Page 85 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Poor Agriculture for Rich People?

plago, the community where the Billiani family lived). Within this region
there is a phenomenon that geographers and geologists in the early twen-
tieth century called ‘lowering the elevation limits’ of agricultural produc-
tion. Simplifying, it means that climatic and environmental features are
lowered by at least 400 metres when compared with neighbouring alpine
areas. The counter-evidence of this is given by the limits of vine diffu-
sion (and therefore wine production) in Friuli, which stops right at the
threshold of the mountain area (Feruglio 1923). In Carnia, therefore, wine
could not be produced, as occurred in other mountainous regions, includ-
ing neighbouring ones, whereas for Venetian and imperial Friuli this prod-
uct constituted a prized trade commodity, both to the emporium of Venice
and beyond the Alps (Panjek 1992; Panjek 2005; 2018).
This morphological and environmental framework is confirmed by the
data that emerged during the preparation of the cadastre in the 1820s
set up by the Austrian administration, the first reliable one from a quan-
titative point of view. Agricultural production was drastically limited by
the space allocated to cultivation: less than 3 percent of the entire area.
Two thirds of this, however, was covered by forests and pastures, equally
distributed, while the remainder was grassland. In the absence of mines,
pastures and forests constituted the real natural wealth of Carnia (Bianco
1985, 57–67).
Woods, thanks in part to the abundance of water used for logging and
transportation, became a commercially important resource throughout
the modern age (Bianco 2001). Pastures, especially alpine pastures, con-
stituted a large and widespread asset, for which interests were many and
converging. The first to be interested in exploiting these goods were the
village communities who, as with the woods, held user rights over these re-
sources. These were common spaces, managed by the communities them-
selves or their aggregates (by parishes or valleys: see Barbacetto and Loren-
zini 2024).
Approximately one fifth of the agrarian area was devoted to grassland.
This large portion of land was almost entirely under private ownership
andextendedaroundthe villages,whose conformation wascentralized.
The meadows were only partially used for grazing, since cattle breeding
predominated over sheep and goats, and therefore forage production took
precedence over other functions.
We have few quantitative sources on the number of livestock raised dur-
ing the modern age. Among the oldest are the catastici, documents solicit-
ed by the Venetian state and prepared by communities to list the comu-

83