ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence in Risorgimento racial discourse of the categories of physical anthropology, through the cases of the archaeologist and historian Giuseppe Micali (1768–1844) and the geographer and statistician Adriano Balbi (1782–1848). Micali’s 1832 monograph on pre-Roman Italy marked the grand entry of the craniological theory of type in the reconstruction of national history. The association of specific physical traits with the concept of race enabled a visual identification of the Italian community of descent. Interest in new racial taxonomies characterized the research of Balbi, one of the first ‘systematizers’ and popularizers of the natural history of man, physical anthropology, and comparative linguistics in the Peninsula. In an age when Romantic intellectuals considered linguistic groups as proper ‘biological’ races, Balbi distinguished himself as one of the first scholars advocating a clear methodological distinction between linguistic derivation and the racial descent of populations.
