Insediamenti e territorio nel Veneto Medievale

Venetian landscape offers a wide environmental variety: from the low marshy lowlands close to the Adriatic lagoons, up to the high Dolomite mountains. As of today, the territory was already highly urbanized and populated in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless uncultivated areas have been a constant presence throughout the Middle Ages. Large woods and marshes were amongst the legacies left from this period to the following centuries. Improvement of new lots was also linked to the modalities of rural settlements: the typology of the centralized village, which was already set by the VIII-X centuries, was surrounded by uncultivated areas which constituted at once both a resource and the new expansion front for cultivation. Major operations of reclamation were undertaken in the eleventh-twelfth centuries. The largest and most technically difficult reclamation was the wetlands draining. Stood out in particular the ability of Verona commune that reclaimed a large swamp between 1194 and 1199 for later renting the new dry lands obtained to a consortium of citizens. Aim was to support the supply requirements of the city's cereals. It’s though important to underline that these initiatives of cultivation and tillage were not part of a human-nature quest. Resources from uncultivated lands continued to be well appreciated during the Middle Ages. Just for example, the freshwater fish consumption, highly diffused in marshy or lake areas along the lower Adige, remained always very high, partly because of religious rules that prohibited meat consumption for many days per year. ‘Village economy’ flourished over this kind of consumptions that are guiltily neglected up to day. Furthermore, the marshes were integrated in drainage systems and drainage of excess water, thus ensuring the maintenance of an acceptable hydrogeological balance in the countryside, though perhaps not optimal by today's standards. As for forests, the myth of peasants break the great medieval forests with axes and pruning hooks machines is a classic example of "pioneering apologue” of centuries X-XIII. Certainly there are many evidences of the attack to the woods. Nevertheless the forests were always a significant presence in the medieval Venetian landscape, both in the plains and in the hills, and of course in the mountains. Farmers continued to consider woods a vital integration to the family economy and continued to manage forests and scrublands by means of collective agreements. Since the thirteenth century the same city laws took charge of forests protection, prohibiting the cutting of tall trees by farmers, as these trees were to be needed primarily by the large urban organizations. Fourteenth century demographic crisis, rural depopulation and the wars brought to an increase of uncultivated lands together with a general deterioration of rural environments. The fifteenth-century rebirth and the new proto-capitalist economy introduced a new model of agricultural exploitation, no longer based on the collective organization of village, but on the farm shed, sort of anticipation of the later Palladian villa model. In this period uncultivated territory management was finally centralized.