section_path: National variations/Italy
section_name: Italy
paragraph_text: Italy
  
  In Italy the main centers of diffusion of the Enlightenment were Naples and Milan: in both cities the intellectuals took public office and collaborated with the Bourbon and Habsburg administrations. In Naples, Antonio Genovesi, Ferdinando Galiani, and Gaetano Filangieri were active under the tolerant King Charles of Bourbon. However, the Neapolitan Enlightenment, like Vico's philosophy, remained almost always in the theoretical field. Only later, many Enlighteners animated the unfortunate experience of the Parthenopean Republic. In Milan, however, the movement strove to find concrete solutions to problems. The center of discussions was the magazine Il Caffè (1762–1766), founded by brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri (famous philosophers and writers, as well as their brother Giovanni), who also gave life to the Accademia dei Pugni, founded in 1761. Minor centers were Tuscany, Veneto, and Piedmont, where among others, Pompeo Neri worked.
  
  From Naples, Genovesi influenced a generation of southern Italian intellectuals and university students. His textbook Della diceosina, o sia della Filosofia del Giusto e dell'Onesto (1766) was a controversial attempt to mediate between the history of moral philosophy on the one hand and the specific problems encountered by 18th-century commercial society on the other. It contained the greater part of Genovesi's political, philosophical, and economic thought, which became a guidebook for Neapolitan economic and social development.
  
  Science flourished as Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani made break-through discoveries in electricity. Pietro Verri was a leading economist in Lombardy. Historian Joseph Schumpeter states he was "the most important pre-Smithian authority on Cheapness-and-Plenty." The most influential scholar on the Italian Enlightenment has been Franco Venturi. Italy also produced some of the Enlightenment's greatest legal theorists, including Beccaria, Giambattista Vico, and Francesco Mario Pagano.