ABSTRACT
The mezzadria created a landscape that is especially attractive to a recent generation of visitors and settlers: a sharp division between town and country, a rural population resident in imposing stone farmhouses, a mixed and intensive pattern of land-use. The most general argument is about the changing rationality of rural life. Rationality is a loaded term, and two major points of clarification have to be made. In a generic sense the concept refers to the appropriateness of the means adopted to achieve a particular purpose. The poverty and isolation of rural life compared to an increasingly known urban alternative led to a rural exodus: between 1950 and 1980 the population of the comune of Montalcino dropped from 10,000 to 5,000, and in some of the more isolated districts a network of large households in the farms and hamlets was reduced to a couple of families.
