Volume 12 // The Age of Enlightment and of Reforms

The focus of this volume is the Eighteenth Century. Situated in the middle of the strengthening of the Habsburg’s power on the peninsula from one side and the arrival of Napoleon to the Po valley in 1796, this century was great for Italy, too. Even in this period there were deep transformations that allowed to overcome the stagnation of the Seventeenth and to build up the premises for the imminent Risorgimento (Unification of Italy). Thanks to the wind of a cultural change inspired by the Enlightenment and to the birth of a historical and economic secular culture (synthesized by such important names as Pietro Verri, Beccaria, Genovesi, Galiani and Filangeri), Italy of those years saw the reformation-oriented work of the “enlightened despotism”. Various essays analyze the work of a consolidation – in the modern sense of the word – of states and of their structures (for example the introduction of cadasters), limitations of privileges based on the social class, reduction of ecclesiastical power, foundation of professional bureaucracies that were not aristocratic any more.
At the same time, the cities witnessed the dismantling of corporations become a brake to a free development of the economy, while the Northern country-side saw the birth of the capitalistic agriculture based on the class of the renters. Besides this plot of events and turning points, specific and essential moments of the Italian life of the Eighteenth century are being studied. A new science based on the experimental practice is being founded. It is particularly connected to the name of Lazzaro Spallanzani. The urban reality presents new shapes and ways. An original adventure of the Italian Barocco music starts.

SUMMARY

Culture and society in Italy of the reforms
Giuseppe Ricuperati

An economic development and reforms in Lombardy
Franco Saba

Beccaria and the penal reform
Giuseppe Armani

The Leopoldine reformism in Tuscany
Ivo Bagliani, Roberto G. Salvadori

The Emilian rural areas in the Eighteenth century between the conservation and the reforms
Fiorenzo Landi

The Borbonic reformism in Naples
Anna Maria Lo

States without reforms
Dino Cupanetto

Lazzaro Spallanzani and the scientific thought of the Eighteenth century
Gianni Micheli

Literature and society in Italy in the Eighteenth century
Marco Cerruti, Giovanni Pagliero

Italian life in the Eighteenth century
Aurora Scotti

The great music of the Barocco Age
Franco Bezza