GIANNONE, PIETRO. — Born on 7 May 1676 in Ischitella to Scipione and Lucrezia Micaglia, died in Turin on 17 March 1748. He studied law in Naples, graduated there in 1698, and began to practice law with success. At the same time, he passionately engaged with jurisdictional issues, which he sought to reconsider in their historical precedents and broader context. The result was a work of grand design, the *Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli* (published in Naples in 1723), in which the author intended to narrate the events of southern Italy from the origins of Christianity to the end of the 17th century. These events, however, were reinterpreted by G. through the lens of his political passion, under a single guiding principle: the contrast between State and Church. Systematically, he placed all good on the side of the State and all evil on the side of the Church. Hence arose a series of distortions and serious deficiencies that render the work questionable and ephemeral from a historical-scientific standpoint. It is, however, fundamental in the history of political-ecclesiastical thought for its jurisdictionalism, which in G.’s vision was intrinsically linked to the alliance of monarchical absolutism and the middle class. The work met with immediate resonance, receiving lavish praise from anti-Jansenists and becoming one of their most cherished texts; it was translated into many languages (placed on the Index on 1 July 1723).
G., excommunicated by the Archbishop of Naples in 1723, went to Vienna, where he was received by Charles VI, who granted him an annual pension. In Vienna, he wrote several shorter polemical works, all aimed at deepening and clarifying specific points of his previous work. Taken together, these writings also present a concrete program of political action that was later implemented in Naples and elsewhere (full exercise of the royal *exequatur*, reduction of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, gradual suppression of mortmain, etc.). Also in Vienna, he wrote another more significant work, known by the title *Triregno*: here he developed the thesis that, to ensure free and unchallenged exercise of state sovereignty, it was necessary to suppress the papacy and ecclesiastical hierarchy, strip the clergy of all temporal goods, and subject them entirely to the State.
When his Viennese pension ceased in 1734, G. planned to return home. But he was forbidden from entering the Kingdom
GIAN GALEAZZO SFORZA, Duke of MILAN: *V. FORZA, FAMIGLIA.*
GIAN GALEAZZO Visconti, Duke of MILAN: *V. VISCONTI, FAMIGLIA.*