CUOCO, VINCENZO. - Born at Civitacampomarano in Molise on 1 Oct. 1770 and died at Naples on 14 Dec. 1823, he is one of the most representative men of Italian culture in the Napoleonic era. He was a political writer, historian and educationist. He took part in the Neapolitan events of 1799; after the brief interlude of the Parthenopean Republic, he was arrested and sent into exile. He was at Marseilles, at Paris and then at Milan (1800), where he formed a friendship with Manzoni. Here he directed the «Nuovo giornale italiano», in which, seeking a common meeting point for the conscience of Italians, he pursued a noble aim of popular education.
Meditating on the Neapolitan events of 1799, C. wrote the Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione di Napoli (Milan 1801), in which he sees the defective and negative aspect of the Neapolitan revolution above all in its having been born abstractly, from a wholly intellectualistic exigency of a handful of generous young men. Good institutions - he admonishes in the letter to Vincenzo Russo on the constitution of Mario Pagano - are those that are born and live in the conscience of the people. C. felt deeply the educational exigency, whether he sought in his philosophical novel «Platone in Italia» the sense of balance and harmony of the national conscience, and particularly of the southern conscience, in an most ancient wisdom of the Italic peoples, or whether he deliberately traced a plan of studies for the State of Naples. When C. returned to Naples, after the Napoleonic conquest, he held high offices in the administration of the State. In 1809 King Joachim called him to be part of the Commission charged with preparing a bill on public instruction. In an ample report C. set forth the principles by which the radical reform of studies at Naples was to be inspired. There is no doubt that the current pedagogical ideas are kept in mind in the Rapporto and in particular G. G. Rousseau and G. E. Pestalozzi are present; C.'s vision of education is genuinely Vichian. Starting from the well-known Vichian dignity relating to the spiritual process, C. thinks that the child is first of all sense and imagination, then memory, finally reason. «If you» - he admonishes - «disturb this order you will weary the mind with a precocious effort, and you will stifle the other faculties, hindering their development. You will believe you have formed a man of letters, and you will have destroyed a man». Instruction was for him the exclusive task of the State, which, moreover, while it had to direct opinions, was not to profess any. Instruction had to be universal and to embrace the sciences and the arts, public inasmuch as all citizens had an equal right to it. The school, then, in C.'s conception had to be: for all (primary and free), for many (secondary), for few (higher or sublime), the latter being necessary to promote the sciences. Elementary instruction comprises reading, writing, arithmetic, morals, not religion, which he wants imparted by the ministers of the Church. C. further wanted women to be given an education more properly suited to their nature. In the Progetto there is no lack of a vision of a school which, founded on work, promotes an improvement of the people in the arts and crafts. University instruction, as that which was to promote the sciences, is held in the Progetto in the highest consideration; to this end C. planned the institution of four universities (Naples, Chieti, Altamura, Catanzaro) with five faculties each, from letters to philosophy, to the physical and mathematical sciences, to medicine, to law, to theology.
Works in 5 vols.: Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 seguito dal rapporto al cittadino Carnot di F. Lomonaco, edited by F. Nicolini, Bari 1929; Platone in Italia, edited by F. Nicolini, 2 vols., ibid. 1924-28 (vol. I, 2nd ed., 1924); Scritti vari e carteggio, edited by N. Cortese and F. Nicolini, 2 vols., ibid. 1924.