Medicine, law and the flow of ideas. François-Emmanuel Fodéré (1764-1835) between France and Italy

This paper focuses on the impact made by François-Emmanuel Fodéré’s writings on nineteenth-century Italian medical culture, with particular attention to forensic medicine and public health. The first part of this article analyses some scientific and medical journals published in Italy, and shows how Fodéré’s works are presented, summarized, and discussed. The second part explores Fodéré’s writings translated into Italian, examining the translators’ notes, supplements, and comments. The last part of the paper describes some medical and legal treatises that pay attention to or criticize Fodéré’s Les lois éclairées par les sciences physiques ou traité de Médecine Légale et d’hygiène publique (1798). Lastly, I will argue that the controversial legacy of Fodéré and the «new» legal medicine within the Italian medical culture is closely connected with the Italian political and intellectual history during the nineteenth century.

«La liberté de penser en hommes». Quakerism, religious tolerance and political virtue in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes

This article analyses the chapters dedicated to Pennsylvania in book XVIII of Histoire des deux Indes by Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1770, 1774, 1780). These pages – to which Denis Diderot made a contribution as well – became fundamental for the construction and circulation of the mythe philosophique of the «good Quaker». In Histoire des deux Indes, the representation of the colony founded by William Penn deals with the complexity of the relationship between utopia and reform in Enlightenment political thought. Raynal reintroduces the myth of the «good Quaker», developed by Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques (1734), in a more radical context. His work describes European colonial expansion and its development as a political and philosophical history about freedom; freedom, at its peak in fifteenth-century Europe, had now moved to Northern America. Pennsylvania, the Quakers’ colony, is described as a society based on freedom and religious tolerance. It was a kind of utopia made real, thus becoming the instrument for denouncing the lack of freedom in Europe and outlining a design for society in which «la liberté de penser en hommes», an essential condition for political virtue, could be guaranteed.

Women’s citizenship and the Constitution of the Italian Republic

As is known, the path of women’s emancipation, which developed during the twentieth century, found a fundamental turning point in democratic constitutions. This is of course due to the social and political changes of the second postwar period, but not only. Given that democratic constitutions represent a specific type of constitution built in opposition to the constitutional thought of the nineteenth century, the essay will demonstrate that assuming the widest women’s citizenship is an inherent feature of constitutions of this kind. With particular reference to Italy, the essay is divided into two parts. The first shows two main constitutional changes that have been essential to the claim for women’s citizenship: one related to the subject of law (from the individual to the person) and the other related to the principle of equality (from formal to substantial equality). The second part of the essay is dedicated to the dynamic aspect of the constitution, to its movement. Through the two engines of this movement – the normativity of the constitution and the political/representative element – it shows how the relationship between the constitution and women’s citizenship runs both ways. If one of the constitution’s aims is to empower women’s citizenship, on the other hand the exercise of a full and conscious female political citizenship is a necessary condition for a healthy constitutional democracy.

Balbo’s journals: from «Voce Operaia» to «Terza Generazione»

Among the political experiences that arose in Italy at the end of fascism, one of the most interesting was that of the Catholic Communist Movement, later the Christian Party of the Left (PSC), whose leading figures included the philosopher Felice Balbo (1913-1964). Although the PSC dissolved in December 1945, its members’ intellectual and political experience continued in a variety of environments and contexts. Joining the Communist Party as did other former members of the PSC (including Franco Rodano, Mario Motta, and Luciano Barca), Balbo was for many years one of the closest collaborators of the publisher Giulio Einaudi. A staunch supporter of Togliatti’s programme of «progressive democracy» seeking a non-ideological Marxism, he gradually took his distance from communism after 1948, when the ideological conflict had become too hardened in Italy. The formulation of a new culture could only take place outside of those ideological positions that threatened to bring the country to catastrophe. His intellectual path was expressed through certain journals that significantly marked Italian cultural life between the 1940s and ’50s: Voce Operaia, the PSC’s organ, E. Vittorini’s Il Politecnico, Cultura e Realtà, and Terza Generazione. The article retraces these steps, taking into account both the context and the cultural significance of the different journals, and Balbo’s intellectual progress through them.

Felice Balbo’s role at Einaudi

This article deals with a little known aspect of the biography of Felice Balbo, i.e. his activity as a management training expert at the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) at the turn of the nineteen fifties and sixties. Through a cross-analysis of the Turinese philosopher’s personal papers and of the IRI archives, an organic thinking emerges about the theory of corporate management and the main issues related to the teaching of managerial sciences then coming into being, from how they were taught to more strictly epistemological aspects. Parallel to philosophical reflection, Balbo’s contribution to conceiving the first courses for IRI executives responded to the need to jointly conceive the linkage between technical and social progress, so forcefully established by the industrial society of Italy’s «economic miracle».

Felice Balbo’s role at Einaudi

For about ten years after 1941, Felice Balbo played a key role at Giulio Einaudi’s publishing house as it was establishing its international prestige and extraordinary catalogue. More than a simple advisor on philosophy, he was one of the publisher’s most important consultants and played a leading role in the editorial board. His point of view – which we may call ideologically non-ideological – contributed both to Einaudi’s aim to build a modern, non-provincial Italian culture, and to the ideological battle that took place within the publishing house as well as in the country at large. Balbo’s involvement with Einaudi diminished and finally came to an end as he realized that he had lost this battle. Balbo’s and Einaudi’s stories cast light on one another, giving us better insight into the complex personality of both, in a historical moment when publishers played an essential role in rebuilding Italy’s democratic and republican culture after Fascism.

A difficult coexistence: castles and cities in central and northern Italy (tenth-twelfth centuries)

In the long period between the tenth and twelfth centuries, an important political and institutional evolution took place: a new form of collective government (the commune) arose in the cities of northern and central Italy, and at the same time autonomous lordships, focused on castles, crystallized in the countryside. They were powers that inevitably competed for political control over the territory and above all for control over economic resources. This paper therefore deals with incastellamento, analyzing it from a specific point of view: the relationships between cities and the castles built in their districts. Through analysis of the Tuscan situation and comparison with other particularly significant case-studies (Rome, Ravenna, Genoa, Milan, and Verona), the development of fortified settlements during the first phase of incastellamento (tenth-eleventh centuries) in the areas closest to the cities will be examined, followed by the changes that these networks of settlements underwent with the expansion and consolidation of urban power over the countryside (twelfth century).

The debate on Jesuit scole in sixteenth-century Padua

This study analyses the different steps in the conflict between the Republic of Venice and the Society of Jesus, which culminated in the closure of the Jesuit scole in Padua in the late sixteenth century. This episode, already known to researchers, is then studied through analysis of the unpublished documents conserved at the Paduan State Archives.

From inn to hotel. The economics and sociology of hospitality in eighteenth-century Naples

The article analyses the development of rented accommodation facilities in the city of Naples, from the 1740s until the Napoleonic decade. Except for Paris, recent historiography on mobility and migration has devoted little attention to temporary accommodations such as hotels, inns, hostels, and rooms for hire. The essay explores the relationship between these structures and their location in the city, focusing on the professionals who ran them, the services provided, and lastly the customers themselves. This has made it possible to detect the gradual differentiation of facilities in the Neapolitan accommodation market after the arrival of wealthy travellers and foreign businessmen who spread consumption models originating in Northern Europe. Alongside the new types of hotels, traditional structures persisted, accommodating workers and professionals «in transit», but also Neapolitans without a fixed home.

Genesis of an ideal: Bruno Dudan and marittimista Romanity

This article analyses the influence of the «myth of Rome» among Italian intellectual and academic élites during the era of Mussolini. As it happened, this myth, which had been the main vehicle of fascist ideology towards the popular masses, affected the scientific writings of an important Venetian jurist and historian, Bruno Dudan (1905-1943), whose work constituted a significant corpus of articles and monographs dedicated to the history of the Republic of Venice and its institutions, with a particular focus on the Serenissima’s maritime colonies. By examining these publications’ language and recurring themes, an attempt will be made to deconstruct the interpretative pattern adopted by Dudan to justify the original «Romanity» – and the consequent «Italianity» – of the Slavic and Greek territories that had once been subject to Venetian domination and had then become the target of the planned military expansion towards the Eastern Mediterranean pursued by Mussolini’s regime. The result of this analysis is an original mythography in some way contradictory to fascist propaganda because of its complex intertwining with Dudan’s personal ideals, the spreading Irredentist claims of his era, and the long-standing memories of the «myth of Venice»: along with these elements, in Dudan’s view the «myth of Rome» constituted not only an ideological framework but a genealogical background as well.

Foreign immigration in Republican Italy: early stages and lines of development, 1963-1979

This paper attempts to investigate the migrations of people to Italy from a historical point of view, aiming to approach their origins and features through a comparison of different periods, methodologies and available sources. The main objective is to trace the historical trends of migration to Italy from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, because during this time new, original and significant flows of foreign immigrants could be seen in Italy. In this specific case, the socioeconomic impact and political debate will be highlighted to frame the spreading phenomenon of immigration within the broader picture of the history of the Italian Republic and its political, economic and social framework.