The Dromedaries of San Rossore: How World War II Wiped Out Tuscany’s Century-Old Herd
For over three hundred years, the coastal pine forests of San Rossore, just outside Pisa, hosted a permanent, breeding population of dromedaries. These animals survived regional shifts, political upheavals, and royal successions, only to meet a sudden end in the summer of 1944 due to a bizarre convergence of wartime logistics.
While medieval records show that Pisan merchants occasionally brought camelids back from North Africa as diplomatic trophies, a permanent settlement only began under the Medici.
In 1622, Grand Duke Ferdinand II de’ Medici sought to utilize the royal hunting grounds of San Rossore, a sprawling estate of sand dunes, wetlands, and pine forests. The environment closely mirrored coastal Mediterranean marshlands, prompting the grand duke to import a small group of dromedaries to test their viability as livestock. The herd grew significantly in 1683, when General Arrighetti captured several animals from Ottoman forces during the Battle of Vienna and sent them to the Tuscan court.
The sandy soil and climate suited the animals. Instead of treating them as static zoo curiosities, the grand duchy integrated them into the local economy. The dromedaries hauled heavy timber, cleared brush, and plowed sandy fields, outperforming horses in the swampy coastal terrain.
Population figures shifted considerably across the following two centuries. Records placed the count at 196 animals in 1789, the herd’s historical peak, before a French statistical survey taken in 1799 counted 177 dromedaries. A sharp decline followed through the early 1800s due to disease, and by the close of the nineteenth century only around a hundred animals remained. Their renown by then extended well beyond Tuscany: traveling equestrian circuses across Europe regularly acquired young dromedaries born at San Rossore. King Umberto I ordered a renewed breeding effort during these years, having new stables and a dedicated enclosure called the Boschetto built specifically to house the animals. By 1944, the herd had grown back to 234 animals, the highest number on record.
Friedrich Nietzsche observed them during his stays in the region. Little did he know that due to the army of his homeland, the animals would be completely eradicated! Gabriele D’Annunzio spent summers watching the calves on the beach. The estate clerks logged every birth, death, and daily ration in the grand ducal ledgers, treating the herd as a specific state asset.
“Passano per la macchia,
vanno verso la ripa,
tra i mucchi di legname,
tra i cumuli di stipa,
i camelli gibbuti,
carichi di fascine
di ramaglia e di strame,
sì gravi e tristi e muti!”
The same estate where the king watched over his dromedaries also hosted darker decisions: it was from San Rossore that Vittorio Emanuele III chose not to halt the 1922 March on Rome, and it was there, in 1938, that he signed Italy’s racial laws, a fact still marked today by a plaque in the park.
The 1944 Occupation and the Ostlegionen
By the onset of World War II, the San Rossore herd was at its peak. Following the 1943 armistice, Nazi forces occupied northern and central Italy, turning the country into a theater of horrific civilian massacres and calculated cultural destruction. Alongside infamous atrocities across the Apennine villages, occupying forces targeted Italy’s heritage with spiteful vandalis, most notoriously burning the Roman ships of Emperor Caligula at Lake Nemi. In Pisa, this wave of wartime ruin took a more chaotic, logistical turn.
The troops tasked with holding the Tuscan coast included units of the Ostlegionen (Eastern Legions). These were soldiers recruited by the Wehrmacht from Soviet prisoners of war captured during the invasion of the USSR. Many belonged to Central Asian ethnic groups, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kazakhs, and Kalmyks, who spoke Turkic languages and wore German uniforms. By the summer of 1944, Allied bombing raids had disrupted Axis supply lines, leaving these retreating units without regular rations.
While Western European soldiers viewed the dromedaries as exotic oddities, the conscripts raised on the steppes of Central Asia recognized them as familiar livestock and a viable food source. Facing starvation in a collapsing front, the soldiers systematically slaughtered the entire herd over several weeks, roasting the meat over campfires in the pine woods.
A handful of survivors of the 1944 massacre ended up in zoos and traveling equestrian circuses across Italy. After the war, an attempt to reintroduce the species was made in 1956 at the initiative of Italian President Giovanni Gronchi, but it did not succeed.
The Modern Aftermath
When Allied troops liberated the area, they found the historic estate empty. Only a handful of dromedaries hidden away by local farmers survived the war, but the breeding line was broken. The last animal of the original line died sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, according to different sources; its skeleton remains on display at the Natural History Museum of Calci.
In 2014, a public initiative brought three young dromedaries back to San Rossore, re-establishing a physical link to a centuries-old Tuscan anomaly that a global war had erased.
Fonti: Catalogo dei Beni Culturali, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Wikipedia, Reddit
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