The Science of Naples: Making Knowledge in Italy's Pre-eminent City, 1500-1800 (original) (raw)
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The project of the 21st Annual Conference of the Academia Europaea in Naples on 'Risks, Environment and Sustainable Development' included a session in homage to the international cultural tradition of the host city, which sought to exemplify the three basic aspects of the title in connection with the humanities. As chair of this session, I devised a programme of 'case-studies', bringing together a variety of leading figures active in Naples, who faced 'risks' that were the risks of intellectual life within a dangerous social, historical and political 'environment'. Although situated against various backdrops-history of ideas, musicology, philosophy of science, and related to different ages (Pre-Enlightenment; Neapolitan Revolution and Restoration; Italian Fascism)-the three papers were interconnected by the issue of the 'sustainable development' of forms of knowledge and sensibility and their legacies. In different ways and with diminishing consequences for the lives of the protagonists, the series of papers reconstructed, respectively, the delegitimation and persecution to death, the misfortune and exile, the oblivion and marginalization of intellectuals who struggled to establish the political values, aesthetic taste and scientific methodology that have shaped our modern European cultural consciousness. The first paper presented here considers the trials of history in the age of Giannone (1676-1748), who died in prison. In Pietro Giannone's innovative work, which opposed papal interference in Naples, Brendan Dooley celebrates
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The educated classes of the Italian peninsula developed an independent language from the thirteenth century, a scientific and technical language from about 1500, a single government and a national science policy after 1861. From the 1950s, they took part in efforts to create a European science policy. Some long-term relationships among science, culture, and society will be employed in the present chapter to introduce the reader to some turning points relevant to an understanding of the place and uses of modern science south of the Alps. Italian science will be approached as a sort of “natural experiment”, enabling the historian to put to test some of the factors that intertwine with the development of science. The conclusions will focus on what will be presented as the long-term persistence of the attitude displayed by early modern virtuosi and Italian elites vis-à-vis the prince. An attitude that managed to survive through the subsequent patterns of research institutions that were adopted. Combining, finally, with the pitfalls of an imagined national scientific community that continued to backfire.
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Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani
In the Spring of 1820 the British chemist Humphry Davy wrote from Rome to thank his friend the Abate and Cavaliere Teodoro Monticelli for his hospitality during a recent sojourn in Naples, concluding his letter by remarking that 'the things that you have done for me, and the things we did together I will never forget'. 1 Davy and Monticelli had been working for some months on the slopes of Vesuvius, in 'votre grande et belle laboratoire' 2 as Davy put it, and in Monticelli's house, investigating the chemical properties of the mephitic gases and crystals produced by the volcano. Davy's presence in Naples was officially linked to the task, given him by the Prince Regent, of finding a way to unroll the carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum which scholars hoped would reveal unknown works of classical literature. But he was far happier − and more successful − in exploring the volcano with his friend. Humphry Davy is hardly unknown in the annals of science, but few, even among those who study the history of geology or volcanology, will have heard of Teodoro Monticelli. Yet Monticelli was a powerful figure in his day as well as typical of the many Italian savants, mineralogists and geologists whose work and focus was as much local as international, or perhaps more accurately, who used the international to further local ends. Like many such figures he stood at the intersection of a large body of local knowledge and the greater scientific community, and, like some of his colleagues, he used the promotion of such connections to further a much larger political project, one that looked towards the establishment of constitutional regimes with an educated and enfranchised public, and even on occasion towards an entire peninsula united in a single nation. Monticelli belonged to three different but overlapping networks. One connected Italian savants of mineralogy and geology in Sicily, Naples, Rome, the Tuscan cities, and the towns of northern Italy and the Veneto: Milan,
in Science and Universities of Early Modern Europe: Teaching, Specialization, Professionalization, special issue of Early Science and Medicine, 6.4 (Winter 2001), 267–323, 2001
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Analysis and Geometry between Foundational Issues, Conceptual Changes, and Social Tensions, 2020
In this contribution, we, firstly, deal with some historiographical interpretations of the so-called Neapolitan synthetic school of mathematics. We then illustrate the rise of the school, the events involving it in the first decades of nineteenth century and his renovation after 1840. We focus on the mathematical controversy that involved the school showing how it was largely a matter of social tensions that crossed the Kingdom of Naples (the status of engineers, the relationship between the central government and local potentates). We also analyze the relation between scientific research and professorship in Naples before 1860 and discuss whether the synthetic school can really be considered a mathematical school up to that time. Finally, we investigate the reasons for which the historical memory of the synthetic school was lost in the thirty years following the unification of Italy. We argue that oblivion was a real damnatio memoriae and that it was rooted in the political changes of 1860 that led to rewrite the history of Naples, including the history of science.