Agrarian education and historiographic stereotypes in post-unification Sicily (1860–1900)

The school, understood as a place for acquiring literacy and exercising civil and social power, played a fundamental role in the complex process of construction of the newly unified Italian state. This article aims to analysing the controversial relationship between economic development and the Italian education and training system, in order to shed light on certain aspects of the history of southern Italy as told through the history of agricultural schools, subsidised and coordinated by the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce. The article will analyse partially unpublished documents kept in the Central State Archives in Rome and the State Archives in Catania and Palermo, to piece together the role played by agricultural education in combating the spread of Phylloxera vastatrix and promoting material and economic progress in eastern Sicily during the last decades of the 19th century.