Transatlantic Crossings for Experts’ Training: Italian Agricultural Economics’ Round-trip from Naples to the United States

This report focuses on a group of Italian agricultural experts based at the University of Naples, headed by economist Manlio Rossi-Doria, during the postwar years. Rossi-Doria joined transatlantic knowledge exchange networks associated with the American initiative to enhance cultural and intellectual ties in Western European countries during the early Cold War. In the latter half of the 1950s, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, he became a visiting fellow at the Department of Agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley. During this period, he and a team of close associates established a Center for Advanced Training and Research in Agricultural Economics at the University of Naples, inspired by similar research centers in the United States. The Ford Foundation provided financial backing for this initiative, and the Center officially opened in 1959. This research report aims to understand how this Italian expert and his disciples, with essential support from American philanthropic institutions, revitalized and internationalized economics and social sciences in Italy, while also contributing to the establishment of postgraduate education and research programs in that country.