Boschi e mercanti: Traffici di legname tra la contea di Tirolo e la Repubblica di Venezia (secoli XVI–XVII)

This review can be brief, because readers predisposed to the subject will certainly want to read it — and will gain much thereby — and readers not so predisposed probably cannot be persuaded to read it. Despite the hint of the cover blurb that there would be discussion of a "super-regional ecological model," the author is not in fact concerned with environmental history. Instead, she has written a straightforward book, well-defined by its title. This is the story (although it's not a narrative) of the wood traffic between the Tyrol and the great plain governed by the Venetian Republic, especially that portion served by the Brenta and Cismon rivers. Katia Occhi provides a clear look at merchants, their companies, licences, and government regulation, tolls and taxes, the organization of production and transportation, and finance of the wood industry. There is considerably less treatment of sale and consumption once the wood reached the Veneto, and virtually nothing on the Venetian market, for the simple reason that such was not Occhi's intention. She gets her logs downriver to the pianura (or to the foothills), parks them at sawmills, and leaves it to future historians to investigate the rest of the journey.

In many respects this is also a throwback book. It is resolutely structural: Occhi has mined several archives in exhaustive fashion, provides all the data they have to offer (with numbers where possible), and documents her text thoroughly. While she is sensitive to the underlying issues of writing about a region still dealing with issues of ethnicity and identity (not only German and Italian, but also Ladino), there is no hidden agenda here. Nor is there overarching theory, nor a metanarrative, though Occhi does provide interesting insights from comparable activities elsewhere and from the larger economic history of early modern Europe. This is a book about the wood trade between the Tyrol and the Veneto, pure and simple. Personally, I found it refreshing to read a book that is both immediately readable and deeply learned. The methodology is not complicated, which is one reason that the result is so lucid.

Two notes of appreciation. The first is that this is also a throwback in its traditional economic-social approach. Current history-writing seems to be moving in the direction of the sensational story, the lurid tale that may or may not tell us something about deep systems. Occhi, on the other hand, is representative of an older school, one that approaches the history of the everyday with the question posed by Bertolt Brecht, "Who built Thebes of the seven gates?" In other words, how did things get the way they were? Who did things, and how did they operate, and on what scale? There is certainly a place for passion, and magic, and misbehavior; but there is equally a place for the ordinary, the routine, the unremarkable — the world of wood merchants. Occhi offers us a comfortable place, easy to negotiate.

The second is that Occhi is working under the auspices of the fine Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento. For the past thirty years this scholarly institute has sponsored a string of first-rate conferences, and has published a wide variety of historical works: the Annali/Jahrbuch (one of the finest European journals, in my opinion), multiauthor topical volumes, monographs, and sources. The rate of production has been prodigious, and the quality is consistently very high. While cognizant of the larger debates in the European historical community, and indeed a major player in those debates, the Istituto has remained grounded, sober, and sensible. It is a high compliment to Katia Occhi's book to say, simply, that it is worthy of its publisher.