For five hundred years, every spring, hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of timber set out from the forests above Bassano, bound for the Arsenal of Venice. They floated down the Brenta lashed into rafts, guided by men working barefoot in the water. Without that wood, Venice could not have existed.
The Republic of Venice had no forests, no mines, no real hinterland until the 15th century. It had only the lagoon. When, in 1404, it conquered Vicenza and then Bassano, Belluno, Feltre and the Cadore, it did so for an essentially economic reason: timber. The Serenissima needed wood for the ships of its arsenal, for the piles its palaces rest upon (Venice is a city built on an upturned forest), for roofs, furniture, the building of a maritime empire.
From that moment — and for five centuries, until the fall of the Republic in 1797 — the timber of the Venetian Pre-Alps was managed as a resource of state. The Magistratura ai Boschi of Venice regulated felling, marked every single tree, banned export and organised the floating.
The Venetian timber supply system rested on three great forest districts:
The forests of the Piave basin supplied larch for piles and pile foundations. Logs were lashed into rafts at Perarolo or Codissago and floated down the Piave to Belluno, Treviso, Venice. The Venetian place-name Zattere, along the Giudecca canal, comes precisely from the arrival of the timber rafts.
The great forest between Belluno and Vittorio Veneto, the Republic's "oar forest": here grew the beech from which the galleys' oars were made. An exclusive reserve of the Arsenal, forbidden to peasants and merchants.
Above the Brenta gorge, on the Asiago plateau and in the Grappa valleys, grew spruce for construction and soundboards (the same wood Stradivari used, still used in Cremona's violin-making today). From these woods the logs came down towards Valstagna on the stone stairs, and from there down the Brenta to Venice.
On the limestone walls of the Brenta gorge, facing Valstagna, is carved the most impressive work of peasant engineering in Venetian history: the Calà del Sasso. 4,444 stone steps cut into the rock over a drop of 750 metres, linking the village of Sasso (on the Asiago plateau) to the river port of Valstagna.
It was built in 1389 by the Cimbri of the Sette Comuni, with the Republic's authorisation, to bring their forests' timber to the river. For nearly six centuries — until 1955, when the first conveyor belt came into use — logs were thrown from above into wooden chutes that slid them down beside the stairs to the river.
Beside the log chute ran the staircase proper, where men, women and mules climbed and descended. It was the only link between plateau and valley.
Today the Calà del Sasso is the longest uninterrupted monumental staircase in Italy, walkable on foot (2 hours up, a good hour down). It has been proposed for UNESCO status.
At the upper end of the Brenta gorge, where it narrows to its tightest point before the Valsugana, lay the northern frontier of the Republic of Venice. Here every log, every raft, every merchant descending from Trentino and the Feltre area was checked: this was the gateway through which the timber — and so the wealth — passed.
Guarding the pass, the Covolo di Butistone: an extraordinary fortress built inside a natural cavity halfway up a sheer cliff, mentioned as early as 1004, taken by Cangrande della Scala in 1321 and entering Venetian rule in 1404. It could be reached only by ladders and hoists lowered from above.
Lower down, the Tagliata della Scala — a masonry barrier flanked by an artillery platform, halfway up the climb — physically closed the valley. From this system of "stairs" and forts comes the name Scala di Primolano: not a mere staircase, but the armoured gate of the Canale to the north.
On gates, towers and town halls across the Veneto is carved the lion of Saint Mark, symbol of the Serenissima. But the lion is not always the same: sometimes it holds an open book, sometimes a closed book, sometimes a sword. And in that difference, tradition holds, one could read a community's fiscal relationship with Venice.
By the most common reading, the open book marked the towns that gave themselves to Venice spontaneously and paid tribute; the closed book, often with a drawn sword, marked instead the border lands exempted from taxes — rewarded for war merits or kept loyal precisely through fiscal privilege. The hard, strategic communities of the Brenta gorge, on the edge of the frontier, fell within this logic of loyalty bought with exemption.
It should be said: the Serenissima never codified its symbols, and the pairing "open book = peace/taxes, closed book = war/exemption" is more popular tradition than rule. But it remains a fascinating key for looking at the lions that still watch over the squares of the Veneto — Bassano included.
At Valstagna and Bassano, timber was lashed into rafts — floating platforms of logs tied with willow withies, up to twenty metres long. Onto the rafts climbed the menadàs (from the Veneto menar, to lead), men of the Pre-Alps who did this work for generations.
A raft setting out from Valstagna descended the Brenta to the Naviglio del Brenta (Stra), and from there through the canals reached the Venetian Lagoon in three days. At their destination the logs were untied and taken to the Arsenal, the Zattere, the shipyards.
The menadàs walked back to Bassano on foot, along the Brenta Riviera: 80 km on foot after 90 km of water, to fetch the next raft. In spring, during the floods, up to forty rafts a day set out.
"All Venice rests on the larch piles the Cadore men floated down the Piave, and on the spruce beams the menadàs brought from the Brenta gorge. The Serenissima is a city of water, but it is built on the timber of the mountains." — from a historical study of Venetian timber infrastructure
The Arsenal of Venice, founded in 1104 and expanded to cover 48 hectares, was in the 16th century the largest industrial complex in Europe. 16,000 arsenalotti worked there, organised in an assembly line four centuries before Ford. They built galleys, light and heavy, and round cargo ships.
The Arsenal had an estimated annual consumption of 30,000 cubic metres of timber. All of it came from these valles: the keel (Montello oak), the ribs (Cadore larch), the masts (Sette Comuni spruce), the oars (Cansiglio beech). Every Venetian ship was, in a sense, a synthesis of the Pre-Alpine forests.
When the Arsenal closed — in 1797, with Napoleon's arrival — a system built over a thousand years ended in ten. The timber trade on the Brenta survived until 1903, when the opening of the Valsugana railway made it uneconomical.
The building culture of wood did not vanish with the Serenissima. It changed form — from galleys to houses — but uses the same materials, the same territories, the same skills.
Today structural timber is the material of sustainable architecture: it absorbs CO₂ instead of producing it, is renewable, fast to lay, with exceptional thermal performance. Houses built with X-LAM (cross-laminated timber) or platform-frame reach efficiency levels concrete cannot match.
The wood for these buildings — spruce, larch — comes from the same valleys the rafts set out from. The Cadore, the Sette Comuni, Carnia and the Alpine arc between Belluno and Bolzano are still the timber basin of northern Italy, now managed under PEFC and FSC certifications that closely recall the Serenissima's Magistratura ai Boschi.
In the tradition of the Palladian bridge and the menadàs of Valstagna, HM52 designs and builds timber buildings to live, to host, to work in. Forty kilometres from the bridge, on the same Brenta road.
HM52 is born in Bassano del Grappa as a construction firm specialising in timber load-bearing structures and an associated architecture studio. KlimaHaus expert consultancy, Passivhaus design, bespoke ecological homes, hotels and hospitality structures — also "build offsite and ready to place".
