Some locals see this system as a tool to preserve the area’s natural resources from excessive use and to prevent corporations tempted by Cortina’s thriving tourism industry to buy the land. The problem is that, well, it excludes women.

The inheritance rules for the Regole work like this: When a head of family passes away, all his sons automatically become members of the assembly and pass to their offspring the right to use the land’s resources; his daughters do not. Some exceptions do exist. If a woman’s father leaves no male heir, a woman can represent the family in the assembly and pass to her offspring the right to use the land—but she loses this power if she marries outside of the community, a restriction that does not apply to men. Also, widows can count as heads of family if they don’t have adult male children, though they lose that status when their oldest son comes of age.

Cortina D’Ampezzo (Consorzio di Promozione Turistica di Cortina d’Ampezzo)

Unsurprisingly, the women of Cortina aren’t happy with the system. “It’s a matter of principle. It’s not fair that a brother has certain rights and a sister does not. It’s 2016 and I don’t see why we shouldn’t have an equal say in the administration of our beautiful land,” says Roberta da Zanna, a 53-year-old jewelry shop owner in Cortina. As the only child of of one “historic” Cortina family who married inside the community, da Zanna has her own seat in the council of families. But she wishes the right could be extended to all women, whether they have brothers or not.

Last month, the women of Cortina formally requested to end the male-preference system with an assembly vote. It failed. To be fair, the majority of the (male-dominated) council voted in favor of repeal, but it did not reach the two-thirds of votes necessary to approve it.

Cortina is not the only small town to administer its land with a centuries-old collective system. Once a common practice in rural Italy, the model still survives in a few communities in the Eastern Alps. But most of those have ended the male-preference clauses. Most recently, Costalta, a village not far from Cortina, voted to include women in its own Regole in April.

According to Giulio Sapelli, a professor of economic history at the University of Milan, Italy has a long history of collective land ownership. “For instance, in Sardinia, as much as 40 percent of the forests used to be collectively owned,” he says. “This practice began to weaken in the late 1880s, when the government became more heavily centralized, and since then it has been slowly dying out.”

“The core idea behind so-called ‘commons’ is that the land belongs to the community, not to individuals,” Sapelli continues. “With the advent of capitalism, this model got lost and survived only in few places. Some see it just as a matter of folklore, but it’s an economic system that has proved valuable for centuries. It was a way to encourage poor farmers and herders to help one another instead of engaging in cutthroat competition.”