Agricoltura e allevamento ovino: orizzonti mediterranei e territori cisalpini

Despite the acknowledged and celebrated width of documentary sources (literary and epigraphic) relating to the commercial and economic importance of the production and processing of wool in the ancient Venetia, the historiographical panorama started to give some attention to the initial phase of this multi steps process, constituted by farming and sheep grazing, only during the last two decades. This recent efforts to tackle the problematic had to cope with the usual reticence of the ancient authors about farming practices in that geographic area and with the lack of archaeological evidence concerning pastoralism. For this reason, scholars often gave prime attention to farming practices typical of mediterranean regions like central-southern Italy or Spain, and as a result they tended to analyse the farming in northern Italy according to patterns typical of those regions. Consequently there was a tendency to isolate the most characteristic practice of moving livestock, known as transhumance, as only theme of discussion and sole farming practice existing in north Italy. With these preliminary remarks, the contribution aims to re-evaluate the theme of the sheep farming in the regions of the Po Valley on the basis of two unavoidable considerations of methodology. First of all, we want to free the thematic of farming from the forced isolation to which to some extent the scholars relegated it, separating this topic from the economic and productive context of the municipal territories, in order to contextualise it properly into the systemic production and economic dynamics of these ancient lands, in which it was likely to have a dialogic relationship with the practices of agricultural use of soil. Secondly, we want to underline the geographical, climatic and vegetational peculiarity of the Veneto region, which makes it completely different from any other mediterranean context, and that as such it has to be treated when studying the farming practices, through analysis not related to interpretive models generated in areas affected by different bioclimatic regimes. In conclusion, we will try to suggest a reconstructive scenery of the sheep farming practices in the Po Valley and of the ways they related to the agricultural system, according to the environmental and spacial features typical of the examined region.