ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how the 1850s marked the definitive emergence of the disciplines of linguistics and anthropology in the Italian peninsula. Specifically, it shows how these two disciplines were increasingly regarded as the ‘science of nations,’ delineating how, in those years, the term ‘race’ experienced its definitive transformation into its ‘modern’ understanding as physical and craniological taxonomy. By the 1860s, the anthropologist Giustiniano Nicolucci (1819–1904) and the linguist Giovenale Vegezzi-Ruscalla (1799–1885) attempted to organize the ‘ethnological’ and ‘anthropological’ disciplines. At the same time, they introduced racial Aryanism in the Peninsula through a series of linguistic and craniological inquiries over the ‘first Italians.’ As Italian unification proceeded, however, studies on race gradually shifted from the search of the origins of the nation to the service of the nation-building process. Positivism and Darwinian evolutionism prompted further ‘medicalization’ of the anthropological discipline that began to focus on improving the ‘living’ body of the nation rather than examining ancient osteological remains. In this new political and scholarly context, the needs of the ‘making of the Italians’ gradually overshadowed the question of their alleged racial ‘roots.’
