Based on both archival and contemporary fieldwork materials, this paper explores, over a 300-year time span, changing perceptions of urban space and town-country relationships in the small north Puglian city of Ascoli Satriano. In particular, it examines the implications of the growth of an agro-town economy in the late nineteenth century, and the short-lived peasantization of a substantial part of Ascoli's rapidly expanding population. It argues that early anthropological attempts to delineate the main cultural and structural characteristics of southern Italian settlement patterns were premature, over-generalized and failed to account for variation through time, and that the conceptual peasantization of the Italian south is, in part at least, the product of a historically foreshortened anthropological tradition that has habitually over-privileged the longue durée. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]