Page 83 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

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Poor Agriculture for Rich People?

The Books of Accounts of the Billiani Family
(Friulian Alps, Seventeenth-Eighteenth

Centuries)

Matteo Di Tullio
University of Pavia, Italy

Claudio Lorenzini
University of Turin, Italy

©2025MatteoDiTullioand ClaudioLorenzini
https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-486-6.81-105

Introduction
The aim of this contribution is simple: to describe the characteristics of
the agricultural sector in the Friulian mountains, particularly in Carnia,
its largest region, relying on a particular source, the account books of the
Billiani family between the second half of the seventeenth and the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century.
As with most Alpine areas, agriculture among these mountains was un-
productive and poor due to severe environmental, morphological and cli-
matic constraints. Productive scarcity had a measure: that of the number
of months of dependence on lowland supplies to be able to survive among
the mountains throughout the year. For the Friulian mountains, this de-
pendency ratio was very pronounced, such that it exceeded ten months a
year.
Contributing to keeping the ratio of population to resources balanced
was the emigration of men, a considerable proportion of whom lived out-
side their village for at least two thirds of the year. The first consequence of
this was the so–called ‘feminization’ of agriculture: work in the fields was
predominantly done by women. Work in the meadows for the production
of fodder with which to feed farm animals was also traditionally the task of
women, but since it was summer work, the arms of men, who had mean-

Panjek,A.,ed.2025. Upland Families, Elites and Communities: Long-Run Micro
Perspectives on Persistence and Change. University of Primorska Press.