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Even if his wide-ranging research work is not limited to Roman agrarian history, this is the field in which his contribution has been decisive and internationally recognized. For this reason, Domenico Vera chose this theme when he planned to gather in a single coherent volume a number of texts that first appeared in not easily accessible publications.0The critical examination to which he submitted the sources over the years enabled him to radically renew the account that was traditionally given of the late imperial rural world, at opposite ends of the self-sufficiency that was posited by the 19th century historians, while revisiting the chronology of its implementation. Domenico Vera challenges an alleged break in the Italian agricultural flourishing throughout the 2nd and 3rd centuries as well as an alleged continuity from the 4th-6th centuries colonate up to medieval serfdom, or the prefiguration of the large Carolingian estate as soon as the Later Roman Empire.0Domenico Vera clearly identified those three main features which make a difference in agrarian structures before and after the 3rd century: ?deconcentration of production (hence the prevalence of colonate)?; ?indirect land management (hence the expansion of a multi-level tenancy system)?; ?concentration of the rent and surplus held by the landlords (hence the decline of the banking professions) and the tendency to the overlapping of great landlordship and wholesale trade?. From now on Italian agrarian economy and society organised themselves around two antithetic but non-adversarial poles: the land barons and an authentic ?peasant society?.0This volume aims at giving to more readers easier access to key texts some of which were published in hardly available journals or conference proceedings.

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