Paper short abstract:

The article presents Alpine transhumance in the area of the Friuli Venezia - Giulia (Italy). The history of the use of highlands pastures and dairying is presented, as well as contemporary challenges and heritagization practices.

Paper long abstract:

In the mountain regions, where agricultural activities are constrained by climatic effects of altitude, edaphic factors, scarcity of soil and steep gradients of the land, pastoralism has been the most effective and dominant agricultural activity. Large expanses of grasslands, which ring the valleys above the tree line, could be made accessible for productive activities because of the animals' ability to convert natural plants into nutritive food. In the Alps a combination of cultivation and herding emerged, known as Alpine husbandry or Alpine agro-pastoral system, that consisted of two (or more) spatially segregated spheres of production - fields and meadows near the village, and the alps, i.e. low- and high-altitude pastures with structures for milk processing.

The article presents past and present state of Alpine transhumance in the area of the Friuli Venezia - Giulia (Italy), situated at the crossroads of Romance, German, and Slavic cultures, of constantly changing authority and borders in the Eastern Alps. It ends by showing nowadays challenges of alpine pasture and dairying in the Friuli, that range from intensification and introduction of supplementary agricultural activities to some surviving traditional practices and some new forms of collaborative economy.