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

More than forty years ago, an elderly informant in the Italian-speaking village where I was doing research (see Journal of Social History, Spring 1974) strapped on my back the brenta she had used as a young girl to carry home fresh water. Try it yourself, she said, and then explained that toting this forty-liter wooden container each morning to and from the nearest stream, about four kilometers up the mountain by a narrow rocky path, was good for your soul. It had given her the physical and moral strength to survive through two world wars, a civil war, and now modern times. But she never imagined, nor did I until reading Indispensable Immigrants, that carrying a brenta could make you a saint!

Saint Alberto, the hero of this book, hauled yet heavier loads, probably about seventy-five liters, his horn-shaped brenta filled with wine not water, except when he and his fellow porters were called upon as voluntary firefighters. Alberto had migrated from the mountain village of Villa d'Ogna, outside Bergamo, to the city of Cremona, where he might have been seen among his fellow workers, called brentatori, yelling, cursing, hawking customers, serving as wine-tasters, and, according to one account, roaring drunk much of the time. Perhaps one of these brentatori provided the patronymic for U.C. Berkeley's eminent medievalist, the late Robert Brentano. At a luncheon he hosted some two decades ago, Brentano asked the assembled guests to say a word about their latest research. When Little's turn came, he playfully confided ruminations about Indispensable Immigrants, barely a zygote much less a book-to-be at that point.

Such personal trifles matter in assessing this book. It is a labor of love, a passion fruit to be shared with disheartened graduate students seeking to know what rewards might crown a successful career as a scholar and teacher—after the exams, job crises, tenure hurdles, and promotion rungs are done, along with a few dozen good, bad, and indifferent book reviews. The alphabetical list of local archives consulted just in seeking information about brentatori says much: Bergamo, Bologna, Brescia, Como, Cremona, Ferrara, Lodi, Mantua, Milan, Modena, Parma, Pavia, Piacenza, Reggio Emilia, Trent, Treviso, Turin, Venice, Verona, and Vicenza. Such diligence, such erudition, such leisure, such joy. In doing research on a saint, especially one so precariously clinging to his place in the official pantheon, much time must be spent at the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, by no means a shabby hangout. And then there is the visual evidence: NASA satellite images, variously shaped brente, processional banners, a thirteenth century fresco, manuscript illuminations, a fourteenth century sandstone tablet, sixteenth century woodcuts, an early twentieth century photograph, a fifteenth century Brentano family coat of arms. And finally the excursions, let us not call them diversions, in following Saint Alberto's possible eight pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, in clarifying the confusion between his cult and that of Carmelite Saint Alberto of Trapani, and in tracing the fate of his fellow brentatori in early printed imaginaries, such as those by Teofilo Folengo, Angelo Beolco (Ruzzante), and Tomaso Garzoni, to name just three of many.

Indispensable Immigrants glides beyond Clio toward some Tenth Muse. Though rightly known to all as a generous scholar, Little allows himself (178) to flag a "minor transgression" in fellow historian Augustine Thompson's Cities of God (a turgid book at the opposite end of the historian's craft in every possible way). Little sets the trap by citing Thompson's reliance on thirteenth century Franciscan chronicler Salimbene de Adam's vicious attack on Alberto's cult. The bait is an ad hominem aside that Thompson is a Dominican friar. The spring snaps shut when we learn that Pope Benedict XIV, far from expelling a false saint, in 1748 canonized a sanitized version of Alberto, essentially at the orchestration of several...