Antonio Trampus

Commercial reform against the tide: Reapproaching the eighteenth-century decline of the republics of Venice and the United Provinces

The emergence of ‘civilized monarchies’, reformed European territorial states that had turned commercial, created major challenges to the old trade republics of Venice and the United Provinces. Would they perish and cease to exist, which seemed a logical corollary to the recent history of their decline, or might they be reconstituted and integrated into a new interstate system? Rather than to approach this question from the perspective of the history of political thought, which offers a range of rival outlooks on this issue, the present article treats the issue more from the inside and thus connects theories about decline to their concrete manifestations and experiences; from the spheres of diplomatic tensions over unpaid debts, publishing networks and the oscillation of consular and maritime law reform between Venice and the Dutch Republic.

Francesco Saverio Salfi and the Eulogy for Antonio Serra: Politics, Freemasonry, and the Consumption of Culture in the Early 19th Century

Francesco Saverio Salfi published his eulogy on Antonio Serra in 1802 in Milan.1 Although this might seem like the customary formal tribute, the text is actually full of far greater significance, of relevance to the political climate and the Italian and French freemasonry of the beginning of the 19th century, as well as the Neapolitan culture of Antonio Genovesi and Gaetano Filangieri. The aim of the present work is to illustrate the social and Masonic context in which the eulogy on Serra was written and the role and character of Francesco Saverio Salfi.

Un modèle pour le constitutionnalisme des Lumières : la culture napolitaine et les droits de l’homme

Dans les pages suivantes j’essaie de reconstruire le parcours a travers lequel la culture constitutionnelle italienne qui commence a se former dans la deuxieme moitie du XVIIIe siecle est arrivee a elaborer une specifique theorie des droits de l’homme. Le resultat de cette elaboration est la Declarations des droits de l’homme du Projet de la constitution de la Republique napolitaine de Francesco Mario Pagano (1799). Une declaration qui differe profondement des analogues declarations des droit...

Gianrinaldo Carli at the centre of the Milanese Enlightenment

Gianrinaldo Carli was a central figure in the origin of the Milanese Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century. Carlis political career as well as his works connected him both to the mid-century reforms by Pompeo Neri and to the times of Beccaria and the Verri brothers—the heyday of Lombard intellectual life in Europe. Not originally from Lombardy, but from the Venetian periphery, Carli became an erudite scholar of witchcraft and magic and an influential functionary of the Habsburg administration in Milan. He remains most famous for his works on money and his contributions to the journal Il Caffè. Most of his later political writings, which were widely circulated in Italy following the American Revolution, originated in debates with Pietro Verri over the nature of Natural Law, of the Social Contract, and the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. They illustrate key aspects of Lombard political culture of the 1780s: a culture that was critical of Rousseau, trustful of the reformist experience and supportive of Enlightened Absolutism. Within this context, Carlis works have traditionally been difficult to place.