Communes, valley communities and vicinanze

The rural neighbourhood as a legal person

The basic unit of local life in the medieval Ticino was the vicinanza or vicinia, the association of the heads of household of a village who held rights in common land, woods, pastures and water. The term is usually rendered in German as Nachbarschaft and in English as "neighbourhood community", although neither translation conveys that the vicinanza was a corporate body with its own assembly, officers and property.¹ The vicini met in an assembly, often in front of the church or under a tree, elected consuls or consoli for a year, fixed the dates on which the herds went up to the Alpine pastures, apportioned the use of woods and regulated who might settle in the village and on what terms. Apart from inheritance and marriage, newcomers as a rule acquired the status of vicino only by swearing an oath and paying an entry fee.²

The vicinanze appear in the medieval sources above all in notarial deeds that record the sale or lease of common land, the settlement of boundary disputes with neighbouring villages or the appointment of procurators to represent the community before a lord or a court. Statutes of vicinanze survive in Italian-speaking Switzerland from the thirteenth century. They regulated the management of common property, the upkeep of roads and bridges, a right of pre-emption among neighbours when land was sold, and the election of officers such as the heads of the village and of the alps, the forest wardens and the keepers of the fountains.³ The vicinanze were the organized form of a mountain economy in which private property in fields and meadows coexisted with collective property in the high pastures and forests. The collective element was indispensable, because no single household could manage an alp, maintain a mule path or protect a village against avalanches and floods. It also created a legal person capable of borrowing, lending and litigating. The communes of the Ticino valleys appear in the sources as debtors, creditors and parties to arbitration long before the modern municipality existed.

Valley communities and their statutes

Above the villages stood larger associations. In the Ambrosian valleys the communities of the Leventina and of Blenio formed valley-wide bodies with their own assemblies, officers and statutes, which dealt with the cathedral chapter of Milan as collective partners. The most famous document of this process is the pact of Torre of 1182, in which the men of Blenio and the Leventina, acting under the authority of the cathedral chapter of Milan, swore to besiege the castle of Curterio held by the noble da Torre family and to tolerate no new fortifications in the valleys. The pact has sometimes been compared with the later alliances of the central Swiss valleys. The comparison is loose, but it points to the same combination of peasant self-government, hostility to local castellans and acceptance of a distant overlord who would leave the valley to administer itself.⁴

Valley statutes were written down from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onwards. They regulated inheritance, the division of common land, the maintenance of roads and bridges, the policing of markets, the prices of bread and wine as well as the conditions under which strangers and goods might pass. In the Leventina the statutes also governed the transport of goods over the Gotthard, which the valley organized through corporations of carriers entitled to take over loads at fixed stations (see Chapter A.IV).⁵ The statutes are the first written law of the territory and they deserve the attention of the modern reader for another reason. They show a legal culture in which rules were negotiated between communities and lords, recorded by notaries and enforced through local courts, long before the Confederates arrived.

Notes

1. DSS, art. "Vicinanza", https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/016403/; Treccani, Dizionario di Storia, art. "Vicinia", https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/vicinia_(Dizionario-di-Storia)/. ↩
2. DSS, art. "Vicinanza" (above), on admission by inheritance, marriage, purchase of property or invitation, with an oath and an entry fee. ↩
3. On the statutes and functions of the vicinanze: Karl Heinz Burmeister, "Vicinanza", in Dizionario storico della Svizzera (DSS), version of 19 June 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/016403/. For the notarial deeds: Luigi Brentani, Codice diplomatico ticinese. Documenti e regesti, 5 vols (Como and Lugano 1929–1956). ↩
4. DSS, art. "Serment de Torre", https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/017150/ (February 1182; directed against Artusio da Torre and his family). ↩
5. DSS, art. "Someggiatura", https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/014053/; DSS, art. "Leventina" (above). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.