ABSTRACT
Inspired by the example of Arab scholars, Italian authors such as Pian del Carpini, Marco Polo, Vespucci, Verrazzano and Ramusio were among the earliest contributors to a preanthropological literature during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe. Italy also produced Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), a professor at the University of Bologna who was the first scholarly collector of Western history; Vico (1668–1744), one of the first philosophers to conceive of history in a comparative and determinist light; and Balbi, a Venetian ‘pre-linguist’ who made the first recorded use of the term ‘ethnographic’ in the title of a book in his Ethnographic Atlas of the Globe (Paris, 1826). But it was not until 1861 that Italy was united with Victor Emmanuel II as its king, and not until 1870 that Rome became the nation’s capital, even as it remained under occupation. Moreover, the intellectuals and bourgeois who had long worked towards national unification had not been able to develop a social science tradition in a country suffocated by religious dogma and practice, and the retarding effect of religious conservatism was scarcely mitigated by the benefits of the considerable mass of documentary literature produced by Capuchin, Franciscan and Salesian missionaries.
