Memoria verde. Nuovi spazi per la geografia

摘要

Memoria verde - the imaginative title of this book - refers to the historical memory embodied by plants growing on specific study sites. Like all memory, 'green memory' is a human manufacture rather than something natural. An example is Prato della Lepre (near Alpicella in the Aveto valley) a field covered in Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis). Convallaria is such a rare plant in Liguria one might wonder how it came to be in this precise place at all. Roberta Cevasco answers the question via a series of clever comparative steps involving medieval herbals, modern oral testimony and her expert botanical knowledge, to show that the presence of this plant most probably indicates medieval management of pasture land at this site rather than the modern introduction of the plant or its 'natural' presence there. These Lily of the Valley plants constitute a 'green memory' which historians and geographers can reliably use as evidence of past land management.