El concepto de Ilustración ha sido, casi exclusivamente, estudiado en Francia, Inglaterra o Alemania. En este caso, el autor se centra en Italia, donde ha sido especialemte conocida por su música y literatura en este período. Franco Venturi, además, ha querido analizar las teorías políticas, económicas y la problemática social.

This work offers an examination of how Newtonian science affected the early 18th-century Enlightenment in Italy in terms of religion and politics.

The Enlightenment has often been written about as a sequence of disembodied 'great ideas'. The aim of this book is to put the beliefs of the Enlightenment firmly into their social context, by revealing the national soils in which they were rooted and the specific purposes for which they were used. It brings out the regional divergences of the Enlightenment experience, shaped by different local intellectual and economic priorities. At the same time it also shows how central concerns (with virtue, patriotism, liberty and modernisation) were shared everywhere, and how the writings of certain key areas (such as France and England) came to be influential elsewhere. The thirteen essays, each written by a historian specialising in the particular country, examine national contexts from Sweden to Italy, from Russia to North America. As well as focusing attention on the interplay of thought and action, ideology and society, the book offers important insights into the place of the intelligentsia in the modern world.

For centuriesthe society and politics of Old Regime Europe relied on the strong connectionbetween past, present, and future and on a belief in the unstoppable continuityof time. What happened during the eighteenth century when the Age of Revolutionsclaimed to cancel the previous social order and announced the dawn of a newera? This book explores how antiquarianism provided new political bodies withallegedly time-hallowed traditions and so served as a source of legitimacy forreshaping European politics. The love for antiquities forged a common languageof political communication within a burgeoning public sphere. To understandwhy this happened, Marco Cavarzere focuses on the cultural debates taking placein the Italian states from 1748 until 1796. During this period, governmentstried to establish regional "national cultures" through erudite scholarship,with the intent of creating new administrative and political centralizationwithin individual Italian states. Meanwhile, other sectors of local societiesused the tools of antiquarianism in order to offer a counter-narrative on thesepolitical reforms. Ultimately, thisbook proposes a localized way of reading antiquarian texts. Far from presentingtimeless knowledge, erudition in fact gave voice to specific tensions whichwere linked to restricted political arenas and regional public opinion.

This essential book fills a serious gap in the field by synthesizing modern Italian history and placing it in a fully European context. Emphasizing globalization, Italy traces the country's transformation from a land of emigration to one of immigration and its growing cultural importance. Including coverage of the April 2008 elections, this updated edition offers expanded examinations of contemporary Italy's economic, social, and cultural development, a deepened discussion on immigration, and four new biographical sketches. Author Spencer M. Di Scala discusses the role of women, gives ample attention to the Italian South, and provides a picture of how ordinary Italians live. Cast in a clear and lively style that will appeal to readers, this comprehensive account is an indispensable addition to the field.

Examines the nexus of learned culture and architecture in the 1730s to 1750s, including major building projects in Rome undertaken by the popes.