (Carpi: Elettra, 2006).
Theunissen, “Breeding for Nobility or for Production?” 278–309.
The European Economic Community sanctioned Parmigiano-Reggiano as a Protected Designation of Origin product in 1992.
See Salvatore Baldassarre, I tipi zoologici in zootecnia (Turin: G. Bruno Editrice, 1893), 3–5.
See “Elenco dei corsi,” in Il Real Istituto Superiore Agrario in Portici 1871–1928 (Spoleto: Arti grafiche Panetto & Petrelli, 1928).
Caglioti, “Science and Fascism, or Fascist Science?” 170.
Vezzani, Progresso zootecnico ed economia montana.
All data in this paragraph in Vittorino Vezzani, Produzione, propaganda e sperimentazione zootecnica, discorso pronunciato alla Camera dei Deputati, 4 Marzo 1935 (Rome: Camera dei Deputati, 1936).
In 1938, there were 25833 bull stations and 35,028 approved sires in Italy (but only 2,500 selected elite bull breeders), which covered 2,713,068 cows (51,000 by selected elite bull breeders), on a total of 7,879,000 bovines. In Bonadonna, Zootecnica speciale, 34–36.
In 1942, those predicaments would be confirmed by the Meran congress, and only the bravery of local farmers would prevent those breeds from going extinct. See Brunella Dall’Ava, “Recupero e valorizzazione della razza bovina Burlina in Veneto” (Master thesis, University of Padua, 2008), 17–21.
Vittorino Vezzani, Crisi Zootecnica e nuove direttive di miglioramento, discorso camera deputati, 18 febbraio 1932 (Rome: Camera, 1933)
and Bonadonna, Zootecnica speciale, 32.
See Vezzani, Produzione, propaganda e sperimentazione zootecnica.
Goats decreased on a national level from 3,803,000 in 1918 to 1,857,000 in 1939. See Bonadonna, Zootecnica speciale, 19.
Still in 1940, the Italian government was trying to encourage the transformation of so-called prati stabili into artificial grasslands through a series of prizes and economic support initiatives. See “Legge del 27 maggio 1940-XVIII, n. 627. Disposizioni relative all’attuazione di un programma straordinario di azione zootecnica ai fini autarchici,” Gazzetta Ufficiale 25, no. 6: 2292–2294.
In Confederazione fascista dei lavoratori dell’agricoltura, Relazioni e proposte relativi alla Corporazione della zootecnica e della pesca (Roma, 1934), 5.
Like the much-advertised Bonifica di Torre in Pietra S.A. close to Rome, which owned the world-famous holstein elite bull Carnation Producer.
See Carlo Cavazza, “Giro d’orizzone sulla zootecnia italiana,” Rivista di Zootecnia 2 (1946), 91
and Renzo Giuliani, “Il problema foraggero meccanico-zootecnico,” Rivista di Zootecnia 2 (1946), 112.
See Rivista di Zootecnia 11 (1936)
Rivista di Zootecnica 4 (1939)
and Rivista di Zootecnia 1 (1943).
Giuliani directed Rivista di Zootecnia until 1957, while Bonadonna was the most prominent Italian scholar in artificial insemination and genetics until the 1980s.
