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Updated: April 30, 2025
For these sufficient reasons the merca is practiced still in the old way in the Roman Campagna, and the victory of the man over the brute has to be achieved by main force and dexterity. The buttero has not so much as a lasso, or even a halter or a stick, to assist him in the struggle. There is the beast with his horns, and there is the man with his hands.
"And, pray, what may a 'buttero' be?" rejoined my Johnny Newcome, looking back after the receding figure of the horseman with no little curiosity. "A buttero," I answered, "is one of the most peculiar and characteristic products of that very peculiar region, the Agro Romano."
My friend Nanni Silvani was all that I have described the buttero to be.
But the vast extent of the plain is wandered over by large herds of half-wild cattle, in great part buffaloes, the produce of which is turned to profit in large dairy and cheese-making establishments, and by large droves of horses, from which a very useful breed of animals is raised. The superintendence and care of these is the work of the buttero.
And if this fact is recognized by the generality of the world in which he lives, it is very specially assumed to be undeniable by the buttero himself. There is always a smack of the dandy about him. He is proud of his appearance, of his horse and of his mastery over him.
He grew up to be a buttero, with a consummate knowledge of horses and horned cattle, and a sure eye for the condition of the pastures from one to another district of which the animals are constantly moving, under the eye of his father, who put him on a half-broken colt almost as soon as he could walk. And he is giving his son the same education.
Thus matters pass in a case where the buttero is master of his business, where he is in his own best condition of muscular force and activity, and where he is not matched against a beast of exceptional strength. It frequently occurs, however, that all these conditions are not fulfilled. Some men are cleverer at it than others.
But the buttero, well mounted, to whom it is a small matter to ride eight or ten miles to his home every night, lives with his family either in Rome or in one of the small towns on the slopes of the hills which enclose the Campagna.
Large flocks of sheep and goats also are fed upon the herbage of the Campagna. But the shepherds who tend them are quite a different race of men from the buttero, and are deemed, especially by himself, to hold a far inferior position in the social scale. And, as is ever the case, social prejudice justifies itself by producing the phenomenon it has declared to exist.
While the poor shepherd, shaggy as his sheep, wild-looking as his goats, and savage as his dogs, squalid, fever-stricken and yellow, spending long weeks and even months in solitude amid the desolation of the Campagna, saunters after his sauntering flock, crawling afoot, the gallant buttero, in the saddle from morning to night, represents that aristocracy which among all uncivilized races and in all uncivilized times is the attribute of the mounted as distinguished from the unmounted portion of mankind.
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