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Country houses

The typical estate's landscape includes 25 cascine. Until the end of the 1960s these low-lying buildings, painted yellow with a blue band provided a home and a livelihood for some 450 people. These were the sharecroppers and their families.

While much of the agricultural work has now been mechanized, and the cascine have been converted into weekend homes for city-dwellers, part of the farm is still run under the mezzadria system, whereby only the tenant-farmer as opposed to the tenant-farmer and his entire family - works under contract for the landlord.

Indeed, the estate of the Conti Vistarino was among the last to abandon sharecropping (mezzadria, in Italian). Under this model, dating from medieval times, the landlord (concedente) provided the fields while the tenant-farmer (mezzadro) and his family, provided the labor. They shared the harvest and profits deriving from the land.