220 
THE FOREST IN ITALY. 
quests and extended commerce of Rome created a greatly 
increased demand for wood for the construction of ships and 
for military material. The Eastern Alps, the Western Apen¬ 
nines, and the Maritime Alps retained their forests much later; 
but even here the want of wood, and the injury to the plains 
and the navigation of the rivers by sediment brought down by 
the torrents, led to some legislation for the protection of the 
forests, by the Republic of Yenice in the fifteenth century, by 
that of Genoa as early at least as the seventeenth; and Mar- 
schand states that the latter Government passed laws requiring 
the proprietors of mountain lands to replant the woods. These, 
however, do not seem to have been effectually enforced. It is 
very common in Italy to ascribe to the French occupation 
under the first Empire all the improvements, and all the abuses 
of recent times, according to the political sympathies of the 
individual; and the French are often said to have prostrated 
every forest which has disappeared within a century.* But, 
however this may be, no energetic system of repression or 
restoration was adopted by any of the Italian states after the 
downfall of the Empire, and the taxes on forest property in 
some of them were so burdensome that rural municipalities 
sometimes proposed to cede their common woods to the Gov¬ 
ernment, without any other compensation than the remission 
of the taxes imposed on forest lands.f Under such circum¬ 
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. It 
has even been calculated that four tenths of the area of the 
Ligurian provinces have been washed away or rendered inca¬ 
pable of cultivation by the felling of the woods.:); 
* Le Alpi die cingono VItalia, i, p. 367. 
t See the periodical Politecnico , published at Milan, for the month of 
May, 1862, p. 234. 
t Annali di Agricoltura , Industrial e Commercio , vol. i, p. 77. 
