The closed farm of Andreas Hofer

Raise your hand if you don't know that the Tyrolean closed farm is that fossil of the ancient Germanic law that leaves the farm to the first-born male. All? Well done, completely wrong! The story is much longer and a little complicated. This is not a last relic of the ancient medieval "majorasco", but - indeed - it is the exact opposite: at least until 1787 a real "minorasco" was in vogue, that is the piece of land that could guarantee the family self-sufficiency had to fall, by law, to the youngest of children! In the early nineteenth century, for example, Andreas Hofer, the commander of the Tyrolean revolts against Bavarians and Napoleons, was the last of a family of seven when, on the death of his father Josef, he inherited the Sandhof farm with adjoining the inn of San Leonardo in Val Passiria from which his glorious epic began which ended tragically in front of the firing squad of Mantua in 1810. The philosophy of this ancient legal institution does not lie in establishing a priori who the recipient of the farm is ( now she can easily also be a daughter), as well as guaranteeing the integrity, in terms of functionality and self-sufficiency, of the family business. A lesson of wisdom that is not always applicable, of course, - and even more so in different geographical and cultural areas -, but which can always tell something useful to those families in which fathers or brothers bleed themselves or, worse, bleed their company accounts, liquidate one or the other, but ending up commanding an empty box, now in the hands of the banks. Or families whose members break organisms, born and raised organically and fully functional, in as many company branches as there are children to be accommodated, undermining the stability of the system at the base. Better to breathe another air, perhaps Dolomite.