VERRI, ALESSANDRO. – Man of letters, born in Milan on 9 November 1741, died in Rome on 23 September 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 Avventura di Saffo (Padua 1782) and Vita di Erostrato (Rome 1815), but his fame came from Notti romane (there 1792, new enlarged ed., there 1804), freely imitated from Notti dello Young.
Although he took his stand among the classicists, he in fact anticipated Romantic attitudes.
PIETRO, his brother, was a writer and politician, born in Milan on 12 December 1726, died there on 28 June 1797.
He took part in the Seven Years’ War; in Vienna in 1760 he wrote Elementi del commercio, in which he advocated a closed national market and complete internal freedom. On returning to Milan,
he drafted a report Sul tributo del sale e un Saggio sulla grandezza e decadenza del commercio in Milano. Together with his brother Alessandro, 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 Risposte alle Note del Facchinei (1765). In Discorso sulla felicità (Livorno 1763), he followed Rousseau and the Encyclopedists eclectically. In 1764 he founded Caffè, in which for two years he acted as a herald of Enlightenment culture, combating the nationalism of pedants, privileges, and economic constraints. A member of a committee for the reform of the ferma, whose replacement by the regia he had requested, he published Bilancio del commercio dello Stato di Milano (there 1764) and, under the new fiscal system, became the representative of the treasury (1765). In 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 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 Indole del piacere (there 1773), maintaining that pleasure is merely the cessation of pain. Having married his niece Maria Castiglioni (1776), he took up again in Osservazioni sulla tortura (posthumous 1804) the theme he had suggested to Beccaria, but on a more practical than rational plane. For his daughter Teresa (born in 1777), he wrote Ricordi a mia figlia, in which he affirmed his belief in a creator God and the necessity of obeying the Church, while combating superstition. In Storia di Milano (there 1783), in accordance with Enlightenment principles, he traced through the darkness of the past the emergence of reason and enlightenment. Joseph II’s ecclesiastical policy aroused new enthusiasms in him, leading him to imagine a Christianity restored 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 already destined to disappear (cf. Decadenza del Papato, posthumous 1825). The death of his wife and father (1782), the quarrel with his brothers over the inheritance, and the loss of his offices as a result of the Josephist reforms (1786) plunged him once more into bitterness. With renewed enthusiasm and abundant writings, he therefore hailed the French Revolution, demanding a constitution and national representation. Elected a decurion (1791), he supported freedom of the press and of speech, but with the arrival of the French he felt surpassed and isolated, although he continued trustfully to hope for Italy’s independence. Death overtook him during a full night session of the Municipal Council.