Events in the mid eighteenth century mark in some ways the end of the period, provide verdicts on progress through the early modern period and trigger some conclusions about the nature of Italian society.
From the summer of 1763 famine conditions developed through most of the Kingdom of Naples and afflicted others parts of Italy, notably the southern Papal State and Tuscany, through to 1767; a reasonable harvest in 1764 was followed by bad ones in 1765 and 1766. Varied adverse weather conditions through the previous winter and spring had severely affected all foods, not just cereals; and unlike a similar mainland crisis in 1759, Sicilian or Middle Eastern supplies could not come to the rescue. The situation tested the resources and abilities of a reforming government in Naples under Bernardo Tanucci, and the systems that had been developed to cope with food shortages over the past two centuries. ‘We have begged at all the gates of Europe’, declared Tanucci in April 1764, before getting some help from Piedmont. Naples was known to be better organised over food supplies, and helping the poor, so huge numbers initially headed there from around the Kingdom. Rebellious conditions developed in the city, though a total revolt was possibly avoided by the popular belief that the wrath of God was more to blame than government incompetence. Troops remained loyal enough to keep some control. Tanucci reported on major tumults in cities like Altamura, Crotone, Rossone and Taranto. Villages rose against feudal lords and pillaged their castles. Charitable resources could not cope. In bitterly cold December 1764, English ambassador William Hamilton reported seeing 2000 sick in a Neapolitan hospital ‘crowded together with no other covering but a shirt which they have worn four months’, having no bread for twenty-four hours ‘owing to the failure of the charitable subscriptions that have hitherto supported them’. He also commented on ‘the numberless emaciated objects that present themselves in every street’.1
Maybe 40,000 inhabitants of Naples, and 200,000 from the Kingdom died of starvation and disease before the crisis was over. Rome and southern parts of the Papal State as well as Tuscany (especially Pistoia, San Miniato and Lucca) were badly hit, but the casualties seemed fewer, even if reports came in of people dying on their feet from hunger. Rome in early 1764 was invaded by the poor from the surrounding state seeking relief, and troops were needed for control. Papal Romagna or the Ferrarese, and Tuscan areas around Livorno, Pisa and Empoli could cope with actual food supplies and high prices. The Roman Annona and Florentine Abbon-danza food-organising offices had more resources; in comparison with Naples the governments could raise more money and secure more supplies (as from France) through the ports of Civitavecchia and Livorno, and charitable resources appeared greater. This did not prevent some riotous conditions, as in Perugia, Fara or Ferentino – which threatened to establish a separate Republic.
These famine years indicate an historical turning point, and mark the beginning of the end of the early modern period. They tested governments and society which, in the case of Naples and Tuscany, were already reforming under the impact of intellectuals and writers. The failures to cope properly with the crises, and the lessons drawn about fundamental flaws in Italian society and mentalities, produced more reform campaigning, led from Lombardy and Tuscany, under internationally famous writers, ministers and advisers like Cesare Beccaria, Pietro and Alessandro Verri and Pompeo Neri. Tanucci and Antonio Genovesi renewed their reform efforts, and were followed by Gaetano Filangieri, Ferdinando Galiani, Domenico Grimaldi, Giuseppe Palmieri and many others.
The writers and reform campaigns reflected on the weaknesses of the society and politics of early modern Italy, but also on some strengths and ‘progress’ since the mid sixteenth century or earlier. From the late seventeenth century an educational and intellectual climate fostered new thinking. The Italians drew on the writings of key thinkers from France, England and Scotland – Descartes, Newton, John Cary, Montesquieu and David Hume; later Rousseau and Helvetius. Some of the Italians, like Genovesi, Beccaria and Filangieri, were to contribute economic and legal ideas to the cosmopolitan enlightenment, and reform policies in France, Russia and America.2 Many leading figures came from patrician and noble elite groups, many were part of the church, like abbot-professor Genovesi or the pioneering historian Ludovico Muratori (who for years served as a parish priest as well as archivist-librarian to the Duke of Modena), and educated by Jesuits (like Beccaria). The old ambience of the elite academies changed, and new academies were formed, notably Celestino Galiani’s in Naples in 1732, which triggered major discussions of economic problems or law as well as natural philosophy and mathematics. This provided a background for practical advice for reform, involving his nephew Ferdinando Galiani. Giam Battista Vico and Genovese rejuvenated Naples university in various disciplines, and that produced many reforming graduates and professors.
Out of the supposedly backward Kingdom of Naples came a major reform ethos and programme. A civic, legal section of the elite, concentrating on legal theory and some anti-clericalism, had persisted through the seventeenth century and was then stimulated by the fall of Spanish rule from 1700 and by a degree of political chaos to analyse and seek to mend society. They realised that the South had many riches and potential for wealth, but also many impediments. Too much land was owned and controlled by uncaring lazy landowners, secular and clerical; the peasants were grossly ignorant and incompetent farmers; peasants and their communities were massively in debt to landowners (and the famine had made this even worse); commerce and the handling of key products like silk, wool and olive oil were in the hands of foreigners (whether English, Tuscan or Venetian). The ‘feudal’ systems inhibited not only good land-management, but sound administration and due legal process. Open critical analysis had limits; when Pietro Giannone in his Istoria Civile (Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1723) blamed southern problems on the feudal dependence on the Papacy, with excessive papal influence over true religion and society, and called for complete separation of church and state, he was not only excommunicated, but suffered popular attacks – and had to go into exile. He continued his anti-clerical attacks, and criticism of the detrimental effects of monasticism and church landholding, from Geneva, where he became a Calvinist. Seemingly under papal pressure he was tricked, arrested in Geneva and smuggled to Piedmont in 1734 – to die in a Turin jail in 1748.
The 1730s and 1740s, as Franco Venturi strongly emphasised, saw the first major stage of Italian-wide critical analysis and some reform attempts, with an emphasis on economic and legal problems, and historical analyses of Italy’s social and legal realities – led by Muratori. The problems of war helped generate major campaigns in many states to improve road and water communications, and land analysis for tax purposes. From 1763–4 came fresh impetus, initially focused on Beccaria’s very influential Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishment), and a Milan periodical Il Caffe (1764–6), involving him with the Verri brothers. Beccaria notably attacked the practice of torture and capital punishment, but – influenced by Alessandro Verri’s experience as a lawyer dealing with Milan prisoners – his work was an indictment of much else in law and society. Law and punishment should be divorced from social hierarchy and from moral concepts, and proportionately linked to damage to society. Society, laws and their effects must be analysed with a geometric spirit, rationally, from self-evident principles, and the overall aim should be ‘the greatest happiness [felicità] being spread among the greatest number’. This egalitarian and utilitarian philosophy had him criticised as a socialista by the Venetian Ferdinando Facchinei, ex-monk, satirist, agricultural reformer and author of a life of Isaac Newton.3 That Beccaria, like Giannone, was too radical for many other elite reformers, rendered their campaigns more difficult. Felicità is often translated as ‘happiness’, but ‘well-being’ might be better, since its use implied physical satisfactions as well as psychological, as Pietro Verri’s slightly earlier Discorso sulla felicità (1763) makes clear.
The periodical Il Caffe under the Verri brothers was influenced by the English The Spectator journal for style, literary approach and lightness of touch in many articles, and by the French Encyclopédie for its willingness to analyse and comment on all manner of subjects, using a significant number of contributors. Most contributors to this, and much reform literature and work, came from sectors of the noble elite, often poorer and more vulnerable members. Aware of the conservative nature of their social order, and the ignorance of the middling sort, they aimed at gently educating and cajoling the elites to reform agriculture, commerce, the law and morals. Ideally or practically change would best be produced by the enlightened few advising and educating princely rulers to put political force and law behind some changes. Policies needed to be tailored to existing states, princely or republican; there were no serious campaigns for democracy or Italian-wide nationalism. Understandably, much of the best work came out of Lombardy, now directly ruled by the Habsburgs from Vienna (where a leading minister Kaunitz much favoured the Verri circle), and Tuscany, ruled by Peter Leopold, younger brother and successor of the Emperor Joseph II.
After the 1760s crisis, much discussion focused on grain supplies, the merits and disadvantages of free or freer trade, in foodstuffs and then other commercial activities. Tanucci, Genovesi and others realised that where free trade might help northern Italian states, and more so Britain, Neapolitan commerce and industry needed some protection until reformed from within. Tuscany abolished food control in 1766, and by 1775 promoted free trade between states. By the 1780s Naples had abolished or loosened many internal tariffs and trade controls. A considerable literature aimed at landowners, and even literate smallholders and artisans, was published to improve agriculture production, drain and terrace the land, improve implements and machinery for treating soil and crops, processing olive oil, spinning and weaving cloth. Some capital went into practices and education. There were erosions into the less productive land-holding systems outlined earlier in this book. ‘Feudalism’ was heavily attacked, and in the Kingdom of Naples about 150 major towns were brought back under direct government jurisdiction and control by 1789. The guilds, key aspects of corporate society, came under increasing attack as too restrictive and anti-enterprise; they were gradually abolished in Lombardy 1769–74 (with Pietro Verri and Beccaria as activists), and in Tuscany 1770–9. Confraternities and philanthropic procedures similarly were targeted. Muratori had led an attack on charity, for failing to help the real poor, encouraging the idle and diverting money from beneficial investment in land improvements. Confraternities were part of this detrimental activity in the eyes of some; but also they were seen as undermining proper parochial religion. Peter Leopold in 1785 accepted such arguments and abolished virtually all of them in Tuscany. One of his advisers, Lorenzo Mehus, had written a book that aimed ‘to show that they [confraternities] are contrary to sacred laws, harmful to parish jurisdiction, and offensive to that status which, by right of divine decree, is held among their flock by rectors of churches, who in our day reside in them enjoying no respect and nearly insult’.4
Thus key institutions of early modern society were attacked and depleted. Anti-clericalism grew more rampant in some quarters, and in published works. Carlantonio Pilati, professor of civil law at Trent, in his 1767 Di una riforma d’Italia produced one of the most swingeing attacks on the economic, religious, charitable and legal situations; and included a diatribe against the Inquisition, which had condemned his earlier writings on natural law. The Jesuits were the target internationally, from scandals in South America, alleged influences on royal courts, excessive show or ostentatious wealth and (in the eyes of Jansensists and Dominicans as well as Protestants), gross moral equivocation. Finally Pope Clement XIV was pressurised to abolish the Order in 1773. In Italy this was a significant educational loss, though Jesuit teachers could find roles in other institutions. The Jesuits had honed the sharp minds of many who came to demolish their colleges.5
The visions and assessments of Italian society in the mid and late eighteenth century, by natives and non-Italian visitors, were ambivalent and misleading. They depicted joys and miseries, felicità and immoral indolence. Ex-Jesuit Abbot Saverio Bettinelli echoes Machiavelli’s attack on foreign encroachment on Italy:
Italy the first innovator of almost all the arts, no longer sees any of them flourish in glory; she once taught and overlorded all peoples, now she follows as adulator, and tribute payer to all; with varied commerce, but bloodless and constrained; with many governments, but little regulation; with fertile lands but poor; with a thousand studies, but few learned men recognised and rewarded, all united and enclosed by the Alps and Sea, but very diverse, and discordant in languages, in genius, in usages, money, measures, laws and the customs of the people.6
This Preface, from 1775, has a rhetorical exaggeration and deprecation of Italian talents. But many others noted the rich potential, the natural abundance of Italy, and the poor use of it. An indifference to using resources properly, whether by complacent landowners or ineffectual governments, was commented on by visitors. The ‘many governments’ of different types complicated the improvement of economies, and an ability to fend off British and French competition. But Republican, papal and secular governments may arguably have been too similar, as Giorgio Chittolini has suggested; the political and social networking of the elites and the executive body had blurred the distinctions between public and private in all cases, to the detriment of effective change, and the incorporation of new elements into government, administration and the economy.7
Several eighteenth-century visitors echoed the ‘bloodless’ accusation in a slightly different way, seeing Italian society as effeminate and lacking in moral constraint. They seized on the phenomenon of the cecisbei, the unrelated escorts of married women absent from compliant husbands. Before marriage upper society women were enclosed at home or taught in nunneries with no say over marriage partners; on marriage they could parade with escorts, presumed lovers. As Thomas Watkins wrote in 1792:
Before marriage their women are nuns, and after it libertines. At twelve years they are immured in a convent, from which there is no return, but upon the hard condition of receiving from their parents a husband whom they have never seen. If dissatisfied with him (as it generally happens) they are at liberty (from universal custom) to chuse their Cavalieri Serventi, or Cecisbei, who attend them in all public places, for their husbands dare not, assist at their toilette, and, in a word, do every thing they are ordered; for which the ladies sacrifice their own virtue, and their husband’s honour.8
Doubtless this applied to few women, but it marked a change from the more restrained central centuries of our period. Many women had had more say over marriage than this implies, had better relations with husbands but had not been able to move so freely in public.
In selecting social snapshots in this concluding chapter, I have offset this foreign verdict of immorality and dishonour among the elite, with pertinent social criticism from others in the elite, and the misery and mortality of the poor in famine conditions. The events of the 1760s were taken as an indictment of our ‘early modern society’. Some of the corporate structures and institutions described in various chapters, and seen as sometimes evolving beneficially – guilds, neighbourhoods and network structures, confraternities, hospitals and parishes – were found wanting, in the social reality of selfish turmoil in and around Naples, Rome and lesser cities; and in the writings of critics. Through to the French Revolution and an ultimately disastrous French occupation of the peninsula, social reforms were attempted, with some successes, in virtually all states, princely or republican. Gains were made in legal practice, in education from universities to practical manuals for agriculture and industry, in freedom of speech and writing. There were winners among adventurous landowners and smallholders, especially in Tuscany and the Veneto. But a more efficient agricultural scene in the same areas could mean more landless underemployed contadini, with less common land as a safety valve, fewer charitable institutions and handouts, and attempts to rationalise Christianity as in Tuscany took away the psychological consolations of ‘superstitious’ religion. There might be more job opportunities for displaced peasants in re-industrialising Bologna or Piedmont – especially in the silk industry where Beccaria played a beneficial role, and sought higher wage-rates – but in most areas there were probably more vulnerable poor. The social scene was set for the chaos and misery of the early nineteenth century, out of which a more integrated Italy slowly emerged.
Our early modern period ends with a combination of disasters in the 1760s and 1790s, and in between partially successful attacks on early modern institutions and attitudes that had once been social strengths, but were now apparently atrophied. Finally it is worth emphasising some aspects of continuity and change, and some paradoxes. Fundamental geographical factors remained as impediments to communication, dictators of economic wealth and causes of disasters. However, people and nature changed some features with new crops, losses of forests and alteration of waterways. Against natural barriers there was throughout much physical movement, between country and town, between south, centre and north. Printing by the mid sixteenth century accelerated the transference of ideas and attitudes. Concepts of honour and status became more prominent at the same time, but in reality hardly rendered society more rigid and stratified in a class or caste system. Italian elites were varied, fluid and alternated between conflict and co-operation. Local hierarchies of society – noble, official, artisan in towns, or landlord, factor, tenant and bandit in the contado – worked together whether in common cause against a common enemy, or for business interests and political patronage concerns. Jurisdictions became more ‘feudal’ until the excesses were attacked in the eighteenth century. But in most of Italy this meant less transference of power from central government than in other European states, and the anti-feudal attacks were more against economic inefficiency and lassitude than against brutal exploitation of peasants. Part of the re-feudalisation was governed by shifts of investments from some international trade, textile industries, later shipping to the land in the mid sixteenth century onwards. Eventually the different Italian economies were overtaken in world significance by various non-Italian economies, notably in the Netherlands, parts of France and Britain. But within Italy there were very complex shifts and balances or gains and losses between cities, between rural and urban areas and between trades and commodities. The starting points by the fifteenth century of a high proportion of the Italian population living in urban communities, considerable interconnection between city and contado, strong corporate institutions or social networks in many cities, and a mentality that favoured conspicuous consumption and display, meant that much of Italian society could weather economic storms and competition through to the eighteenth century.
Changes in household, clan and family structures followed no easy pattern, and they were often governed by local economic conditions. Family affections in a modern sense probably developed through the period. Though renaissance attitudes emphasising individual virtu may have had an impact at the beginning of our period, the corporateness of Italian society rather than any individualism is what remains striking. Corporate loyalties and identities outside the family have been stressed in discussing urban districts and neighbourhoods, guilds and confraternities, parish identities and organisation. All may have lost their vitality and broader purposes when the enlightenment attacks were launched. In the resulting long transition to a fully modern society the Italian extended family or clan remained the only hope for those in trouble and need.