In Cesacastina, on the Teramo side of the Laga Mountains, shepherding is still practised in residual forms that reveal, in the background, a centuries-old history largely founded upon livestock breeding and transhumant pastoralism. Rich in water and pastureland, the Cesacastina area once hosted the largest concentration of animals in the entire municipal territory of Crognaleto, as witnesses Benito Di Giacinto and Luzio Samuele recall: nearly twenty thousand sheep, thousands of cattle and horses which, especially during the summer months, populated the entire surrounding mountain landscape.

Within the framework of Apennine pastoralism in the Teramo area, Cesacastina represents an imaginary boundary between different forms of transhumance: while the families of nearby Cortino and its hamlets gravitated mainly towards the Tavoliere plain in Apulia, the most important shepherding dynasties of Cesacastina more frequently rented land in the Roman Campagna — as also happened in Fano Adriano — where the surviving practice of transhumance is still concentrated today, although evidence exists that, in a more distant past, families from the village also moved their animals to Apulia. Horizontal transhumance towards Lazio, both in the past and today, follows a rigorous seasonal cycle: shepherds from Cesacastina spend around four months of the year in the mountains during summer, making use of civic rights over the high-altitude pastures, while in winter they descend with their flocks to the countryside of Lazio. Until the first half of the twentieth century, the journey was undertaken entirely on foot and could last between seven and nine days of arduous travel, interrupted by a sequence of stops at predetermined shelter points; later, beginning already in the late 1940s, transport by lorry gradually became established, reducing the hardship of travelling on foot but introducing new costs into an occupation that had become, in Claudio Marrocco’s words, a succession of “a thousand ordeals”.

In the Roman Campagna, whenever shepherds did not have farmhouses available for shelter, they built huts from straw, reeds and wooden poles, where they spent the entire period away from their village of origin. Claudio Marrocco recalls the large pastoral hut, lined with woven marsh reeds in such a way as to prevent both water and air from passing through, where shepherds without families slept and where cheese and ricotta were produced, or meals were cooked on the hearth placed at the centre of the structure, surrounded by only a few tuff bricks.

In the houses of Cesacastina, sheep’s wool — spun by women using the spindle and woven on the loom — was transformed into cloth, blankets, mattresses, sweaters, socks, jackets and heavy garments dyed with plant-based materials such as walnut husks; a domestic body of knowledge that has now entirely disappeared since synthetic fibres have reduced the value of fleece to the point where it barely covers the cost of shearing. Cheese and ricotta were produced in abundance, accompanied by an array of utensils that have largely fallen out of use or undergone radical transformation. Yet more than a repertoire of objects, what defines a shepherd’s prestige and abilities — now as in the past — is embodied knowledge: the ability to regulate the pace of the flock; the symbiotic relationship with animals directed through whistle and voice; the reading of weather signs; the use of the staff and bells as extensions of the body; and constant attention and vigilance to protect free-grazing animals from predation and accidents, as demonstrated by recent studies carried out by the anthropologist Emanuele Di Paolo. Today, this body of knowledge is exposed to constant reconfiguration, necessary for its own survival and inevitably accompanied by the dissolution of the fabric of shared orally transmitted culture, which remained vital only as long as land and animals constituted the sole means of subsistence.