ABSTRACT
Venturi's contribution established the penetration of enlightened ideas into the remotest comers of urban Italy. It thereby set the preconditions for the socio-cultural study of books south of the Alps that this paper aims to explore. The fact that the history of books in eighteenth-century Italy no longer remains a 'terra incognita', as Giles Barber observed in 1977, owes much to the influence of the French brand of histoire dLt livre as established by Roger Chartier, Henri-Jean Martin and Daniel Roche in the first place. 4 GranlSci's concept of the 'organization of culture' has also played a role in promoting research into the history of books as material objects and commercial conID'!odities. Both the avatars of the French 'Annales school' and GranlSci's suggested line of enquiry have played an important role in enlarging the scope of traditional Italian historicism that prevailed up until the 1970s. If most recent scholarship on the book follows the first line of inquiry and pays at least lip service to the 'Annalcs school' and to its American counterpart, the work of Robert Damton, Marino Berengo's monograph on the marketplace of ideas in Milan during the Restoration, published in 1980, can be taken as an example of the secondS Berengo's contribution provides a model of the creative application of Gramsci's views. In analysing the relationships - intellectual as well as economic - between Milanese booksellers and men ofletters, many of whom were dismissed from public office after the demise of the Napoleonic empire in 1814, Berengo offers a compelling view of the short-lived boom in publishing in the first decades of the nineteenth century. His assessment of the alleged failure of Milanese publishing in securing a sustained capitalist growth tor the sector may be, however, somewhat flawed by his reliance upon notarial records and other legal sources that tend to emphasize the role of bankruptcies and default payments within the book trade. Nevertheless, Derengo established the agenda that scholarship on the nineteenth-centmy book has followed ever since. Berengo's work also inspired Mario Infelise's mastertlJl monograph of 1989 on Venetian publishing during the eighteenth century (Infelise 1980, 1989). Both Berengo and Infelise emphasize the limited social distribution of print in Italy which followed upon the structural constraints of the market in
Ifliteracy rates remained low in Italy until the First World War (Tran£1glia 2000: 4 - 5), political fragm.entation m.ilitated against a unified national book market well into the nineteenth century. The dispersion of print-works and publishing across the peninsula and in Sicily even increased after 1861 as local printers and booksellers strove to meet the cultural demand of the provincial elites and their need to participate in politics and the public discourse. As Gabriele Turi suggests, this process did in £,ct reduce the reliance of the provincial audiences on imported (that is, French) books, and eroded the late eighteenth-century cosmopolitan element that Venturi had emphasized (Turi 2(01). The dispersion of the sources caused by the political fragmentation of the country lllay be responsible for the traditional parochialism of our scholarship on the book. It also reflects the maze of bizarre legal and institutional contexts that discouraged the international book trade in the Age of the Enlightenment. As an agent of the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel remarked in 1772, 'avec tous les libraires d'Italie il faut aller doucement', a wry allusion to the extreme difficulty to retrieve bad debts and the high cost of taking the de£1ulters to court7 As compared with France or Germany, not to mention Britain, the Italian book trades looked helplessly 'backward', and tied to a long-lasting typographical Old Regime. The quite distinctive character of this sector in Italy is spelled out in a letter from. Joseph Strange, the British resident at Venice, to the President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks. With reference to the latter's attempt to establish son1.e commercial connections between London and the capital of Italian publishing, Strange wrote:
But it is time to come to our bookseller here Zatta ... I doubt not his ability in a commission; but he is a rich man, and attends to nothing but his own particular business, like the rest of his brethren here; who are all absorbed by their own internal Italian commerce, mostly of common theological or juridical trash, history, translations from the French etc. nor is there one of them punctual enough for any extra commissions; [and] if they served you once for favor, they would neglect the second time [as] being quite out of their way; nor are any of them to be depended upon. In vain have I tried, repeatedly, to settle such a correspondence between this place and London; but our booksellers will have nothing to do with these here, or the Italians, I
believe, in general; finding that they are not to be depended upon. To give you an idea of their indifference, and idleness, out of their beaten track of home commerce, among themselves, I would just mention that when I tlrst came here, I got all their catalogues, printed and in mss.; took the trouble of examining them. and marked m.any books I wanted to buy; yet not a nun of them would take the trouble oflooking them out for me; because they were mostly in warehouses, out of their C0111.1non shop. I beg, therefore, without scruple, that you will send the note of the books you want to me; and you shall be served punctually, and without any trouble to me scarcely, knowing the directions to give; and in case of my absence m.y friend Mr. Richie, our consul here, and also a literary man, will be as attentive as myself; beside m.y secretary and other friends; and the same repeat to Mr. Barnard. It is easier thus to tlnd the means of serving, than to engage for the punctuality of any one m.an of the trade here. 8
and diffusion of Italian books. Aristocratic capital was directly involved in publishing in Venice and Lucca, where the first Italian edition of the Ertcylopedie was printed (1758 - 76), as well as in Genoa, Florence, Perugia, Verona, the Romagna and other minor localities of the Papal States. ll Money fr01H the aristocracy proved essential in getting Muratori's Rerum italicarum scriptores and Alltiquitates printed in the 1720s and 1730s (Vischi 1880). The Venetian patriciate invested in the trade during the boom years before 1760 as they sitnultaneously pursued economic profit and intellectual itnprovetnent equally. In the 1760s and 1770s noble factions battled in Venice during the bitter dispute following the expulsion of the Jesuits fi-om most of Catholic Europe and their eventual suppression at the hand of Clement XIV in 1773 - Venturi analysed this chapter in ideological as well as printing history at some length in volume two of Settecento riformatore and Infelise further explored this period in 1994 (Venturi 1976: ch. 4; Infelise 1994). During this moment of strife, the Venetian oligarchy split apart when the leading public figure Andrea Tron began to support the anti-Jesuit bookseller-publisher Bettinelli. At the satne time, more conservative members of the elite subsidized Antonio Zatta's proJesuit propaganda. Thousands of prints, pamphlets, broadsides and woodcuts were widely circulated by both sides in Venice, as well as exported to the other intellectual centres of the peninsula. Political and economic support from the Bourbon courts in Madrid and Lisbon also helped in nuking Lugano, a snull Swiss town north of Milan, into a thriving production centre for anti-Jesuit books. The network of contacts revolving around Giatnbattista Agnelli and his print-shop in Lugano has recently been studied and provides a good example of the role of the press in fostering ideological change (Mena 2003: ch. 1). In general, however, the Italian book trades served the needs of the elites. Aristocratic patronage shaped a printing industry which was to remain largely aloof from the financial adventures of 'the business of Enlightenment'.
