Franco Venturi

Franco Venturi (Rome, 1914 - Turin, December 14, 1994) was an Italian historian, essayist and journalist, a scholar of the Enlightenment in Italy and of the history of Russia, and an anti-fascist active in the Resistance.

The younger Venturi attended Liceo classico Cavour and during the Resistance and later was active in the ranks of the Action Party; he was captured and subjected to confinement in Avigliano between 1941 and 1943.

[1] Venturi's greatest achievement is his multivolume work Settecento Riformatore, of which three volumes have been translated into English under the general series title The End of the Old Regime in Europe In addition, he published a volume of his selected essays, under the title Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century.

Grendi continued the studies of Gabriel Le Bras to investigate statutes and real life of the Roman Catholic local and lay confraternities.

He affirmed they weren't originated by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but by a natural process of group devotion which made lay confraternities the main center of the Ligurian popular spirituality until the suppression decreed by Napoleon in the Enlightment century.