For centuries, the Italian cowboys, or butteri, have been an iconic feature in the Maremma region of Italy. They have roamed the marshes on the peninsula's west coast, herding the wild cattle since Etruscan times.

But the butteri are a dying breed, casualties of mechanization and modern tastes. Like the vacca maremmana cattle they once watched over, there is little need for them anymore.

In a cabin on a small horse ranch in Marsiliana, a village in the Tuscan Maremma, two generations of butteri join in song. Gathered around a long table set for lunch, Giovanni Travagliati and Piero Crociani croon in voices crackling with disuse.

"Mi fa pianger e sospirare, sul letto dei lamenti," they sing, "It makes me weep and sigh on a bed of complaints." The song, a lament by an abandoned woman, is so old that its origins are lost in time.

Not a single day off

The two Italian cowboys whiled away hours on horseback singing like this as they guarded the livestock in their care.

"It was a tough life," Giovanni Travagliati recalls. "You had to get up very early in the morning, before the cattle."

Travagliati spent more than 80 years in the saddle; he's now 102. For decades, he was capo buttero, or chief cowboy, for the Corsini - a royal Italian family with large estates in Tuscany.

He taught Piero Crociani, now in his fifties, everything he knows. Crociani recalls long hours in the saddle, helping cattle give birth, protecting them from wolves and poachers.

"It was from five in the morning until nine at night, Monday to Sunday," he says. "Then on Monday you began again. You didn't have a day off."

"We lived on the farm, in a house the prince had given us, so whatever happened, they'd call and we'd go back to work, day or night, Sunday, even Christmas Day," he laughs ruefully.

Getting leaner

The Maremma region on the west coast of Italy was once a wild place, troubled by malaria and brigands. Mostly marshland, it was dotted with large landholdings, its soil too poor for much else but raising livestock. The butteri needed to be tough to tame the wild horses and tend the long-horned cattle.

"The cows were pretty wild," Crociani recalls. "If you went to touch their young, they attacked. The horses were the same. You had to know how to move on horseback and on the ground." But they never had an accident, he added.

But times have changed in the Maremma. You can now count the number of butteri working in Tuscany on one hand.

Stefano Pavin is capo buttero on the Alberese farm, around 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Rome. There used to be seven cowboys here - now he is just one of four.

The Alberese estate has reduced its herd of Maremmana cattle. The breed is no longer used as a beast of burden. Tractors took care of that and there is not much demand for its beef either.

"It's a meat that's very lean, with very little fat. It's darker, so people don't want it," Pavin explains. "They're used to light-colored meat with veins of fat running through it."

Farmers do receive a small subsidy for raising the Maremmana cattle, he says. It is a breed considered to be at risk of extinction. But Pavin says this is not enough to offset the costs.

"This is a breed that gives little return," he says. "While a normal beef animal gives a yield of 65 percent on the cow, ours gives 50 percent. A private owner or concern would never go ahead with this," Pavin laments.

End of a way of life

Alberese farm is owned by the regional government of Tuscany, so to a certain extent it is immune. But Pavin says private farmers in contrast are getting out of the business and letting the cows and the cowboys go.

Crociani is one of the casualties of this trend. A few years ago, he was laid off from the farm that had employed him nearly all his adult life.

"I received a phone call from the owners saying that they'd decided to change the direction of the business, they were selling the cattle and I had to stay at home," he remembers. "A little while ago I began working at another farm and even there they've begun to change direction and are selling all the livestock. So the trade is finishing."

Crociani is now trying to get a business of his own off the ground using the skills he knows as a buttero. He trains horses, offers riding lessons and organizes horseback treks.

He wants the authorities to give more incentives to restock the Maremmana herds and encourage the return of the cowboys.

"It's more than a trade or occupation - it's part of the culture," he protests strongly. "If there are no more butteri in the Maremma, it's no longer the Maremma and the Maremma, too, is finished."

Although he is now living a hand-to-mouth existence, Crociani says, given the opportunity to go back, he would only change one thing. He would have worked even harder to keep the cattle and preserve a way of life.

Author: Jean Di Marino

Editor: Kate Bowen