“Dear Sturzo…, Dear Micheli”. The agrarian question in the epistolary relationship between two leaders of the Italian Catholic Movement (1897-1922).

At the end of the 19th century, two young exponents of the Italian Catholic Movement began exchanging letters from one end of the Peninsula to the other. One from Val del Baganza, in his native Parma, following in his father’s footsteps, had just undertaken a career as a notary, the other from the Piana di Catania became a priest. They were Giuseppe Micheli and Luigi Sturzo who, animated by the common desire to see the principles carved by Leone XIII in the Rerum Novarum realized, will maintain a dense correspondence in order to find a solution to the difficult “land question”. From that moment their political commitment, from their respective local realities will reach the heart of the institutions of the Kingdom of Italy, not without encountering obstacles and misunderstandings. From the recent discovery of some unpublished letters exchanged between the notary from Parma and the priest from Caltagirone, this essay, following the thread of the “agrarian question”, retraces the relationship between them during the first twenty years of the twentieth century.

Keywords: Luigi Sturzo, Giuseppe Micheli, Italian Popular Party, agrarian question, correspondence, twentieth century.

Marco Carone, “Caro Sturzo…, Caro Micheli”. La questione agraria nel rapporto epistolare tra due esponenti del Movimento cattolico italiano (1897-1922) in "SOCIETÀ E STORIA " 189/2025, pp 649-672, DOI: 10.3280/SS2025-189006