Indispensable Immigrants: The Wine Porters of Northern Italy and their Saint, 1200-1800 by Lester K. Little (review)

Fernand Braudel looms large over Lester K. Little's deeply researched and highly readable new monograph. The title borrows a phrase from Braudel to describe the importance of foreign workers—often low-paid and unskilled—who, then as now, contributed their all-important labor to any given economy. The subtitle also evokes the great practitioner of longue durée. history indicating that Little will take a long view of its subject: six hundred years and then some as he interlaces a social history of the rise and slow demise of the brentatori. (wine porters) in northern Italy with a religious history of the rise and slow demise of the cult of St. Alberto of Villa d'Ogna.

St. Alberto was venerated as a "lay saint," one of a new breed of saints whose status was made possible thanks to the revival of both religious and urban life that indelibly marked the cities of northern and central Italy, beginning in the twelfth century. Alberto's extraordinary trajectory starts after his death. One local annal reported that a miracle occurred upon Alberto's death, after which news spread, pilgrims journeyed to the tomb, and—lo—further miracles ensued. Fra Salimbene de Adam, the Franciscan chronicler, poured scorn on this new "saint." With a withering pun, he dismissed the miracles as fake news because, he inferred, the wine carrier (portator vini.), was also a wine drinker (potator vini.) Though Salimbene penned a damnatio memoriae. of this new saint, he failed to make it stick.

Little pieces together the fragmentary shards of evidence of Alberto's cult to trace it as it spread through northern Italy at the end of the thirteenth century, but not before he takes his readers off on an excursus that explores the history of wine porters of the region, a trade that boomed in this period. In these chapters that draw upon city and guild statutes, compendia on the trades, and striking visual material, Little teaches us everything we always wanted to know about brentatori.—a little studied trade—but were afraid (or too uninformed) to ask. Among the informational nuggets Little delivers are that brentatori. take their name from the brente, tall wooden cornucopia-shaped containers that they carried on their backs, a term that itself derives from the Brenta territory of southern Switzerland and northern Italy where they were manufactured, and from which the river also takes its name. We also learn that when circumstances demanded, these laborers were required to carry water in their brente, enabling them to serve as fire-fighters or street cleaners, according to the urban exigencies at hand. Consequently, we are relieved to learn that they were not allowed to use their brente. to carry trash or corpses, much less to use them to clean out sewers. Some brentatori. even managed to rise to positions of rank in society, as Little demonstrates. In a touching homage to his old friend and fellow medievalist Robert Brentano, he unearths the first known coat of arms of the Brentano family of Como dating to 1480. It depicts a wooden brenta. positioned beneath the family name: de brentanis. In these anecdotes, told with dry wit, and often explained by recourse to contemporary analogies, one grasps how Little developed his fama. as a teacher par excellence, a métier at which he excelled during his long career.

The third and final part of the monograph answers the question posed at the outset of this study: "how did it happen that a humble worker in thirteenth-century Italy, a historical nobody, embarked immediately after his death upon an afterlife of fame and honor that gained him sainthood?" Little gives us St. Alberto as he was likely first adopted as patron saint of the guild of wine porters in Cremona in...