摘要:The paper utilizes farm-level data from the 1990 and 2000 Italian Agricultural Censuses to describe the major changes in the Italian agriculture in the ’90s. We applied the taxonomy by Marinelli, Sabbatini and Turri (1998) and we performed a comparative static analysis. Th e results show that, in the ten-year period, three major changes happened: the growth of the non-commercial farms, the steady trend of professional farms and the crisis of the in-between farm models. Th e overall result is the result of a broad range of diff erent local trends. Th e data show a signifi cant trend of “typology polarization”: although the variation in the population mean of the most relevant structural variables is moderate, we found a remarkable increase in variance. Such higher variance takes the form of an higher spread in the distributions of production factors and farm income.