“We Are Italians!”: The Hybrid Ethnobotany of a VenetianDiaspora in Eastern Romania

The ethnobotanical knowledge of migrant communities has been the focus of a number of studies in recent years aimed at understanding how Traditional Knowledge (TK) about plants changes over time. Changes in TK often occur in response to various sociocultural and/or environmental factors, which affect the continuum between adaptation (i.e., changing, substituting, or eliminating home plant uses according to the new host environment/culture), and isolation (i.e., retaining plant uses according to a presumed “original” plant TK). In this study, we focused on a very small group of descendents of migrants who left Friuli and Northern Veneto in north-eastern Italy at the end of the nineteenth century to work as stonecutters around Măcin Mountain in Dobruja, eastern Romania. Our aim was to record the ethnobotanical knowledge of this diaspora and to compare the data with the previously published ethnobotanical literature available for Romanians and Venetians/Friulans in their home regions in order to learn how practices and beliefs related to plants may have changed.