CAPPONI, GINO. — Writer and politician, born in Florence on 13 September 1792, died there on 3 February 1876. Educated in the provincial milieu of grand-ducal Tuscany, he broadened his spiritual horizons through journeys in Europe: his travels in Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland were fundamental to his study of educational institutions. His political career was confined to the presidency of the Tuscan Council of Ministers in August–October 1848 (on which he left an engaging memoir entitled Seventy Days in Office).
A historian of notable calibre, he wrote incisive pages on The Lombard Rule in Italy (1844–59), entering into the well-known Romantic controversy, even though he vacillated concerning the concept of race. Also noteworthy are The History of Pietro Leopoldo and the posthumous Introduction to the Civil History of the Popes, or Essay on the History of Christianity in the First Two Centuries, as well as The History of the Republic of Florence (1875), whose limitations must be stressed: a formal academicism and a historical empiricism.
His view of human misery and dignity, his concept of religion, and his very opposition to the political power of the papacy did not depart from Catholicism, even though at a certain point in his life he had envisioned a religious reform centred on the Redemption, understood more as a naturalistic than a supernatural event, and on the denial of the efficacy of the Sacraments ex opere operato; in 1846 he had also maintained that dogmatic formulations were essentially negative. On the other hand, he was always a convinced champion of transcendence (he wrote pungent lines against the pantheism of the Saint-Simonians).
C. occupies a prominent place in the history of Italian pedagogy, because of his opposition both to the esprit géométrique of Enlightenment rationalism and to pedagogical automatism and the dissolution of religious society advocated by Gian Giacomo Rousseau. C. is among the most conscious Romantic theorists when he states: «it seems to me how little confidence I place in that sort of education which, learned from books, is sustained by art; how incredulous I am of the promises of educators and of the empiricism of methods. Through excessive regularity these constrain the living forces of nature; through softness they enervate them; and, dissociating men from the predominance of self-interest and confining them in the solitude of an unproductive pride, they prepare a people more feeble, alienated, and mechanical than ever» (G. C., Sull'educazione e scritti minori, edited by E. Codignola, Florence 1921, p. 87).
Despite his intellectual vacillations, C. is one of the most suggestive and well-rounded figures of nineteenth-century political reformism and liberal Catholicism.