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The father of Sismondi, returning to Geneva, gave up to his son the care of directing the little farm of Valchiusa. It had been held on lease during thirty years, by an honest family of peasants, and its produce in kind, divided into two parts, according to the custom of the little farms among the hills, was to provide subsistence for the masters, farmers, and servants. Devoted to this cultivation with all the ardour of his age, he increased the activity of his mind by the numerous labours of rural life, and imbued his vast intellect with the study of agriculture, that fruitful source of ever varied, ever attaching, ever new observations.

His free and generous mind reproached the tyrants of Italy with the progressive increase of the barren moors, uncultivated plains, and bogs; nature, as he said, taking again the gifts which man did not know how to manage. Struck with admiration at sight of the dikes, which forced the devastating torrent, an immense river of mud, to restore the slime which it was carrying to the sea, and to transform into fertile fields what would have changed its mouth into infectious marshes, Sismondi thanked for these admirable metamorphoses the zeal of the religious orders, which have so often in Italy, as lately in France, renewed the face of the earth.