Page 40 - Changing Living Spaces

Luca Mocarelli and Paolo Tedeschi

new investments by private landowners. If in the past the sales of com-
mon real estate had depended on financial needs, now they were compul-
sory whenever the commons were not cultivated or not used as pasture
(a rare occurrence in the Alpine valleys), but also when they did not guar-
antee a good income. The new objective was to improve the fiscal contri-
bution of the Alpine villagers by increasing the yield of the Alpine com-
munal lands. The Austrian authorities evidently underestimated: (a) the
social and economic importance of the common real estate and the tradi-
tional rules for its use; and (b) the real costs and the real possibility of im-
proving the production and yields of Alpine pastures, forests and less fer-
tile arable land. Thus, as a consequence of the new legislation, the Alpine
communities had to pay more taxes than before, but they also had to con-
tinue to satisfy the same needs of the villagers, whose income kept de-
creasing due to other factors that depended on the improvement of tech-
nology in the field of transportation and industrial production.
It is important to point out that the tax increase for the Alpine villag-
es of western Lombardy, which were part of the Austrian Empire, began
in the last decades of the eighteenth century. In order to reduce the pub-
lic debt and rationalize the taxation of real estate, the Austrian govern-
ment decided to create a new cadastre and to eliminate all favourable fis-
cal rules related to the commons. The tax burden was low and the new
fiscal system, based on a stable tax for many years, favoured landown-
ers who invested in improving the real estate yields. Since the new taxes
depended on the estimate of annual ordinary production, any fruit pro-
duced in excess of the fiscal estimate did not form a tax base. However,
the real impact on the quality of life of the Alpine villagers was not ful-
ly understood by the authorities, since the new cadastre came into force
only a few decades before the Napoleonic wars and, moreover, did not
concern most of the Lombard Alpine villages, which were located in the
eastern part of the region, that is, in valleys that until the end of the
eighteenth century belonged to the Republic of Venice or to the Swiss
canton of Grison. Moreover, few villages were located near the plain;
on the contrary, in eastern Lombardy many villages were far from the
markets in the plain. In the nineteenth century, the increase of taxes
and the consequent recessionary effects on the income of the villagers
had more relevance, along with their impact on the sales of the Alpine
common real estate. Finally, the new French laws limited the villagers’
ability to intervene in the decisions of the authorities. For example, all
restrictions on the sale of common real estate disappeared, since the vi-

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