VERRI, ALESSANDRO. - Man of letters, b. in Milan on 9 Nov. 1741, d. in Rome on 23 Sept. 1816.
At first a follower, together with his brother Pietro, of Enlightenment ideas, he abandoned them after a journey to Paris and London (1776-77). Having settled in Rome, he imitated Shakespeare in the tragedies Congiura di Milano and Pantea (Livorno 1779). He also attempted the novel with the Avventura di Saffo (Padua 1782) and the Vita di Erostrato (Rome 1815), but fame came to him from the Notti romane (ibid. 1792, new enlarged ed., ibid. 1804), freely imitated from Young's Notti.
Having ranged himself among the classics, he in reality anticipated Romantic attitudes.
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PIETRO, his brother, was a writer and politician, b. in Milan on 12 Dec. 1726, d. there on 28 June 1797.
He took part in the Seven Years' War; in Vienna in '60 he wrote the Elementi del commercio, in which he advocated a closed national market and complete internal freedom. Having returned to Milan, he drew up a report Sul tributo del sale and a Saggio sulla grandezza e decadenza del commercio in Milano. With his brother Alessandro, with Beccaria and other friends he founded the Accademia dei Pugni (1761), a center of cosmopolitan and Enlightenment culture, urging Beccaria to compose his Dei delitti e delle pene, which he defended in the Risposte alle Note del Facchinei (1765). In the Discorso sulla felicità (Livorno 1763) he eclectically followed Rousseau and the Encyclopedists. In 1764 he founded the Caffè, in which for two years he made himself the herald of the culture of the Enlightenment, combating the nationalism of the pedants, privileges and economic restraints. A member of a Junta for the reform of the tax farm, whose replacement by direct administration he had requested, he published the Bilancio del commercio dello Stato di Milano (ibid. 1764) and, in the new fiscal order, was the representative of the treasury (1765). In the Riflessioni sulle leggi vincolanti principalmente nel commercio (1769, but published in 1797) he advocated freedom of commerce as an aspect of political freedom, and in the Meditazioni sull'economia politica (Livorno 1771) he opposed the physiocratic thesis of the sterile class, maintaining that to produce does not mean to create matter but value and wealth.
Disappointed in his political ambitions, he published the Indole del piacere (ibid. 1773), maintaining that pleasure is merely the cessation of pain. Having married his niece Maria Castiglioni (1776), he took up again in the Osservazioni sulla tortura (posthumous 1804) the theme he had suggested to Beccaria, but on a practical rather than rational plane. For his daughter Teresa (b. in 1777) he wrote the Ricordi a mia figlia, in which he affirms his belief in a creator God and the necessity of obeying the Church, while combating superstition. In the Storia di Milano (ibid. 1783), in conformity with Enlightenment canons, he traced through the darkness of the past the affirmation of reason and enlightenment. The Josephine ecclesiastical policy aroused new enthusiasms in him, making him fantasize about a Christianity brought back to its evangelical origins, but in reality reduced to rationalistic deism (cf. Dialogo fra Pio VI e Giuseppe II); the Papacy appeared to him an enemy of progress and by now destined to disappear (cf. the Decadenza del Papato, posthumous 1825). The death of his wife and of his father (1782), the quarrel with his brothers over the inheritance, the loss of his offices because of the Josephine reforms (1786) plunged him back into bitterness. With renewed enthusiasms and copious writings he then greeted the French Revolution, claiming a constitution and national representation. Elected decurion (1791), he upheld freedom of the press and of speech, but with the arrival of the French he felt overtaken and solitary, though he confidently hoped for the independence of Italy. Death overtook him in the midst of a night session of the Municipality.
Bibliography5 works
the French Revolution, ibid. 55 (1929); M. R. Manfra, P. V. e i problemi economici del suo tempo, Rome 1932; N. Valeri, P. V., Milan 1937.