VERRI, Alessandro. – Man of letters, born in Milan on 9 Nov. 1741, died in Rome on 23 Sept. 1816.
Initially, together with his brother Pietro, he adhered to Enlightenment ideas, but abandoned them after a journey to Paris and London (1776–77). Settling in Rome, he imitated Shakespeare in the tragedies Conquira di Milano and Pantea (Livorno 1779). He also essayed the novel with L’Aventura di Saffo (Padua 1782) and Vita di Erostrato (Rome 1815), but his fame came from the Notti romane (ibid. 1792, new enlarged ed. ibid. 1804), freely imitated from Young’s Nights.
Though aligning himself with the classicists, he in fact anticipated Romantic attitudes.
PIETRO, his brother, was a writer and statesman, born in Milan on 12 Dec. 1726, died there on 8 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. Returning to Milan, he drafted a report on the rise and decline of commerce in Milan. Together with his brother Alessandro, Beccaria, and other friends, he founded the Accademia dei Pugni (1761), a centre of cosmopolitan and Enlightenment culture, urging Beccaria to compose his Dei delitti e delle pene, which he defended in the Risposta alle Note del Facchine (1765). In the Discorso sulla felicità (Livorno 1763) he eclectically followed Rousseau and the Encyclopedists. In 1764 he founded Il Caffè, in which for two years he proclaimed the culture of the Enlightenment, combating pedantic nationalism, privileges, and economic restraints. A member of a commission for fiscal reform, whose replacement by a royal system he had advocated, he published the Bilancio del commercio dello Stato di Milano (ibid. 1764); in the new fiscal ordinance he became the treasury’s representative (1765). In the Riflessioni sulle leggi vincolanti principalmente nel commercio (1769, but published in 1797) he championed commercial freedom as an aspect of political freedom, and in the Meditazioni sull’economia politica (Livorno 1771) he opposed the Physiocratic thesis of the sterile class, arguing that production does not mean creating matter but value and wealth.
Disillusioned in his political ambitions, he published Dell’indole del piacere (ibid. 1773), arguing that pleasure is merely the cessation of pain. After marrying his niece Maria Castiglioni (1776), he took up again in the Osservazioni sulla tortura (posthumous 1804) the theme suggested to Beccaria, but on a practical rather than rational plane. For his daughter Teresa (b. 1777) he wrote Ricordi a mia figlia, in which he affirmed his belief in a creating God and the necessity of obeying the Church, while combating superstition. In the Storia di Milano (ibid. 1783), conforming to Enlightenment canons, he traced in the darkness of the past the advance of reason and enlightenment. Josephist ecclesiastical policy kindled new enthusiasms, leading him to envisage 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 the enemy of progress, now destined to disappear (cf. La 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 through Josephist reforms (1786) plunged him back into distress. With renewed enthusiasm 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 speech, but with the arrival of the French he felt himself outmoded and alone, though still hopefully awaiting Italy’s independence. He died in the midst of a night session of the Municipality.