Giancarlo takes care of masonry, electrical
work, plumbing and other building and
maintenance tasks. Women are in charge
of hospitality and catering, under the
supervision of the two brothers’ mother. 75
year old Nonno Pietro continues to take
care of the courtyard animals and the few
cattle. Agostino, on the other hand, is pri-
marily responsible for horses and horse-
riding activities. His 22 year-old son
Andrea, who has an official diploma as a
horse-riding instructor, assists him. The
second cousins Riccardo and Maurizio work
as trekking guides and grooms, while
Giancarlo’s daughters Cristina and
Valentina are in-charge of the Pony Club.
Also Lorenzo, the 13-year-old son of
Agostino and Giuliana, is expected to con-
tribute to the horse-riding center activity
by saddling and harnessing horses and
keeping the stables clean. As compensa-
tion for his/her personal contribution, each
member of the family is entitled with per-
sonal assets (the flats, the horses, the sta-
bles, the chestnut woods, the forest, etc.)
and has access to an individual share of
the earning generated by their use.
However, the bulk of the money generated
by the enterprise is managed collectively
to pay debts or make new investments
according to needs, opportunities, and
contingencies. Slow but steady accumula-
tion is indeed a major goal of this petty-
capitalist neo-rural enterprise.
It is important to stress that from a finan-
cial point of view La Sommawould not
work if a regular monthly salary was paid
to each one of the ten individuals that
work on a full or part time basis for the
enterprise. The secret of La Somma’seco-
nomic success is thus the mobilisation of
the extended family’s social capital(i.e.,
those immaterial assets like trust, respect,
friendship and love that make all members
of the Bevilacqua family behave in a coop-
erative manner to earn a livelihood and
achieve security and welfare). Social capi-
tal is particularly intense within the net-
work of primary kinship linkages among
grandparents, parents, sons, siblings, cog-
nates, cousin and nephews that live the
under the same roof. However, the
Bevilacqua rely also on a wider social net-
work including distant relatives, step-par-
ents and neighbors, who were born and/or
are settled in the surrounding villages.
Many minor economic transactions occur in
this broader social arena, most of which
focus on the making of sociability through
the reciprocal exchange of surplus use
value (labor, natural resources, machinery),
rather than on the production of exchange
value for profit. For instance, during the
2003 summer drought, when the munici-
pality forbade the use of the aqueduct for
watering animals, Agostino exchanged fire-
wood and manure for the water that he
had to carry daily from a private source
owned by a distant relative.This kind of arrangement reproduces in a
hybrid and modernised fashion the ancient
socio-economic structure of Central Italy
peasant villages. It plays a major role not
only in enhancing access to unevenly dis-
tributed natural resources, but
also in preventing conflicts and
managing those that can not be
avoided. Gossips (which are
abundant in La Somma) are an
important component of this
system, as they often prevent
“bad things” (such as animals
getting “lost”, over-exploitation
of forest resources and pasture
unlicensed building, drunken-
ness, forest fires, unsafe driving
and violence) from happening.
Gossips also maintain and dis-
perse knowledge of what is hap-
pening on the territory allowing
for the limitation of encroachment by “dan-
gerous” outsiders (such as rural real estate
speculators and tour operators). For
instance, nobody in the area would sellConservation aas ccultural aand ppolitical ppractice
As iit wwas ffor
the ffamily
farmland oof
ancient
Umbrian ppeas-
ants, LLa
Somma hhas,
for iits ccontem-
porary oowners,
turned iinto aa
repository oof
symbolic ccapi-
tal.