Mediterranean upland economy. The large massifs of the italian central Apennines (from the sixteenth-to the nineteenth century).

It is widely known that the economy of Mediterranean mountain settlements was based on an ever-insufficient primary sector where equilibrium was reached by adding other activities such as seasonal work, migration to cities, and transhumance (Braudel). This shared knowledge formed the starting point for further exploration. The notion of economic integration has been applied to mountainous areas (Coppola 1989, 1991), and from this a new model of interpretation has emerged: the Integrated Peasant Economy (Panjek 2011, 2014, 2015, Mocarelli, Larsson and Panjek 2017), which has been examined from the perspective of the Abruzzo mountain area (Bulgarelli 2017). This paper extends the survey area and examines the region of the Central Apennine’s largest mountains, which have the highest peaks. The aim is to illustrate the features of the above-mentioned equilibrium, taking into consideration the hallmarks of the various forms of initiative and their diversification over time and focusing on resilience and social capital, taking a fresh look at the literature on Southern Italy (Bansfield 1960, Putnam 1993)