the phantom cemetery

It’s not that I go out looking for trivia, it just seems to drift into my lane.  And by the way, I’m not convinced that “trivia” deserves its negative connotations.  Mount Everest is made of atoms, after all, and it appears that much of life is composed of trivia.

There once was a cemetery in the campo next to the basilica of Saints Giovanni and Paolo.  Plenty of churches here had cemeteries, but these dear departed weren’t Venetians. They were Ledrensi, people from the Ledro valley near Lake Garda.  (Not to classify them as trivia.)  Six hundred years ago they had become so important to Venice and its Arsenal that they were given many important privileges, up to and including their own burial ground.  I can’t tell you why the Ledrensi would have chosen to spend eternity here rather than their home parish up in the mountains, but let’s be impressed that the Venetian government wanted to bestow this honor on them.

The people in the Ledro Valley enjoyed a few important advantages — geography, for one thing. The valley offered the fastest route between the area near Lake Garda and Brescia, and this was of huge strategic importance to Venice during the war with the Visconti, the lords of Milan.  (Of course you remember the Lombard Wars that went on for an invigorating 31 years from 1423 to 1454.)  Furthermore, the Ledrensi fought for Venice in a few important battles up in their valley.  As early as 1426 doge Francesco Foscari, in recognition of their valor, granted them various benefits and exemptions that were confirmed in 1440 and 1445.  Venetian troops remained in the Ledro valley till 1509.

But the Ledrensi’s greatest advantage was their forests.  Venetian archives show that from the 1200’s there were workers in Venice from the Ledro valley, but by the 1500’s the relationship had evolved.  Venice depended on the Ledro valley for the resin tapped from the area’s larch and Scots pine.  By  the 1600’s the town of Tiarno di Sopra had become famous for its clay ovens that transformed the resin into pitch, essential for caulking the ships in the Arsenal.

More and more men of Ledro — also referred to as the Trentina Nation, as coming from the area near Trento — began to migrate to Venice to work.  They were allowed to work as bastasi and cargadori (porters and stevedores) in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the association of the Germanic merchants.  Even more important, they worked in the Arsenal as segadori (sawyers reducing tree trunks to planks for building ships), and as ligadori, exclusively responsible for loading and unloading of the ships in the Arsenal.  And of course, as caulkers.  Some of these men didn’t return to the mountains but stayed in Venice permanently, becoming better-off certainly than they’d been back home.

I suppose it’s not strange that they’d have wanted to be interred in Venice, which had been for some a sort of Promised Land.   At least we still have the lintel.

This hidden jewel of Venetian history was carefully explained on a site I discovered by chance, and I offer sincere admiration to its creator.  His name is Alfonso Bussolin and his life’s work is Conoscere Venezia (know Venice).  If you read Italian you’re going to have a fabulous time wandering around this man’s research.