In the peasant families everyone worked: men, women and boys.

The peasant’s day began at first lights at dawn: he got up from the bed stuffed with dry corn leaves and went toward the mule shed to clean it and pick up the manure to use as fertilizer. He looked up the animals, loaded on the mule his tools and went toward the wagon.

There were peasants that did not even possess that rudimentary mean of transport, so they had to go to the workplace by mule or by donkey. The wage-earners and the ‘daily workers’, that didn’t owned neither fields nor mules and worked to the farms on behalf of rich owners. They reached the workplace on foot.

The working year began immediately after the reaping and the threshing with the burning of the stubbles. After the first rains it followed the ploughting using iron plows with one or more ploughshares. Therefore there was the seeding and the manuring. The first harvested products were the broad beans, the lentils, the peas. In half-June started the reaping and the threshing followed. It prevailed the cereal growing but there were also other crops (olives, grapes) so the agriculturists had as secondary activity the olives harvest and the vintage.

Also in the peasant world a social stratification existed: close to the owners of about ten hectares of land and three or four mules there were small farmers that owned few tomoli of earth and one or two mules.

It followed the ‘daily workers’ that found job for the seasonal works and the wage-earners that worked with annual contract in large farms on behalf of rich land owners. The work of these ones was directed by the massaro of the fields supported by the massaro of the vineyard and from the massaro of the olive-grove.