LATIFONDO. — Property of great extent belonging to a single owner. From the technical-economic point of view, l. may be more precisely defined as a holding of great extent in which, owing to various circumstances, intensive cultivation is not practiced; that is, it is not sufficiently exploited. The causes may be natural (climate, quality of the soil, lack of water, etc.), material (lack of capital), or voluntary (the selfishness of the proprietors, the inertia of the rural population). L. must therefore be distinguished both from uncultivated land and from large agricultural property, whether divided into farms or not, that is intensively cultivated.
L. was regarded as a very serious scourge afflicting Italy from the time of ancient Rome, despite the celebrated agrarian reforms of the Gracchi, in connection with a particular politico-social conception according to which manual labor was despised by the Roman citizen of the classical age, and the rural economy was based predominantly on servile labor.
L. was increased not only by the holdings of the cities, municipalities, and Caesars (ager publicus), intended almost exclusively for pastoralism, but also by the increasingly frequent sale of land by small proprietors, burdened with debt, to the powerful Roman patricians, enriched by continuous military campaigns and, because of their immense financial resources, little concerned with the rational exploitation of their landed properties.
L. survived the collapse of the Roman Empire and the disappearance of the slave economy: it persisted in the Middle Ages through the Gothic and Byzantine invasions and under Norman and Angevin rule; nor was the problem resolved by the innumerable but irrational redistributions of land to the victorious warriors carried out under the rule of the Swabians, the Aragonese, and the Bourbons.
Despite the disappearance of feudalism and the abolition of serfdom, the political unification of Italy, and the development of legal and social conceptions, l. still persists today in extensive areas of Sicily, the Mezzogiorno, Latium, and the Tuscan Maremma.
The phenomenon, however, was never and is not exclusively Italian, since it has occurred and continues to occur in all the countries of Europe and beyond, even in those agriculturally advanced; and everywhere it presents the same disadvantages.
Hence the problem of abolishing l., regarded by all as a matter of the utmost urgency (cf. Settimana sociale di Napoli [cited in the bibliography], p. 274; National Catholic Rural Life Conference of the United States in Documentation Catholique, 1948, col. 754; Unione di Molines, in Cahiers d’Action religieuse et sociale, 1950, p. 143). Hence also the Church’s preference for the family farm, which more firmly anchors the peasant to his land, diminishes the disastrous scourge of urbanism, intensifies production because it awakens and sharpens the farmer’s interest, and preserves the family in greater health (cf. Pius XII, Eserrezione ai coltivatori diretti, in Discorsi e radiomessaggi, VIII, 1946–1947, Città del Vaticano 1947, pp. 301–309).
On the other hand, Christian social doctrine itself conceives the right of property not in an absolutist sense or as an end in itself, but as an instrument for the perfection and external expression of the human personality, situating it within an organic conception of social life that does not permit anyone to be excluded, for the benefit of a few, from the enjoyment of goods indispensable to the community, such as the land itself.
Naturally, any change in the landholding system in areas of l. can never be crowned with fruitful results unless it is preceded and accompanied by adequate technical and economic measures capable of making possible the practice of modern agriculture in those regions.
The State, which, in a social democracy inspired by Christianity, cannot remain extraneous to the problems of production and labor, is responsible for carrying out a comprehensive plan for the execution of public, road, and hydraulic works, together with the adoption of appropriate hygienic and sanitary measures, in order to ensure the colonists who will settle in those lands, uninhabited and uncultivated for centuries, a decent standard of living that will attach them to the soil and enable them to live honestly by their own labor.
Individual initiative, on the other hand, will be entrusted with carrying out all those works more specifically related to the agricultural holding, such as plantations, deep plowing, water regulation, and the construction of stables and farmhouses, under penalty of compulsory expropriation, for those who fail to comply, in favor of colonization agencies, cooperatives, or small owner-cultivators.
In the field of agricultural contracts, a more equitable regulation of the relations of fitto, the suppression of intermediaries, and the gradual elimination of wage labor through the establishment of family-based profit-sharing arrangements, at least wherever the division into farms is possible, should mark a first step toward the spread of small peasant property, a factor of economic well-being and social tranquility.
Conversely, since often, precisely where l. in the strict sense exists, the diametrically opposite phenomenon of excessive fragmentation also occurs, as a direct consequence of the poverty of the rural masses, giving rise to the so-called peasant l., appropriate regulations must be enacted to consolidate small parcel-based holdings and to prevent further divisions on the occasion of sales or hereditary succession, so as to achieve that reorganization of landholding capable at last of satisfying both technical and productive requirements and the ardent hunger for land among the rural classes.
Moreover, the solution to the problem is linked to a substantial reform of custom, capable of reawakening in agricultural proprietors an awareness of their social duties and confidence in a better future, and in agricultural cultivators the desire to become competent and increasingly attuned to the common good.