Since the early decades of the Nineteenth Century, associationism appears as a consolidated phenomenon in the Iblea area. But it is above all by means of he birth of the Mutual Relief Societies in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and the birth of the Workers' Fasci that, even in this part of Sicily, the attempt (more moderate rather than the rest of the Island) of a social and economic emancipation of the working classes started. This effort was suppressed at the end of the Nineteenth Century by the repressive policies of national governments and it resumed only at the beginning of the Twentieth Century in new and, in part, more effective ways.
Keywords: Associationism, politics, Sicily, Nineteenth century, society, working class.