Saints on the move

In August 1766, the printmakers of Augsburg brought a case of plagiarism against the Veneto publishers and printmakers Remondini. One of the witnesses they summoned was Giuseppe Fietta, an itinerant pedlar, who was then doing the rounds of Bavaria selling Remondini’s Santi, or prints of saints. They were very popular with country-folk, Fietta explained, because they were not only cheaper than other prints, but also highly coloured and even decorated with silver and gold.

Fietta was one of hundreds of pedlars working for the Remondini, an extraordinarily enterprising workforce that was a cornerstone of the company’s enormous success. The Remondini family began their operation in 1657 in Bassano del Grappa on the banks of the Brenta, 40 miles north-west of Venice. To distribute their wares they recruited men from the nearby Tesino valley who had long traditions of spending the winter months roving on foot around central Europe selling inexpensive goods, such as wooden toys. Men from numerous outlying mountain valleys joined this ambulatory regiment, but regardless of where they actually came from they were familiarly known as ‘Tesini’.

The Tesini’s journeys eventually took them all over Europe, to the farthest shores of the Iberian peninsula, onwards to the Americas (at least as far south as Paraguay), to the Near East and Africa. In 1781, a priest in the Tesino valley recorded that his parishioners were going not only to ‘Spain, Germany, Hungary and Poland, but also throughout the greater part of the Russian Empire, even as far as Siberia and Astrakhan’.

By then Remondini were employing 1,000 men and women in their printworks on the central square of Bassano, with hundreds more in their own local paper mills and as salesmen, making them probably the largest single publishers in Europe.