Agenti rurali e aziende agricole nell’Italia centrale agli inizi del XX secolo (1900-1926)

Land managers and farms in central Italy in the early twentieth century (1900-1926) The aim is to highlight the changes that Italian agriculture saw in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries – changes which also affected large farm managers (fattorior agenti rurali). When the royal schools established farming practices, land managers underwent a radical change: practical training, hitherto an exclusive component of professional education, joined a school curriculum that was also based on the teaching of theory. The documentation in the archive collection at the Agricultural Institute of Todi (Umbria) reveals a number of issues, related not only to the progressive modernization of agriculture but also to the educational and professional trajectories of those intermediate social groups, such as land surveyors, to which traditional historiography has devot ed little attention.