Village capital: land, credit, inheritance and the absent member

The absent vicino and the commons

The emigrant never ceased to belong to his village. Membership of the vicinanza, the corporation of the old-established families that owned the common pastures, forests and alpine meadows, was acquired above all by inheritance, and also by marriage or purchase. Since it was tied to residence in the territory or to the ownership of a house there, a family that kept its house and hearth in the village could preserve its membership during long absences abroad. A move from one community to another, by contrast, required the payment of exit and entry fees, and the vicinanze tended over time to close themselves to newcomers.¹ The emigrant's wife and children, who stayed in the family house, continued to exercise the family's rights to wood, pasture and a share of communal income.

This continuity had a double significance. For the emigrant it meant that the village remained his legal home, where he held rights that could not be acquired by newcomers and that he could transmit to his children. For the village it meant that the emigrants remained members with duties as well as rights, including contributions to the church, the school and communal works. The corporations of the old families survive today as the patriziati, public-law corporations that own property for common use, among it forests and alpine pastures.² Their membership is still based on descent, since the child of a patrizio acquires the status by birth, and a Ticinese family abroad for generations may still belong to the patriziato of its village. The patriziati are today governed by the cantonal Legge organica patriziale.

Land as the preferred asset

Emigrant savings were invested above all in land. Land was the traditional basis of status in the village and the collateral for credit. It also provided subsistence for the family at home. Land could be supervised by relatives, it could not easily be lost through the failure of a distant banker, and it could be divided among heirs.³ The notarial registers of the Sottoceneri show a lively market in small plots, meadows, vineyards and chestnut groves, in which returning masters and their families were among the main buyers. The price of land in the emigrant villages was therefore supported by money earned abroad, and in some villages prices appear to have been higher than the agricultural yield alone would have justified.

The concentration of emigrant savings in land had consequences for the local economy. It raised land prices and made it harder for non-emigrant families to acquire property. It also tied capital to a low-yielding asset and discouraged investment in local enterprise, which was in any case limited by the small size of the market and the absence of industry. Historians of the Ticinese economy have seen in this pattern one of the reasons why the emigrant villages remained agricultural and dependent on emigration until the nineteenth century, when the railway, tourism and later banking created new opportunities.

Notes

1. Karl Heinz Burmeister, "Voisinage", Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (DHS), version of 19 June 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016403/ (Italian version "Vicinanza", https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/016403/). ↩
2. Legge organica patriziale del 28 aprile 1992 (Canton of Ticino), Art. 1 para. 1 and Art. 41 para. 1, https://www.lexfind.ch/tolv/122678/it; on the transformation of the vicinanze into patriziati see Burmeister, "Vicinanza" (cited above). ↩
3. Ceschi, Storia della Svizzera italiana dal Cinquecento al Settecento (cited 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 October 2026.