Italy, 1760-1815

9 Italy, – Maurizio Isabella Until the s, the map of Italian political journalism, reflecting the complex political conditions of a peninsula divided into a mosaic of ab- solute states and ancient republics, still presented features which had been established very much earlier.  While Mantua, Bologna, Rimini, Modena, Parma, Florence, Venice and Foligno could boast the existence of newspapers whose circulation extended well beyond the limits of state boundaries, the capitals of absolute states like Milan, Naples and Rome only had their official publications, dry bulletins listing official events, decrees and news from foreign courts intended only for a small circle of civil servants. The success of gazettes printed in peripheral cities – the foundation of which, in some cases, dated backto the pre- vious century – depended on the fact that their location enabled them both to collect information more quickly from across the borders and to escape the control of central governments. For this reason they enjoyed a broader readership and a wider circulation. Venice and Genoa were the two most important centres for the collection of international political news. News was collected by specialised agencies from diplomats resi- dent in the cities where they operated, or brought from abroad, although the channels for the further transmission of international news and the networks established across the peninsula are still largely unknown.  During the period between  and , the political press in the Italian peninsula underwent dramatic changes. The number of gazettes grew steadily , and their geographical distribution changed quite dramat- ically , as the centres of political journalism moved from outlying areas to the capital cities of the states where reforms were more vigorously imple- mented and in which a high degree of cultural tolerance was permitted.  Milan, the capital of Habsburg Lombardy, Venice and Florence became the three most important centres of information. In Milan there were no fewer than five gazettes published in Italian. The most important were the Gazzetta enciclopedica, started in  and edited by the famous intellec- tual Francesco Soave, and the Giornale enciclopedico di Milano, which first appeared in . Both newspapers coupled political information with   Maurizio Isabella literary matters. The most widely read newspaper was the Gazzetta di Milano, the semi-official voice of the Lombard government. This weekly Gazzetta came into being in  to replace the Ragguagli di vari paesi thanks to the intervention of the Plenipotentiary Minister Count Firmian. Firmian appointed the famous poet Giuseppe Parini as its editor in or- der to improve the quality of what had been a badly written and dull collection of news. The Milanese public also had access to local trans- lations of foreign newspapers, like the Staffetta di Sciaffusa, the Staffetta del nord and the Estratto delle notizie di Vienna, Italian versions re- spectively of a Swiss, German and Austrian gazette.  Milan effectively became the main centre of dissemination of news coming from the other side of the Alps. Couriers tookten days to get to Milan from Paris, travelling via Lyon, Chambery and Turin. From Milan it took fifteen to twenty days for international news to become available in Venice and Florence, and around twenty to twenty-five days for it to reach Rome and Naples. Venice was the second most important centre of information in north- ern Italy. The oldest newspapers were the Nuovo Postiglione, published as early as , and the Storia dell’anno, a yearly periodical launched in , which attempted to put political information into a historical per- spective by summarising the main events of the year. In the second half of the eighteenth century Venetian political journalism was dominated by the figure of Domenico Caminer, who wrote for the above-mentioned newspapers as well as for the Nuova gazzetta veneta, the daily Diario veneto and the Prospetto degli affari attuali d’Europa, a quarterly journal which first appeared in  following the model of the Storia dell’anno. From , the Tuscan Notizie del Mondo was reprinted in Venice by the printer Graziosi, but later, thanks to the journalist Giuseppe Compagnoni, the Venetian edition began publishing its own material and became a com- pletely new and original newspaper.  The Tuscan press became particularly lively in the s, when Florence became a centre of attraction for gazetteers coming from other states. The Tuscan capital then boasted the important Notizie del Mondo and the Gazzetta universale for international information, together with the Giornale fiorentino istorico-politico letterario and the government- controlled Gazzetta toscana for local news.  As far as the rest of the peninsula is concerned, political information remained extremely scarce. In Turin, the political centre of the Savoy dynasty’s territories, from , the absolutist government allowed only one gazette, the Journal de Turin et des provinces, which was published both in French and Italian, and replaced by the Giornale degli avvisi e notizie del Piemonte in . Sardinia had its own newspaper, the Gazzettino ebdomadario della Sardegna, which Italy – conveyed the opinion of the Piedmontese administration, while French newspapers circulated in the French-speaking region of Savoy.  In Rome information was dominated by only two periodicals. The annual almanac Notizie per l’anno contained a list of the most important public events of the Papal court. The gazette, entitled Diario ordinario di Roma, was issued twice or three times a weekfrom  until , when it was divided into two separate newspapers devoted respectively to for- eign and internal affairs. Both newspapers represented the official voice of the Papal government and informed readers of official ceremonies, the life of the main aristocratic families of the city, foreign dynasties, wars and unusual events . The only semi-independent newspaper pub- lished in Rome was the Notizie politiche, inaugurated in . Elsewhere in the Papal states, however, provincial papers could be found in cities like Bologna, Pesaro and Foligno.  In Naples the political press was even less developed: the twice-weekly Gazzetta civica napoletana, used by the government to publish official communications, was the only product of local journalism. Its diffusion was probably extremely limited outside the capital. In Sicily the first gazettes were printed only in .  However, alongside these local journalistic products, foreign gazettes circulated and competed. In northern Italy the most important of these was the Nuove di diverse corti e paesi, issued in Italian from  in Lugano, a Swiss town near the Lombard border. The Nuove, which were circulated through thirty-six different centres of distribution across the peninsula, represented one of the most reliable sources of information about international affairs.  Some other foreign gazettes were reprinted in their original language, as was the case with the Gazette de Leyde in Milan and the Gazette d’Amsterdam and the Courier du Bas-Rhin in Venice. Although gazettes mainly circulated within the state boundaries, they sometimes reached neighbouring countries. In Naples in , there were more than fifty subscribers to the Gazette de Leyde and to the Florentine Gazzetta universale.  The Milanese Gazzetta enciclopedica di Milano was distributed in Piedmont, Genoa, Venice and Verona, central Italy, Tuscany, Rome, Naples and Vienna. Most of the above-mentioned newspapers appeared either weekly or two or three times a week. The first daily newspapers to appear in Italy were the Venetian urban gazettes Diario veneto, the Giornale veneto and the Novellista veneto, local news-sheets which were published respectively in ,  and between  and . Otherwise the majority of newspapers paid far more attention to European rather than local events. Franco Venturi’s masterly reconstruction of European and American events, based on the extensive use of Italian gazettes, allows us to fully ap- preciate the cosmopolitan nature of Italian political journalism. During  Maurizio Isabella the s and s Italian readers had a chance to follow closely all major international events, ranging from the Corsican revolution and the Bohemian peasant revolts to the Mediterranean expedition of Catherine II and the Greekrevolt against the Ottoman Sultan. Gazettes like the Notizie del Mondo and the Nuove di diverse corti e paesi were also well informed regarding the partitioning of Poland, the Pugachev revolt in Russia and the first signs of revolution in America.  To conclude this general survey, attention should be drawn to the ex- istence of hand-written gazettes, in addition to the printed press, in Tuscany and Venetia and probably elsewhere. Producing manuscript gaz- ettes long remained a profitable activity. In a recent study of a Venetian weekly manuscript gazette called Europa, Mario Infelise stresses that this gazette, which survived until , was produced in the same way as its seventeenth-century counterparts. It was in fact a collection of news drawn from European gazettes, letters or dispatches delivered by couri- ers or provided by diplomats and civil servants and dictated to copyists. Interestingly, the transaction in  between its last owner, the famous journalist Domenico Caminer, and his predecessor simply involved the purchase of lists of foreign correspondents and subscribers.  In Italy these traditional forms of information survived until almost the end of the ancien regime. In pre-revolutionary Italy the publishing industry was regulated by the guilds, and this favoured the monopoly of a limited group of fam- ilies who handed on the trade from father to son. Although this system was a constraint on the development of market-oriented information and was undergoing a period of crisis, it did not prevent a dynamic surge in the activities of printers after . In Venice, for instance, where the large firms which had traditionally dominated the publishing trade and its guild, the Universit`a della Stampa, were in decline, journalists instead turned to smaller booksellers and printers, the matricolati minori of the guild, to publish their gazettes. Given the low costs and the limited risks of publishing a newspaper – journalists generally had lists of subscribers to offer printers – these small entrepreneurs were keen to support journal- istic initiatives.  Likewise, in Florence, small and medium-size printing houses tended to replace the great enterprises which had thrived until the s thanks to the publication of works of erudition, and between  and , the number of Florentine printing houses rose from ten to eighteen. Although the general financial precariousness of the new firms remained a standard feature of the trade, their small size enabled them to adjust to market conditions while also benefiting from a stable and regular income derived from newspapers. Moreover, booksellers and printers used the gazettes to advertise the books they published. Italy – Maria Augusta Timpanaro Morelli describes two successful examples of these medium-size businesses: the Florentine Notizie del Mondo and Gazzetta universale.  These newspapers ensured the survival of two print- ing shops, which in turn supported some ten or dozen families. In , the office staff of the Gazzetta universale comprised ten people. One of the two proprietors edited the paper, while the other ran the administrative side of the business, each being aided by an assistant. Four more peo- ple were in charge of the dispatch of the gazette and two others charged with its distribution. In the same year the Notizie del Mondo was run by a single gazetteer with the aid of a copyist, who earned respectively  and  scudi.  A further  scudi were used to pay the printers. More com- monly, however, gazetteers had to supplement their income with other editorial workand publications. The owners of the Notizie were eight as- sociates who earned  scudi each per month. The newspaper produced a net yearly income of –, lire.Thus, Antonio Graziosi’s earnings of , ducati from the sale of the Venetian version of the Notizie del Mondo represented an exceptional commercial return.  As Anna Maria Rao shows in a recent study, the conditions of jour- nalism in Naples were remarkably different, even though the capital of the kingdom was one of the main centres of the publishing trade in the peninsula.  The publication of gazettes and public announcements or avvisi was tightly controlled by the state through the granting of a privi- lege, called ius prohibendi, to single families of librai stampatori. These families, who printed and distributed newspapers along with their pri- mary activity as publishers and sellers of books, enjoyed the title of regi impressori – Royal Printers – and paid a fixed amount to the govern- ment for it. The heavy burden of government control, exerted by the Segreteria di giustizia, hindered the development of a local political jour- nalism, but was unable to prevent the smuggling of foreign gazettes which, according to the law, only Royal Printers were entitled to republish locally. In Italy gazettes generally broke even at  issues, and many o f them printed no more than this number of copies. The Notizie del Mondo printed , copies, while the Gazzetta universale reached , copies. Ristori’s Giornale Fiorentino istorico-politico letterario printed only  copies, but was distributed across northern Italy. The Gazzetta urbana veneta had , subscribers. The prices of newspapers were generally modest. Marina Formica supposes that, given its very affordable price of  paoli, the Diario di Roma had a wide circulation and may have reached the lower strata of the Roman population.  In the s in Naples, the cost of a yearly subscription to a gazette was  ducati, which corresponded to an outlay of less than  grano per day, the minimum bet on the popular lottery.  Limited editions did not prevent gazettes from enjoying a wide  Maurizio Isabella circulation in ancien regime Italy: a single copy was read by several people in public venues – the caffettieri usually bought gazettes for their patrons – as well as in private spaces. Furthermore, the practice of reading news- papers aloud undoubtedly multiplied their impact. Nevertheless, in spite of the low prices, the high rate of illiteracy throughout the peninsula, particularly in the south and outside the main towns and cities, was a barrier to extended readership. For example, as late as ,  per cent of men and  per cent of women in the Marche region of the Papal states were unable to produce a signature; in comparison  per cent of men and  per cent of women in Milan were sufficiently literate to sign their names.  The problem of the effective circulation of newspapers leads to the even trickier question of the social dimension of their readership.  Un- doubtedly, between  and , Italy witnessed a revolution in read- ing practices – similar to the one taking place in other parts of Western Europe – characterised by an increased and more bourgeois readership consuming books and periodicals alike. Interestingly, the urban gazettes which appeared in the Republic of Venice in the s and s, such as the Nuova Gazzetta veneta and the Diario veneto, started to offer the publication of commercial adverts to tradesman, craftsmen or small man- ufacturers and explicitly pleaded for a public of professionals, physicians and pharmacists. Nonetheless the very limited success of this offer and the short life of these gazettes suggest that a solid bourgeois public was not yet ready to support a wider market for newspapers. As Infelise rightly con- cludes, Italian readership was extremely slow to ‘expand downwards from the urban aristocratic and haute bourgeois milieus to the middle classes’.  Until the end of the century, the bulkof it was most probably confined to those , intellectuals who, in Ristori’s words, ‘represented the Italian educated class’.  The frequent advertisement of French publi- cations in the gazettes bears witness to the elite public to which these periodicals were addressed. Assuming a certain homogeneity between readers and writers, and between readers of books and gazettes, it will be useful to observe that, in a sample of  Italian intellectuals born be- tween  and ,  per cent of men of letters were ecclesiastics and  per cent aristocrats, although these percentages steadily decreased across the period.  As everywhere else in Europe, the circulation of newspapers was linked to the development of different forms of sociability, both institutionalised and informal. In Venice, for instance, there were  coffee houses or botteghe da caff`e in . According to contemporaries, after , when patricians acquired the habit of discussing politics outside the senate, the ‘conversazioni pubbliche’ became all the rage, involving new sectors of the Italy – population. As a result the government decided to control the number of coffee houses. While these were public venues open to a general public which was not exclusively aristocratic but shared an increasing interest in gazettes, the Venetian patricians met also in the ridotti or casini, private apartments used to gamble, read and discuss politics with their peers.  It is most probably in these contexts that journalism reached new groups of readers. Nonetheless, generally speaking politics remained outside the domain of organised forms of civil society. Italian sociability was in fact still dom- inated by academies, where public opinion developed in its pre-political form, as a result of discussions on literary matters or practical and techni- cal issues like agricultural or scientific questions, and the journalism they produced followed similar lines. In this setting the birth of the first reading societies, or gabinetti di lettura, in the early s represented a real ele- ment of novelty. In the gabinetti di lettura, political discussions excluded from the accademie were considered normal activities, and newspapers were available. Indeed, like an increasing number of institutions that came into being after , they were free associations which rejected the tradi- tional structure of the old aristocratic academies, based on the idea of the aristocracy as a body or a corporation. They accepted members simply on the grounds of their common interests.  Yet, in spite of this ‘bourgeois’ spirit, aristocrats still represented an important, if not overwhelming ele- ment of their membership. Piero del Negro’s study on the reading society of Padova, founded in , which represents an interesting exception to an otherwise neglected field of historical research in Italy, shows that out of sixty-three members, thirty-seven were either local noblemen or Venetian patricians, and that these aristocrats exercised control over the association. Among the others, nineteen were churchmen, most of them professional intellectuals, others were lawyers, academics from the local university, writers and physicians; only two were tradesmen. The society subscribed to all the major Italian and international gazettes.  Similar institutions were set up in several other provincial cities in Venetia, like Udine, Brescia and Bergamo, and in Florence, thanks to a new passion for politics triggered off by the revolutionary events in France.  Sometimes, more rudimentary forms of reading societies were established by book- sellers. For instance, in , the bookseller Stecchi in Florence set up a small private library in the premises of his shop, where customers could read and borrow local and international gazettes and books in return for an annual subscription fee of  paoli.  The existence of a public sphere where political information was dis- cussed, and the increase in the circulation of the press, suggest that public opinion, however limited in size and geographical distribution, became  Maurizio Isabella a reality in the period between  and . Indeed, the term opinione pubblica first appeared in Italy in  in the private correspondence between the Lombard intellectuals and brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri.  Although often employed as a rhetorical device – an abstract term pointing to the existence of a superior rationality – by the s opinione and opinione pubblica frequently referred to a real and influential force. In this context public opinion generally denoted a number of universal and commonly shared principles and beliefs regarding morality, law and jus- tice rather than the open discussion of different ideas. Occasionally , public opinion had the negative connotation of the ingrained superstitious be- liefs that prevented ordinary people from becoming enlightened – hence, for instance, Gaetano Filangieri’s belief in the Scienza della legislazione () that education and schools had a crucial role to play in the de- velopment of a reasonable and progressive opinion.  What seems clear is that in all cases Italian intellectuals perceived public opinion as a sort of common ground between state and subjects, which resulted from the positive effects of enlightened reason both on the ruled and the rulers. Any form of tension between the two was to be avoided, as it was apt to disrupt the functioning of society. Therefore, free discussion, which Italian intellectuals of the Enlightenment unanimously advocated, was ultimately geared to reaching this perfect cohesion between the sovereign and the people. Pietro Verri concisely summarised this conviction in his Meditazioni sulla economia politica (): The liberal discussion of opinions on these subjects frequently produces excellent ideas, and out of a mass of dreams and ranting are generated ideas that contribute to the prosperity of the state. The more enlightened the public, the more it will appreciate the beneficial decisions of the throne.  However, Genovesi, Filangieri and Verri stressed the fact that political authorities could be successful only if they had public opinion behind them.  In the development of public opinion, these intellectuals foresaw a crucial role for themselves. In Verri’s words: Philosophers, neglected, oppressed, persecuted when alive, ultimately determine opinion .sovereigns are enlightened and find the mass of the subjects more rea- sonable and willing to accept unprotestingly those novelties which would have appeared as a threat in the shades of ignorance. Opinion governs power, and good books govern opinion, immortal queen of the world.  This argument justified the role that intellectuals wanted and occasionally managed to play in Milan, Tuscany and, to a lesser extent, in Naples, in supporting and actively contributing to economic and administra- tive reforms as bureaucrats. In reality perfect harmony between public opinion, philosophers and state was never really achieved, and Verri’s Italy – constant warning that it was impossible to rule against opinion in his late writings points to the tensions which arose from their collaboration with the state.  From the s, the press came to be seen as one of the foremost in- struments in the development of public opinion. In an article entitled ‘Of the Periodical Press’, published in  in the famous periodical Il Caff`e, Cesare Beccaria unambiguously laid down the civic aims of journalism, designed to improve both private and public life. Although he was mainly referring to journalism relating to contemporary economic, scientific and literary debates – of which Il Caff`e was to become the most illustrious example in Italy – rather surprisingly, he explicitly mentioned gazettes, ‘not less useful although less brilliant than the former’. According to Beccaria these latter shaped and strengthened the cosmopolitan dimen- sion of public opinion: These news items make us citizens of Europe; they produce a continuous com- merce among the different nations and destroy that diffidence and contempt with which isolated nations lookon foreign ones. Everything in Europe tends to be- come closer and more similar, and there is a stronger tendency towards equality than in the past.  In the s, Beccaria’s positive remarks about gazettes represented an exception, as high-brow intellectuals tended to dismiss political journal- ism as an inferior trade. Not surprisingly, therefore, the word gazzettiere often had negative, if not wilfully derogatory, connotations, linked as it was to the idea of gazettes as mere collections of second-hand and unreliable, if not completely invented or exaggerated, pieces of informa- tion. The word journalist referred only to literary journalism.  Never- theless, during the s some gazetteers began to renovate traditional gazettes and to underpin their activities with the same intellectual prin- ciples of enlightenment and professional awareness that characterised literary journalism. In gazette articles it was increasingly possible to de- tect the journalists’ opinion and original interpretation. The distinction between gazetteer and journalist became increasingly blurred. Journalists like Giuseppe Compagnoni and Giovanni Ristori, who had devoted their energies to literary journalism for most of their careers, turned to newspapers expressing the desire to fulfil an educational mission and to provide more accurate and reliable information. Compagnoni’s Notizie del Mondo moved away from the traditional division of gazettes into sections defined by the geographical origin of the news and started to order stories according to their content, thus facilitating their anal- ysis. Careful checks on the sources of information which, according to Compagnoni, were missing from other newspapers, made his gazette the  Maurizio Isabella most popular and appreciated newspaper among the educated classes.  On the eve of the revolutionary events in France, the Tuscan Giovanni Ristori founded a weekly newspaper, Spezieria di Sondrio, which aimed to combine political news with ideological debate. As Beccaria had done al- most thirty years before, Ristori reaffirmed the role of the press in enlight- ening the public. However, his awareness of the political role of journalists in the formation of public opinion was something very new and already anticipated the features of political journalism of the Revolutionary Triennium: ‘We are not gazetteers, we are a society of friends who use the current affairs of nations, new laws, revolutions of all kind, as a pretext to find truth and reason concerning matters which regard the universal wellbeing of peoples.’  Government had a direct and crucial influence over the initial devel- opment of political journalism in the Italian states. The strengthening of state censorship at the expense of the ecclesiastical censorship exerted through the Holy Inquisition or the Catholic hierarchy greatly contributed to a freer circulation of ideas and political information in the second half of the eighteenth century. In Lombardy and Tuscany, the territories di- rectly controlled by the Habsburgs, the struggle between Church and state for the ideological control over culture and society resulted in a freer and more tolerant atmosphere. This had been one of the aims of the wider programme of reforms implemented by Maria Theresa, Joseph II and Leopold II.  New laws tended to treat books and gazettes as com- modities that needed protection and control like any other goods. In Lombardy the Giunta degli Studi, a branch of the central administra- tion, was given charge of censorship in  and both the Church and the aristocracy, represented by the Senate, excluded from exercising cen- sorship of any sort. Among the censors appointed in Milan, the gov- ernment chose some of the most progressive intellectuals who animated Lombard Enlightenment: Paolo Frisi, Alfonso Longo and Gianbattista Vasco. In Naples the Prime Minister Bernardo Tanucci preferred to con- sider information not as something to be repressed but as useful means of broadening consensus. In , he wrote to the King: ‘I have helped myself with the Gazette, and I thinkI have managed to keep the people on my side.’  In general, more open attitudes towards information did not entail the disappearance of repressive measures when state interest clashed with freedom of expression. To give just one example, in  the journalist Giovanni Ristori was condemned to exile for publishing a satirical article in the Giornale fiorentino.  However, in the s and s, the same government, faced with foreign governments complain- ing about the information provided by Tuscan gazettes, would dismiss any direct responsibility and refuse to intervene.  [...]... confined their demands for equality to equality before the law, linked political rights to land ownership and praised free trade Last but not least, journalists intervened in the debate about the future of Italy, which for the first time was described as a nation, and they discussed whether the peninsula should become a unified state or a confederation of independent republics. Bonaparte’s policy of gearing... morally destitute conditions of Italy to its absence, or in other words to the lack of that ‘national pride which is necessary for the economic and moral development of a country’. In Cuoco’s words, in Italy, after the revolutionary hiatus, ‘the order of things’ had been reestablished ‘by a single man’ who had saved the homeland Moreover, Cuoco believed that ‘unity’ was Italy’s first and foremost need,... them, thus fostering anti-Austrian and national feeling. However, although an extremely important and sophisticated journalism engaged in social, economic and literary matters thrived in Restoration Italy, free political journalism reappeared in the peninsula only after . NOTES  The best general history of Italian journalism is the work of Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘Giornali e societ` nell’Italia... italiano’, in Mario Infelise and Paola Marini (eds.), L’editoria del ’ e i Remondini (Bassano, ), –; Renato Pasta, Towards a Social History of Ideas: The Book and the Booktrade in Eighteenth-Century Italy, in Hans Erich Bodeker (ed.), Histoires ¨ du livre Nouvelles Orientations (Paris, ), – Infelise, ‘L’utile’, p  Giovanni Ristori, ‘Colpo d’occhio su lo stato presente della letteratura... Comparato (ed.), Modelli nella storia del pensiero politico,  vols (Florence, ), vol , –; Daniela Donnini Maccio and Roberto Romani, ` ‘All equally rich: economic knowledge in revolutionary Italy, –’, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology,  (), – Erasmo Leso, Lingua e rivoluzione Ricerche sul vocabolario politico italiano del triennio rivoluzionario . 9 Italy, – Maurizio Isabella Until the s, the map of Italian political. enciclopedica di Milano was distributed in Piedmont, Genoa, Venice and Verona, central Italy, Tuscany, Rome, Naples and Vienna. Most of the above-mentioned newspapers