Tobacco
“Tobacco kills” claims Science; “Tobacco is a lifeline” (or rather was!) said the folk of the Brenta valley. This section of valley, surrounded by the rocky walls of the Grappa massif and the Seven Communes plateau offers characteristic, poetic views with a whole series of little villages stretching out along the banks of the Brenta river. Life up there has never been easy! The physical structure of the Brenta valley is such that it would be foolish to talk of a structured economy and intensive farming. People scratched a living with traditional and very basic methods. Livestock got by on hay gathered on the steep slopes and in the high malghe meadows; most of the villages in the valley made their living off the timber from the mountain forests, floated downstream on the river currents. The impetuous and at times unpredictable, threatening river provided power for the factories. The valley’s impoverished economy was revolutionised in the second half of the Seventeenth century with the arrival of an exotic plant: TOBACCO.
What remains of the crop that was cultivated for several centuries, and has now almost disappeared, are the characteristic terraces shored up with dry-stone walls, known as “masiere” that rise out of the slopes up to 400-500 metres above the level of the Brenta river. Some still cultivate tobacco on handkerchief-sized plots, but down in the valley, closer to their homes, where it is less of a struggle. For centuries the folk of the Brenta valley barely eked out a living on subsistence farming of tobacco and smuggling contraband derived from it. The tales of tobacco smuggling along the Brenta valley are a historic recollection that runs the risk of being erased from the memory and very culture of the valley folk.
Once they had abandoned tobacco cultivation for good, and as time went by, with life improving, the elders of our community clinging tenaciously to the land and its centuries-old traditions, the new generations seem destined to easily forget the distant and more recent past of their forefathers and their daily toils, hotly pursuing a radical transformation of lifestyle and rapidly, frantically evolving socio-economic conditions. And yet even the tobacco smuggler, closely tied to tobacco culture and even more so to the extreme poverty of the valley folk, belongs to a historical epic tale that deserved to be remembered and passed onto future generations. It is the typical smuggler mentality, firmly embedded in the “canaloti” valley folk and mountain dwellers of the surrounding areas, that is an essential part of the social fabric of these people, who since way back first managed to adapt and survive on this “wretched land”, harsh and wild, to then adapt to industrialisation in a thousand different ways, legitimate or not, to survive.
With the very first cultivation and therefore crafts and trade, our people slowly but surely began to practise forms of trade that pushed the boundaries of legality. From the 1500s and in centuries that followed the Canaloti traded timber, coal and “biade” (fodder cereals). And in the full-blown War of the League of Cambrai, despite confirming their full, proven fidelity to the Republic of Venice, they supplied the people down on the plains and the city with various goods, and beyond the borders they traded illicitly with the Trentino communities and the actual emissaries of Emperor Maximilian I. All these events and occurrences narrate an endless history that lasted centuries, up to the Great War and beyond, only ceasing after the Second World War. Facts that speak of extremely harsh living conditions, of people who experienced misery, hunger and unemployment and for this reason were forced to abandon their beloved, never-resented homeland in mass emigration, dreaming of wealth and happiness elsewhere.
Not even disastrous, tragic “brentane” floods managed to uproot these people from their valley and those who did move far away took the language, culture, traditions, history and religion with them, passing it all down through the generations. The hardships endured by many women are actually associated with more recent times, after the Second World War, left alone to raise large families, because their husbands had gone to work or seek their fortunes abroad. Those who could, with a cart, usually with a rickety old bicycle or even on foot, went down into the foothills and onto the plains to Bessica di Loria, Castelfranco, Scaldaferro, Pozzoleone and beyond, to sell tobacco illegally and came back with a bag of flour or other essentials. Or they would make their way down the Valsugana on the train or however they could to get to Borgo, Levico, Calceranica, Pergine and Trento to bring home a few handfuls of beans and other goods. All these things were absolutely necessary to survive the easiest of the worst times or to simply get by. There were no other possible choices!