Italian Enlightenment

In Italy the main centers of diffusion of the Enlightenment were Naples and Milan:[4][5] in both cities the intellectuals took public office and collaborated with the Bourbon and Habsburg administrations.

The city of Naples, together with the French capital, best carried out the "century of enlightenment"; in fact, it did not simply absorb this current, on the contrary, it generated it to a great extent, giving life to new architectural forms, new philosophical thoughts and laying the foundations of modern economy and law.

To be remembered also the birth of the economic school of Antonio Genovesi, who brought several innovations in the field of national economy and not only, followed also in Apulia by the man of letters Ferrante de Gemmis Maddalena, who founded an Enlightenment Academy, and by the economist Giuseppe Palmieri, director of the Supreme Council of Finance of the Kingdom of Naples at the end of the 18th century.

Connected to the Accademia dei Pugni was the magazine Il Caffè, a cultural sheet close to the Enlightenment theories inspired by the first modern newspapers such as The Spectator.

[14] Beccaria's is the most famous work of the Italian Enlightenment: the juridical treatise Dei delitti e delle pene published in 1763, in which, referring to the theories of the philosophes and to some recent legislations such as that of Tsarina Elisabeth Petrovna, he proposes with rigorous logic the abolition of torture and the death penalty.

In the Duchy of Milan the Empress Maria Theresa and her son Giuseppe II gave great impulse to the spread of the new Enlightenment theories and in particular through the rebirth of the University of Pavia, in fact the sovereigns, inspired by the principles of enlightened absolutism, made significant administrative reforms to the university, which became one of the best in Europe, they provided it with new buildings and laboratories and called to teach professors of continental fame, such as Alessandro Volta, Antonio Scarpa, Lazzaro Spallanzani and Lorenzo Mascheroni.