Montanari ‘foresti’. L’immigrazione negli alpeggi della Carnia in età moderna

Giorgio Ferigo’s paper Da estate a estate (From summer to summer), presented in 1996 at a conference on male mobility from Carnia in the early modern age and published in the following year, tackled for the first time the issue of immigration in the villages of emigrants in this upland area of the Friuli region. Following in Ferigo’s footsteps, this article reconstructs at first some contextual aspects of the preparation and reception of that essay, and then addresses the theme of immigration in the high mountain pastures of Carnia in the early modern age. Parallel to the emigration of a large number of men engaged in peddling in Central-Eastern Europe and weaving in the Venetian plains and in Istria, the periodical presence of immigrants (both flock owners and salaried shepherds) in the Carnian high mountain pastures during the summer periods is also attested. These pastoral resources exceeded the needs of the communities that held rights over them and rigidly excluded foreigners from enjoying such rights. The presence of shepherds from the Pedemontana zone of Friuli, who were generically known in Carnia as asìni (a term properly designating the inhabitants of the villages belonging to the Pieve d’Asio), is documented since the second half of the 16th century. During the 18th century, their presence began to turn from periodical to stable, as suggested by the growing number of marriages between men coming from the Pedemontana zone and Carnian women. Their immigration thus developed, from temporarily complementing the absence of the ‘original’ inhabitants, into permanent and integrative.