The Mandria delle Apertole boasts a rich story and a tradition which goes back in the centuries

 

In these pages we summarise our Estate history, written by Giovanni Franco Giuliano, testifying the noble past which still is reflected in the unmatched quality of our rice.

 

The great Apertole plain, which lies between the borders of the municipalities of Livorno Ferraris, Fontanetto, San Genuario and Crescentino, of right in old times of the Abby of Saints Michele and Genuario of Lucedio, and eventually turned  into common pasture for neighbouring villages, was always a cause of land disputes.

The municipality of Livorno appealed to the Silys’s family land property division of 1263. On the other hand, the municipality of Crescentino referred to the testimony of the abbot of San Genuario, filed with the Visconti commissioner in 1392, according to which the Apertole belonged to San Genuario and Crescentino, while no right belonged to the people from Livorno.

It is reported that, on 31 October 1383, the attendants of the noble Antonio Isola from Livorno were found to mow grass in the Apertole and were fined 30 coins by the field guards of Crescentino.

These disputes between Livorno and Crescentino went on for centuries, accompanied by hostilities, killings and house burnings.

In 1499, with the division of the Apertole area, these disputes were put to an end. One third of the territory was assigned to the San Genuario Abby and to the Crescentino municipality and two-thirds were assigned to the Marquis of Montferrat, who had taken over the rights of the Livorno municipality.

Throughout  this period the agricultural land was destined to pasture.  The same destination persisted even beyond 1631, the year in which the land and the buildings of the Apertole became part of the property of Victor Amadeus I, i.e. of the Marquises of Savoy.

In 1721 the Savoy family, in the person of the Count of Montalenghe, launched a project according to which a part of the land was to be destined to horse breeding and the remaining part to the production of cereal crops, with livestock, farm implements and most of all with the construction of buildings for peasants. The project involved the construction of 26 farms integrated in 7 granges, with a substantial investment of money by the House of Savoy.

In 1734 our farmhouses were built, named after Saint Sebastian.

On 22 December 1741, the lawyer Carlo Onorato Sarterio, Mandria di Venaria, enterprise director, estimated the costs required to reduce “the pastures destined to thoroughbred horses in the  Apertole and the revenues that could be earned”. It revealed the necessity to vary the production by the different farms after the introduction of rice cultivation and the consequential reduction of horse breeding in 1736; in each farm 33% of the arable land was used for rice, 22% for wheat, 11% for rye, 17% for spring crops (chickpeas, kidney beans and also maize) and the rest for renewable crops (kale, rape, vetch, legumes) which, being a natural fertilizer, contributed to the renewal of the soil fertility.

In 1758 the Marquis Giuseppe Roberto Solaro di Breglio, king’s counselor, defined the Apertole location as ideal for rice cultivation. From that moment, first the horse breeding, then the other crops and pastures were gradually eliminated, as in the present days in which rice continues to dominate the land of the Estate.