Page 84 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Matteo Di Tullio and Claudio Lorenzini

while returned from their periods of engagement outside the homeland,
also contributed to it.
What we have described is, in short, the context that contemporaries
and historiography on the primary sector of Carnia have reconstructed
for the modern age. This picture can be enriched, complicated and im-
proved with recourse to a peculiar and rare source: account books. These
are personal and family records produced to manage the activity of an
enterprise, most often and at the same time artisanal, agricultural and
commercial. The Billiani family of Somplago was one of these enterprise
groups. We possess their account books from the late seventeenth century
to the first decades of the nineteenth century (asu, ab, bb. 3–7), an almost
unique case for the Friulian mountains and beyond. They record payments
for agricultural and artisanal work, both in monetary form and in goods
(grain, wine, legumes, cheese), which demonstrates the commercial as well
as the productive nature of the enterprise.
Sometimeswomenappearamongthepeopleemployedandpaidfor agri-
cultural work. We will also focus on them in order to understand what tasks
they performed, trying to gain insight into the organization of agricultural
labour among these mountains.
A small and preliminary finding that emerges from this source is that
despite the miserable condition of agriculture in Carnia, there were en-
trepreneurial and family groups that invested in agriculture and people
employed in production outside their own household. Self-consumption,
therefore, was not the only goal pursued by those who worked the land and
engaged in the meadows and pastures of these valleys.

Elements of the Historical Rural Landscape
Carnia is the north-western Alpine region of Friuli, the largest province of
the Republic of Venice. A significant part of its territory consists of rocks.
The conformation of the valleys is narrow and leaves little space for flat
areas, almost all of which are concentrated in its southern portion, where
the major streams (But and Degano) and the main river of the Friuli region,
the Tagliamento, which flows through it from the Alps to the Lagoon in the
Adriatic, converge.
Although the altitudes where the settlements are distributed are low-
er than those of other conterminous alpine territories, the environmen-
tal and climatic characteristics of the region are typical of a harsh envi-
ronment. The permanently inhabited villages are distributed between the
1,200 m asl of Sauris and the 290 m asl of Cavazzo Carnico (nearby Som-

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