358 
BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 
OYSTER-CULTURE IN ITALY. 
Modern oyster-culture seems to liave been derived from Italy.* Before the visit 
of M. Coste to Lake Fusaro in 1853, but little had been done in France to regenerate 
an industry almost on the verge of extinction. The report of Coste pictured the 
successes of the cultural processes of Italy and strongly urged their introduction 
'on the French coast, causing the institution, under the patronage of Napoleon III, 
of a series of experimental measures, out of whose successes and failures has grown 
one of the most important of the coast industries of France. 
Especially interesting is the fact, already shown by Coste, on evidence furnished 
by pictured funeral vases, that the processes in use to-day at Tarente or in the lakes 
near Naples are apparently the very ones that the Romans employed as early as the 
time of Marius. The oyster stakes of the Lucrine Lake, we are told, represent in 
appearance and actual position the very ones that Pliny may have inquisitively exam- 
ined, little thinking that their use would be handed down to posterity more carefully 
than the volumes of his lifelong work. 
Everyone who has written of Roman oyster-culture has referred to Sergius Orator 
as the inventor of this branch of industry. It would seem, however, from evidence 
that has endured two thousand years, that this wealthy Roman represented little more 
than a successful culturist of his day, noteworthy, perhaps, because a patrician. His 
prominence, too, as a successful culturist has been accented by a remark of the orator 
Lucius Crassus, who, as his lawyer, defended him in a suit for trespass against the 
state in the matter of oyster property; his time-honored pleasantry that the question 
of a few feet of land made no difference to his client, who could, if necessary, raise 
oysters with success bn the thatches of house tops, has given the grasping Sergius 
more credit than lie perhaps deserves. Certainly the oysters from the Tarentine Gulf 
were very early known, and were by historic evidence planted, doubtless with method 
of culture, in the lakes near Naples. Tarente, as a Greek city of ancient wealth and 
commercial relations, is far more apt to have had oyster-culture than was Sergius to 
invent it.t 
The modern industry is carried on extensively only at Tarente. It is here that 
the major portion of the seed oysters are produced which are afterwards cultivated 
in the bays and tidal ponds of the southern coast and supply the general market of 
Italy. The gulfs at the north do not appear to be favorable to the growth of the 
typical European oyster, Ostrea edulis. The Gulf of Genoa produces a small oyster, 
mainly for local consumption, O.plicata (more probably Ostrea edulis var. plicata), a 
species delicately flavored and appearing to find its best living conditions in waters as 
dense as 1.027 to 1.028. In the harbors of Trieste^ and Venice another variety of oyster 
occurs, 0. edulis Venetians. This is generally regarded as poorer in quality than edulis , 
and its production, therefore, competes but little with the more southern industry. 
Tarente (or Taranto) has been rich in its fisheries from the earliest times. Itsshallow 
gulf, opening broadly to the Mediterranean on the southward, shelters its shore life, 
but readily renews its supply of water. At the head of the gulf, protected by promi- 
nent ridges, is the small deep-cut and almost landlocked bay that has for ages been 
*As to the independent origin of the use of collectors in Connecticut, sec Ingersoll, Oyster 
Industry, Tenth Census, 1884. 
t For discussion of Roman oysters and oyster-culture, v. Pliilpots’ “Oysters and all about them,” 
Richardson, London, 1890. 
I Soubeiran. Bui. Soc. d’Acclim., 2e s^rie, vi, 105, 1870. 
