Lakes, valleys and the necessity of leaving

A territory that could not feed its people

The territory described in Chapter A.I was poor in everything except water, stone and people. Arable land in the Sopraceneri was confined to narrow valley floors and terraces, while the higher slopes carried chestnut groves, meadows and summer pastures whose yield depended on the weather of a single season. The Sottoceneri, around the lakes of Lugano and Maggiore, was milder and more fertile, but its holdings were small and fragmented by the custom of dividing land among all sons. In both parts of the territory the chestnut functioned as the bread of the poor. A bad chestnut year could therefore push families to the edge of subsistence.¹ Grain had to be bought from Lombardy, which tied the valleys to the Milanese market and to the tolls and prohibitions discussed in Chapters A.II and A.IV. A household that wished to pay for grain, salt and taxes needed cash, and cash could be earned only by selling something that the plain wanted. The valleys had little to sell apart from livestock, cheese and the labour of their men.

Emigration was therefore a structural element of the economy of the southern Alps from the Middle Ages onwards. It was organized as a household strategy. The land at home was kept, worked largely by women, children and the old, while the men earned money elsewhere during part of the year or over several years. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes seasonal and permanent emigration as one of the means by which the territory maintained the precarious balance between the resources of its farming and pasture and the food needs of its population. Migration is attested there from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and had reached enormous proportions in some regions and trades by the fifteenth.² Its logic is familiar to development economists today: a family diversifies its sources of income across places whose risks are not correlated, so that the remittance becomes a form of insurance against harvest failure at home.

Two geographies of emigration

The emigration from the territory followed two distinct geographies, which correspond roughly to the division between the Sottoceneri and the Sopraceneri. The villages on and around the lakes of Lugano and Como, together with the Mendrisiotto, the Malcantone, the Val Capriasca and the Italian valleys of Intelvi and Solda, specialized in the building trades: architects, master builders, stonemasons, sculptors, stucco-workers, plasterers and decorative painters. Their emigration was skilled, often long-distance and frequently multi-generational, since sons followed fathers and nephews followed uncles into the same workshops and the same foreign cities.³ The historical literature calls them maestri comacini (after an early medieval term discussed in the next section), magistri Antelami when they came from the Val d'Intelvi, maestranze or, in the more recent usage, artisti dei laghi (artists of the lakes, German Tessiner und Comasker Künstler).⁴

The upper valleys of the Sopraceneri, by contrast, supplied service and petty trades. The men of the Verzasca, the Centovalli and the Onsernone worked as chimney-sweeps and stove-fitters in Italy and as far away as France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Porters from the Val di Blenio, the Locarnese and the Leventina had been present in Milan, Genoa and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany since the fifteenth century, while in the Onsernone the plaiting of straw supplemented the income from farming between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century.⁵ This second emigration was mostly seasonal, poorly paid and often involved children. It produced no famous names, but in numbers it was probably larger than the building emigration. Its remittances also formed a larger part of the income of the villages concerned.

Notes

1. Romano Broggini, "Castagno", Dizionario storico della Svizzera (DSS), version of 25 July 2013, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/013935/. ↩
2. Giuseppe Chiesi and Paolo Ostinelli, "Tessin (Kanton)", section "Bevölkerung und Siedlungsentwicklung", Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), version of 24 October 2022, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007394/. ↩
3. Laura Damiani Cabrini, "Maestranze artistiche", Dizionario storico della Svizzera (DSS), version of 20 March 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/047823/. ↩
4. Laura Damiani Cabrini, "Maestranze artistiche", Dizionario storico della Svizzera (DSS), version of 20 March 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/047823/. ↩
5. Sandro Guzzi-Heeb, "Lavoro stagionale", Dizionario storico della Svizzera (DSS), version of 4 February 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/007934/2015-02-04/; Anne-Lise Head-König, "Émigration", Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (DHS), version of 15 October 2007, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/007988/. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of October 2026.