Luiz Camillo de Oliveira Netto s intellectual biography is reconstructed on the basis of old jottings that point to the founding mark of his personality: the town of Itabira and the people of Girau. Since his first job, it is clear that the small, iron-paved town was the moral core of his personality - Itabira with its dead and living relatives, its reserved landscape, its traditions, its style. This was the origin of his love for the study of history and his destiny as an intellectual, researcher, and political activist. His archive includes primary and unpublished sources; it holds interest for researchers who would like to understand the limits and importance of his activities in the cultural and political world and to grasp, from his perspective, the spirit of the times he lived in. Most of the letters and documents upon which this work is based date from a precise cultural and historical moment: between 1904 and 1953. These materials are located at the intersection of different factors which make them the object of history, sociology, and literary genres; from these documents, to which were added interviews with people who lived around him, were drawn themes and concerns of the Brazilian intellectual world and the characterization of a historical period, with the mapping out of mentalities, the interlacing of relationships between friends, family members and fellow workers.