Keywords

• The aim is to highlight the changes that Italian agriculture saw in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries â€
• “
• changes which also affected large farm managers (fattori or 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 devoted little attention