Page 93 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Poor Agriculture for Rich People?

andcredit. What remainstousofthe family archives preserves as manyas
six registers attesting to the income derived from their credit activity for
as many as one hundred and fifty years, from 1650 to 1801 (asu, ab, b. 2).
It is necessary to recall here that access to credit (and microcredit) was the
precondition for men’s departures in the autumn (Fornasin 1998a, 84–95).
TheadvancesgavethemtheopportunitytopurchasespicestotradeinCen-
tral and Eastern Europe, or yarn to weave in Venice and Friuli. The Billiani,
thanks to their activities, held a hegemonic role in this sector, for Sompla-
go, the villages of Pieve di Cavazzo and beyond.
A demonstration of this economic role of the family is also given by the
inventory of the division of property between the brothers Candido and
Valentino, drawn up in 1810. The appraised value of the ‘factories,’ the total
real estate, was 18,710:22 lire, while that derived from ‘capital assets,’ the
income from rents and credits, was higher: 25,842:23 lire (asu, ab, b. 1,
fasc. 2a).

Account Books and Accounting Sources
The material foundation of the Billiani enterprise was real estate in Som-
plago. In the division of property among the brothers in 1810, the list of
properties begins with the house, to which the stable for cattle was at-
tached, followed by four other stables, one for horses and one reserved for
goats(asu, ab, b. 1,fasc. 2a,c. 1r).This wasfollowedby74plots, most of
which were used as meadows and, to a much smaller extent, as arable land,
often described together with a special space for orchards (the bearzo). Al-
though the document does not attest to this, it is easy to imagine that all of
these plots were small or very small in size, by virtue of the space available
and especially the land fragmentation characteristic of this area (De Corte
1994), with the exception of the high-altitude spaces where the meadows
and pastures were distributed (Stefanutti and Tomat 2000). Their value
ranged from a few lire to no more than 350, except for three larger plots
that were worth about 500, while the house alone was estimated at over
4,000 lire. Consistent with their activity as importers and grain producers,
they also owned a mill (Sereni 1987, 152).
This scenario represented the final phase of the Billiani land accumula-
tion, which was also the result of the credit activity they exercised. The
account books that we possess are a possible representation of their eco-
nomic activity: agricultural activity exercised on their own land, commer-
cial activity with the plains, and artisan activity.
The family’s surviving account books number twelve and record their ac-

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