La fluidità dei diritti: la gestione delle risorse idriche tra rivendicazione collettiva e appropriazione privata nelle comunità locali di antico regime

[Machine translation] The essay intends to discuss the relationship between forms of resource management and the local characterization of rights to them in a historical perspective, through two brief case studies that concern modern northwestern Italy. The objective is to propose a reconstruction of the changes in the practices of exploitation, activation and control in the management (public, private, collective) of environmental resources - with particular regard to water control -, also in relation to the issues of conflict. A first case study concerns a Lombard community, and the methods of managing an irrigation channel between the 15th and 19th centuries. The second, on the other hand, concerns the Chiusella stream basin (province of Turin) and analyzes the way in which the local community saw its rights eroded between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The essay is based on unpublished and original sources, and is also confronted with the more general discussion on the history of the environment, with specific attention to the approach to the local analytical scale, thus placing itself in a very flourishing debate in recent years that relates the history of environmental resources with other more general themes, from the history of power to the history of collective ownership, and to the more general debate on the Commons.