have no reason to over-exploit or destroy
the natural environment. On the contrary,
nature is for them a capital that has to be
nurtured and cultivated, so that it will con-
tinue to provide dividends to its owner. This
is what Nonno Pietro and Zi’Bruno have
done, this is what is happening in La
Sommaand this is how their sons and
daughters are being taught to behave in the
future.
Of course, the two brothers know very well
that in Italy and in Umbria there are places
where deforestation and agrochemical pollu-
tion have led to environmental disasters;
where speculative parceling has trans-
formed the countryside into fields of sec-
ond-home condominiums; and where
unscrupulous entrepreneurs have taken
advantage of agro-tourism incentives and
facilities to build five star rural hotels with
tennis courts and swimming pools. Yet they
can not understand why the conservationist
regulations which have been easily by-
passed in those instances continue to be
applied so rigorously and blindly to them;
why they had to pass through long and
expensive bureaucratic procedures to get
the permission to establish their own house
and enterprise on their own land? Why they
should not be free to build a new stable for
horses or a wooden cottage to host tourists,
if this is needed? Why they are forbidden to
open a new track to extract firewood from a
poorly accessible and under-exploited forest
area?
As nobody in the town is able to provide
convincing answers to these questions
Agostino and Giancarlo are very suspicious
about environmental laws and regulations.
In particular, they are very resistant to the
local Mountain Community project of estab-
lishing a Regional Park in the area, which
they see as an additional source of troubles
for their enterprise. The believe that, at the
end of the day, talks about forest and land-
scape conservation are just excuses to
extract taxes and bribes from rural people.
They feel that that there is not much they
can do about it, except for keeping good
personal relationships with the officers in
charge. This is why regional and municipali-
ty officers always find at La Sommaa coffee
on the bar desk, a table in the restaurant, a
flat in the guesthouse or a good horse to
ride. As their peasant ancestors did with
landlords and tax collectors, Agostino and
Giancarlo use the “weapons of the weak” to
protect against the conservation bureaucra-
cy that hinders them with specious rules
and interferes with their effort to improve
their enterprise.
What lessons can be drawn from this narra-
tive on the interplay between history, cul-
ture and forest conservation in contempo-
rary Umbrian upland? First, it is clear that
La Sommais a successful attempt to re-new
the forest-based livelihood strategy of
Acqualacastagna and Montebibbico peas-
ants, threatened by the major economic
and social change that took place in the
region after World War II. From an histori-
cal perspective, introduction of horseback
trekking and agro-tourism in the rural
household economy is equivalent to other
major adjustments that have occurred in
the past, such as chestnut semi-cultivation
History, cculture aand cconservation
Figure 5.In the durmast forest (Courtesy
Patrizio Warren)
