With the crisis of the late empire and the first incursions of the Germans the agents of disintegration of the Italian agricultural landscape accelerate significantly, a process accompanied by the progressive decay of urban centres. With the arrival of the Lombards in 568 AD and their stable settlement in Italy, a process of disorganisation of the landscape is consolidated, with a reduction of agricultural spaces and a regrowth of woods and pastures, linked to an unstoppable demographic decline favoured by famines and pestilences, which reduced the population from about eight million in the imperial period to the four million estimated for the sixth–seventh century. The change in the landscape is also reflected in the redefinition of social roles: in Lombard society, the pig keeper certainly has more importance than the small farmer. We are, therefore, in a regressive phase that brings the landscape of the plain back to forms pre-existing the Roman colonisation and that affects also the mountain, in which the change is less dramatic, but where the woods are growing again, giving new impetus to the beech forests, probably favoured by a cooler climate. In Tuscany, with the birth of the farm economy and the diffusion of share crop system, the management form adopted in the woods was generally the coppice with standards, but also pollard coppice was very common, while shredding occurred mostly at single tree level. Pastured wood and wooded pastures were quite common in all Italy. An interesting case to explain both the wooded pasture, but especially the management system in which such cultivation was inserted, is the practice of alder cultivation, widespread in the Val d’Aveto on the Ligurian Apennines between the XVIII and XIX centuries. The case study of Moscheta, a site in the Appennine Mountains north of Florence, shows that in the early nineteenth century the complexity of the landscape mosaic could be higher than the one that can be found on the plains. Even the Sila woods, in the Calabria region, appear as largely subject to grazing, in the form of wooded pastures, giving us an interesting cross-section of the situation in the south of Italy. A configuration of the forest sometimes described by the land registries, quite widespread not only in the Apennines mountains but also in the rest of Italy, are the forest managed for hunting, in particular for the birds.