I concimi chimici nelle campagne italiane tra le due guerre mondiali

The introduction of chemical fertilization is one of the fundamental steps in the modernization of Italian agriculture and represents a fundamental hub of the great economic, social and environmental transformations of the twentieth century. The aim of the article is to contribute to the reconstruction of an initial framework of this process in the peninsula, on the one hand by collecting and arranging the available data, on the other by providing a first basic picture of some of the problems and issues in which it is inserted. The years between the two wars constitute a moment of elaboration and advancement of agronomic knowledge, as well as practical experimentation, which goes hand in hand with the appearance on the fertilizer market of new products, linked to an expanding chemical industry; but this also the period of the outbreak and the long course of the Great Crisis, which further complicates the process of appropriation of chemical fertilization by the rural world and represents a crucial junction for the history of contemporary Italian agriculture. The profound diversity of agricultural Italy is also manifested in fertilization. In order to understand this, the paper proposes a taxonomy by cluster of the intensity and type of fertilizers consumed in the Italian provinces.