To gain broader perspective this chapter will compare and contrast Locorotondo with several other Italian settings. First it is useful to understand that the small proprietor based, rurally dispersed, peasant population which typifies Locorotondo, while relatively infrequent in the mezzogiorno, is not unique, and in fact probably belongs to a roughly definable type to which other locales can be ascribed as well. Second, the chapter will emphasize the point that Locorotondo's peasant population shaped itself and the local landscape it continues to occupy through strategic choices. Contrasts will be drawn with several other Italian places which share certain characteristics with Locorotondo and neighboring towns, but where peasant choice-making behaviors and strategic abilities were severely limited by the choices and strategies of dominating landowners. Locorotondo's development emerged instead from landowner and peasant strategies, and the particular nature of the settlement pattern and landscape it produced depended more heavily upon peasant choices than upon those of the local agrarian middle class, which in certain ways were more constrained by both local historical experience and by the nature of the landscape.

LOCOROTONDO AND TYPES OF PEASANTRY IN THE 'MEZZOGIORNO'

To grasp the nature of Locorotondese peasant sociocultural patterns it is useful to draw contrasts with other zones in the Italian south. Arlacchi has contributed a broad study of three distinctive Calabrian areas, each described for the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century period, which helps do just that (1980).