La ricerca della “specialità” dell’impresa agricola e l’inesorabile tramonto dell’art. 2135 cod. civ.

The paper focuses on the crisis of the distinction between commercial and agricultural enterprises as adopted in the Italian civil code. Technical progress and the development of industrial agriculture have weaken the traditional link between agricultural production and land . and reduced the structural disparities between industrial and agricultural production process. In the framework of such changes, it seems to become useless and even ambiguous the dual system adopted by Italian civil code, according which agricultural and commercial enterprises should be approached and regulating in different specific ways , due to the supposed weakness of rural enterprises particularly in the market relations. The A. criticizes this dual approach , and points out how uncertain become the boundaries between commercial and agricultural enterprises when a so called “connected” activity is implied (that is, when the farmer carries also out typical commercial activities, like transforming and selling of what he produces). Italian legislation, under the pressure of economic processes and of the CAP, has meaningfully reduced legal disparities in the statutory of agricultural enterprise, so that the separate definition provided in article 2135 Italian civil code looks updated and, particularly in the new wording drafted in 2002, it is unsuitable to take account of the various activities developed in a modern rural enterprise. The latest reform of Bankruptcy Act moves forward a uniform approach to the managing of business crisis and then it makes more and more anachronistic – the A. stresses – the aim to keep agricultural enterprise in a no failure zone