664 mario infelise
populations by bringing such persons into contact with the printed text
and stimulating their desire to learn to read and write. these initiatives
were usually extremely circumscribed geographically. in one case, how-
ever, a small entrepreneur from the Venetian terraferma, starting from just
such a small-scale operation, constructed a veritable publishing empire
which a century later would be considered one of the largest in europe.32
it was in Bassano, a town in the pre-alpine region about 60 kilometers
from Venice, that giovanni antonio remondini opened a small print-
shop that in the first few decades produced devotional booklets, saint’s
lives, poetry collections, chivalric tales, school texts, practical use manu-
als, and, most of all, sacred images. With a catalogue of this sort, includ-
ing hundreds of titles and more than 10,000 different printed images, the
remondini built up a commercial network extending from latin america
to the russian empire. their business reached its maximum expansion
in the second half of the 18th century. But even when giuseppe remon-
dini moved his company’s headquarters from Bassano to Venice in 1750,
he maintained his entire industrial complex in the terraferma hinterland
and with it the competitive advantages of using laborers unprotected by
urban guild norms. such tactics took the older Venetian publishers by sur-
prise, accustomed as they were to a much slower production process. in
contrast to the older publishers, the remondini controlled every phase
of production, from the paper itself to the selling of the finished prod-
uct, and they took full advantage of the previously mentioned colporteurs,
supplying them with merchandise and advancing them the money with
which to set out around the world. they opened shops to distribute their
literary and visual wares around europe and supplied their workshops in
Bassano with the necessary information about local religious cults, which
allowed their illustrators in the Veneto to produce accurate images of
forms of religious devotion in many centers of the iberian peninsula and
latin america.
for the entire second half of the 18th century, the remondini’s opera-
tions allowed Venetian presses to reinforce their presence on the interna-
tional book markets. it was ultimately the fall of the republic in 1797 that
put an end to Venice’s dynamic publishing industry. in the napoleonic
years, Venice was no longer a capital, and in a radically changed political
32 on the remondini, mario infelise, I Remondini di Bassano. Stampa e industria nel
Veneto del Settecento, 2nd ed. (Bassano, 1990); mario infelise and Paola marini, eds.,
Remondini. Un editore del Settecento (milan, 1990).