The journalist and scientific communicator Elio Cadelo, winner of the 2013 Publishing and Scientific Dissemination Award, overturns the idea that Italy is by its nature a sort of "Garden of Eden" with the widest biodiversity in the Mediterranean book 'American Plants (and not only) in Imperial Rome - The Transoceanic Voyages of the Romans, published by All Around Edizioni.
Biodiversity - which according to many nineteenth-century historians was the prerequisite that allowed numerous civilizations such as that of the Etruscans, the Greeks of Magna Graecia, the Samnites, the Ligurians, the Sicans and finally the Romans to thrive and which it still enjoys today Italy - was actually "built" by importing "alien plants" from everywhere, especially from the Middle and Far East.
Roman farmers acclimatized them, hybridized them and cultivated them, creating, for the first time, a variety of agricultural products unique in history.
Botanists, ornithologists, historians of Roman civilization, archaeologists, personalities and institutions from the scientific world collaborated on the essay, in particular from the National Research Council and Enea and numerous university studies, especially American ones.
Among the hundreds of plants that arrived in Italy during the long history of Rome, some are native to the Americas.
The essay by Cadelo - who was a member of the Working Group on Information and Communication in Biotechnology of the National Committee for Biosafety and Biotechnology of the Presidency of the Council - examines over a hundred plants - not only food but also medicinal and hallucinogenic - which, in Roman times, crossed the oceans and were moved from one continent to another.
The presence in the Roman world of plants of American origin such as corn, pineapple, pepper, pumpkin, sunflower and many others is amply proven not only by a large number of classical authors, but is also well depicted in frescoes, mosaics, bas-reliefs and exhibited statues in museums throughout Europe.
Furthermore, long before the voyage of Christopher Columbus, numerous plants of Mediterranean origin, such as water lily and jimsonweed, had been widespread in America, as confirmed by Mayan archeology and iconography.
For the first time, in 'American Plants' the author places navigation at the center of the economic and technological development of ancient civilisations.
It also shows how that of Rome, in many respects, was the first, and perhaps the only "liberal and quasi-capitalist" economy of antiquity, notes Cadelo who for years was the voice of the Rai Radio Newspaper for Science and Environment and received the Enea Prize for Scientific Dissemination in 1999.
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