The project investigates the role played by inclusive institutions in affecting economic inequality in preindustrial Northern Italian Alps and Appennines. It observes (I) the level of inclusiveness of public municipal institutions; (II) how this affected the municipal incomes coming from the commons and direct taxation; (III) how these processes affected economic inequality that, as a grounded historical literature demonstrates, was intimately linked to the fiscal dynamics. We will answer to the following main research questions: 1) How did the potential unequal access in the decision-making influence the management of commons and the resort on directtaxation? 2) How did this affect economic inequality? We will focus on the period 1500-1800 in which economic inequality starts a path of relevant growth continuous until nowadays. It is quite evident that this process was flanked by a drastic change in public revenues, the rising of the so-called “fiscal-military State”, which means (a) the intense increase of the public expenditure and (b) the parallel growth of the regressive direct taxation. A process worsened by the deterioration of the municipal finances. This often meant that the municipal institutions sold the commons to face the indebtment but, by doing so, they cause the loss of important municipal “ordinary” revenue, that were used to limit the local fiscal pressure. This general picture (increase in direct taxation, loss of the commons), besides fostering economic inequality, was promoted by the concomitant creation of narrow municipal councils, that increased the inequality in the access in the decision making. To reach our goal, we will focus on the mountain areas, because they are the perfect case study to observe such dynamics, given that commons played in these zones an essential role. We will collect a novel extensive database about the composition of the community councils, communities’ incomes structure, and economic inequality, mainly of wealth (for which better documentation exists, compared to income). Published data and existing databases from all over the Peninsula will be collected as terms of comparison and included in the project database, together with the data and the information collected in the local archives. The project will lead to a better knowledge of the relationship between inclusiveness of public institutions and inequality in the past, but it will also help to understand this relationship nowadays. Indeed, it offers a unique opportunity to observe this phenomenon in the long run, which is certainly the best way to reconstruct both the reasons and the policies related to the different trajectories of the economic inequality. Only a project at this scale, can shed new light on the impact of the inequal access to the decision making and its relationship with economic inequality in our past, present, near and far future.