FORESTS OF ITALY. 313 



stances, woodlands would soon become disafforested, and where 

 facilities of transportation and a good demand for timber have 

 increased the inducements to fell it, as upon the borders of the 

 Mediterranean, the destruction of the forest and all the evils 

 which attend it have gone on at a seriously alarming rate. 



Gallensa gives a striking: account of the wanton destruction of 

 the forests in Northern Italy within his personal recollection,* 

 and there are few Itahans past middle life whose own memory 

 will not supply similar reminiscences. The clearing of the 

 mountain valleys of the provinces of Bergamo and of Brescia is 

 recent, and Lombardini informs us that the felling of the woods 

 in the YalteUine commenced Httle more than fifty years ago. 



Although no country has produced more able writers on the 

 value of the forest and the general consequences of its destruc- 

 tion than Italy, yet the specific geographical importance of the 

 woods, except as a protection against inundations, has not been 

 so clearly recognized in that country as in the States bordering it 

 on the north and west. It is true that the face of nature has 

 been as completely revolutionized by man, and that the action of 

 torrents has created almost as wide and as hopeless devastation in 

 Italy as in France ; but in the French Empii'e the recent desola- 

 tion produced by clearing the forests is more extensive, has been 

 more suddenly effected, has occurred in less remote and obscure 

 locahties, and therefore excites a Kveher and more general in- 

 terest than in Italy, where pubhc opinion does not so readily 

 connect the effect with its true cause. Italy, too, from ancient 

 habit, employs little wood in architectural construction ; for gen- 

 erations she has maintained no military or commercial marine 

 large enough to require exhaustive quantities of timber, f and the 



* "Far away in the darkest recesses of the mountains a kind of universal 

 conspiracy seems to have been got up among these Alpine people, — a destruc- 

 tive mania to hew and sweep down everything that stands on roots." — Country 

 Life in Piedmont, p. 134. 



" There are huge pyramids of mountains now bare and bleak from base to 

 summit, which men stiU living and still young remember seeing richly man- 

 tied with all but primeval forests." — Ihid., p. 135. 



f The great naval and commercial marines of Venice and of Genoa must 

 have occasioned an immense consumption of lumber in the Middle Ages, and in 

 the centuries immediately succeeding those commonly embraced in that desig- 

 nation. The marine construction of that period employed larger timbers than 

 14 



