Metropolitan Problems and the Rural Environment in Seventeenth-Century Venice: Iseppo Paolini's Map of the Piave River

Venice’s unique geographical circumstances lend themselves particularly well to environmental history. Most work on the history of lagoon management has examined the relationship between the urban fabric of the city and the surrounding waters, yet almost all of this work has ignored the connection between local problems and environmental changes on the peninsula. The Venetians themselves understood this relationship well, and wrote extensively about the threat posed by alluvial sediment to the integrity of the lagoon. Because the Venetians feared that sedimentation would eventually swallow up the lagoon and make it part of the mainland, they undertook a series of large-scale projects aimed at reducing the amount of sediment that surrounding rivers dumped into their lagoon. Such projects necessarily forced the Venetians to confront the connection between the lagoon and the mainland in a systematic way as early as the fifteenth century. This paper will explore Venetian ideas about the links between deforestation, agricultural techniques, and the pastoral economy in the Alps, and sedimentation problems in the lagoon at the turn of the seventeenth century. The main focus of the paper will be a map of the Piave basin and accompanying proposals for regulating local agrarian practices that Iseppo Paolini, a landowner from the town of Belluno, presented to the Venetian Senate in 1608. Because they constitute an appeal for patronage, Paolini's map and proposal reveal a great deal about what Venice's mainland subjects imagined their rulers thought about the connections between mainland environments and the lagoon. In this sense the map and accompanying illustrations shows how the mutually constitutive relationship between the metropolitan expertise of the Venetians and the concerns of mainland landowners could create a regional view of complex environmental problems.