Page 87 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Poor Agriculture for Rich People?

to demonstrate the difficult conditions in which the inhabitants of Car-
nia lived, argued during the concluding report delivered in the Senate that
they were forced to have grains delivered from the city of Udine, ‘not hav-
ing their own collection of grains’ than ‘for two months’ (Istituto di Storia
Economica 1975, 124).
In 1782 Nicolò Grassi, author of a brief history of Carnia (Ferigo 2009),
to describe the condition of the inhabitants wrote thus (Grassi 1976, 22–3):

The Province is so lacking in grain that it cannot supply it for the
food and maintenance of the inhabitants except for three months, or
little more peryear[...]. Servingtherefore forthe most part from the
grain and wine they transport from Friuli, they lead backwards to the
Friulians coarse cloths of wool, half-wool, cloths, calves, butter and
cheese, of which they have large quantities. They have pastures and
mountains suitable for feeding their cattle, and moreover they derive
a considerable profit from many woods which they possess, when the
chiefs of their villages exercise a good and faithful economy on the
same.

Again, a few years later, in the first statistical survey sponsored by the
French administration in 1807, all communities were asked to provide data
on the present population, the amount of livestock raised, crops and their
yields. These data were also used to determine whether or not needs were
being met by agricultural production. On that occasion, too, the answers
were unequivocal, albeit with different gradations: for communities placed
at high altitudes the threshold was close to two months, for those below,
four. We limit ourselves to collecting the answers related to the communi-
ties in the flat area of the Cavazzo Lake area, among which is Somplago:
‘only enough for eight months of the year’; ‘insufficient’ (Corbellini et al.
1992, 312, 314).
This overwhelming similarity and continuity among views clashes with
three particular aspects that, when examined, help to contextualize them.
The first concerns innovation in production, above all the introduction
of maize. This product, like wheat, also does not ripen in the mountains.
However, its introduction, starting in the 1620s, was widespread in the
Friuli Lowlands and contributed quickly to overcoming the crisis brought
about by the famines and epidemics of those years (Fornasin 1999; 2020).
The same solution was adopted in the mountains, where maize grew with
difficulty (it was grown in Somplago: see Ciceri 1987, 307) and was imme-

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