Cultivating Land and People

This chapter focuses on agronomy and agricultural philosophy in Padua in the 1840s. It examines the reasons for the inability of Padua’s Agrobotanical Garden, a formerly avant-garde institution, to respond to the challenges of the mid-century. In Sect. 9.2, I argue that influential landowners like Andrea Cittadella Vigodarzere advocated a peculiar romantic agro-botanical worldview and that they saw themselves as gardeners that cultivated land and people. Their paternalistic social theory enjoyed lasting success in Veneto. In contrast, Andrea Meneghini developed a philosophy of cooperation and strove to implement his ideas through his journal Il Tornaconto and through agrarian associations and political activism. The potato famine of 1846–1847 exposed many of the shortcomings of Veneto’s agriculture. In Northern Italy, the potato crisis was less severe, but acquired peculiar political overtones as the tubers symbolized the increasingly contentious Austrians. Giuseppe Meneghini, on the other hand, tried to come to the farmers’ rescue and sought to establish his own expertise by approaching the problem with scientific methods and investigating fungi as the possible cause of potato blight.