314 edoardo demo
the presence of some sectors (above all, wool and silk production) of inter-
national caliber, at the forefront both technologically and organizationally
and able to produce manufactured goods of varying qualities that enjoyed
notable success in Italy as well as in europe and the near east.
research over the last two decades, moreover, has palpably enriched
our knowledge of 17th-century manufactures and increased our familiar-
ity with aspects of the 18th-century economic recovery which had been
ignored or little studied by the first analyses of the period. It seems clear
by now that the terraferma was not, even in the middle century of the
early modern period, the stagnant agricultural backwater of a commercial
and manfacturing metropolis that had gone into an irreversible decline. at
least some of the cities, towns, and rural areas of the terraferma continued
to produce and export semifinished and finished articles both in the Ital-
ian peninsula and abroad. certainly, the levels of undoubted importance
achieved in the previous centuries were no longer within reach, such that
many positions of leadership or excellence enjoyed in the past were now
ceded to the competition. But it is equally true that much of the Veneto
remained a rich and populated area in the 17th and 18th centuries, per-
vaded by an impressive ability to resist the repeated crises that marked
the years between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. the collapse of
some urban manufactures was at least in part compensated by the con-
sistent development of the transformative sector in rural zones. If the rate
of urbanization certainly dropped, it still remained higher with respect to
that of most other european countries. In the meantime, the rural Veneto
was able to recover in 50 years the demographic losses suffered in the 1630
pandemic, a sure sign of what in some ways constitutes a surprising vital-
ity that was certainly not the fruit of a “general crisis” of the economy.49
Bibliographyalbini, Giuliana, “contadini-artigiani in una comunità bergamasca: Gandino sulla base di
un estimo della seconda metà del ’400,” Studi di Storia medioevale e di diplomatica 14
(1993), 111–92.
arbel, Benjamin, “the Last decades of Venice’s trade with the Mamluks: Importations into
egypt and syria,” mamlûk Studies review 8.2 (2004), 37–86.
49 Fontana, “Industria e impresa nel nord est d’Italia”; Lanaro, ed., at the Center of
the Old World; edoardo demo, “Venezia e il Veneto nel secolo del presunto declino,” in
augusto roca de amicis ed., Storia dell’architettura nel Veneto. Il Seicento, Venice 2008,
pp. 4–7.