CAPPONI, GINO. - Writer and politician, b. in Florence on 13 Sept. 1792, d. there on 3 Febr. 1876. Educated in the provincial milieu of Grand Ducal Tuscany, he broadened his spiritual horizons through his travels
European travels: his journeys to Belgium, Holland, Germany and Switzerland were fundamental for his study of educational institutions. His life as a politician is confined to the presidency of the Tuscan Council of Ministers in Aug.-Oct. 1848 (about which he left a delightful memoir entitled Settanta giorni di ministero).
A historian of remarkable mettle, he wrote acute pages in Sulla dominazione dei Longobardi in Italia (1844-59), entering into the well-known Romantic polemic, albeit wavering on the concept of race. Also noteworthy are the Storia di Pietro Leopoldo and the Introduzione all'istoria civile de' papi ovvero Saggio sull'istoria del cristianesimo ne' primi due secoli (posthumous), as well as the Storia della Repubblica di Firenze (1875), whose limitations must be emphasized in a formal academicism and a historical empiricism.
His vision of the misery and dignity of man, his concept of religion, and his very opposition to the political power of the papacy do not depart from Catholicism, even if at a certain moment of his life he had toyed with a religious reform centered on Redemption understood more as a naturalistic than a supernatural fact and on the denial of the efficacy of the Sacraments ex opere operato; in 1846 he had even maintained the merely negative essence of dogmatic formulations; on the other hand he was always a convinced assertor of transcendence (he wrote pungent lines against the pantheism of the Saint-Simonians).
C. occupies a considerable place in the history of Italian pedagogy, for his opposition to the esprit géométrique of Enlightenment rationalism, as well as to pedagogical automatism and to the dissolution of religious society of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. C. is among the most conscious Romantic theorists when he affirms: «mi sembra, quanta poca fiducia io riponga in quella sorta di educazione, che imparata ne' libri, si regge sull'arte; come incredulo io mi sia alle promesse degli educatori, e all'empirismo dei metodi. Questi con la troppa regolarità costringono le vive forze della natura, con la mollezza le intorpidiscono; e gli uomini dissociati dal predominio dell'interesse rinchiudendo nella solitudine di una superbia infeconda, preparano un popolo più che mai fiacco, disamorato, meccanico» (G. C., Sull'educazione e scritti minori, edited by E. Codignola, Florence 1921, p. 87).
Despite his waverings as a thinker, C. is among the most suggestive and well-rounded figures of nineteenth-century political reformism and liberal Catholicism.