The present essay shows the results of a research study mapping Italian women-literates during the Restoration within the boundaries of the “Stato della Chiesa” and Southern Italy at large. This research has been performed in the framework of a broader one entitled Per un Archivio delle scritture femminili del Primo Ottocento italiano by a group belonging to the Dipartimento di Italianistica e Spettacolo,  Sapienza Università di Roma, coordinated by myself. The study is inspired by Carlo Dionisotti’s methodology (Geografia e Storia della letteratura italiana); based on historical-documentary criteria, it adopts a critical perspective aimed at shedding new light on forgotten or “cancelled” female figures of the official Italian literary historiography who nevertheless hold a strong history for the history of culture. Some of the women-literates being reviewed here represent living examples for the most widely spread literary genres of the time (i.e. private forms of writing such as – first of all – epistolography, a literary genre where the women-writers generally express an originality unknown in more official forms, where they most likely undergo leading literary models of the Tradition. The most interesting themes, such as the patriotic one, education and the difficult condition of a woman-literate of the time, are also being analyzed along with some relevant anthropological aspects.
Keywords: Italy; 19th Century; Women writers.

The present paper deals with the history of women’s writing, focussing on marginalized texts and, more precisely, on how to recover lost memories. The “cold case” of Arcadia’s women poets shows that even accidental marginalization becomes a “habitus” that implies the systematic exclusion of texts from the literary canon. The digital archive is the ideal tool to counteract this effect.
As an example the paper introduces the literary electronic archive on the women writers of the Accademia of Arcadia during the 18th Century implemented at the University of Zurich and it shows its successful achievements in collecting and displaying information about them. The conspicuous database Donne in Arcadia (1690-1800) () is freely accessible and at present it contains more than 450 names of women poets, more than 900 titles of literary works and more than 1,200 bibliographical entries. Hence it allows for reliable and general considerations about how to file writings by women. The paper argues that, thanks to their open and dynamic qualities, digital literary archives are the best means to give new life to forgotten texts and to give a voice to long marginalized authors: also they don’t just collect distinct exemplary models, but generate a new overview on the whole literary tradition in its complexity. This is how literary “cold cases” may remain open without being definitely shelved forever.
Keywords: Arcadia’s Women Poets; Digital Archive.

This paper deals with two female intellectuals, who lived in Ireland and Italy respectively from the end of the 18th Century to the beginning of the 19th: Sydney Owenson (also known as “Lady Morgan”) and Ginevra Canonici Fachini. The comparison between these two writers aims at reinterpreting these two profoundly different personalities in the perspective of M.me De Staël’s myth of the femme superieure (a role that De Staël created but also played).
Keywords: 18th -19th Century; Lady Morgan; Ginevra Canonici Fachini.

These reflections on the presence of women on the literary scene take origin from the first 19th Century bibliography of “women’s writing”, published in Venice in 1924 with the title: Prospetto Biografico delle Donne Italiane Rinomate in Letteratura dal Secolo Decimoquarto fino a’ giorni nostri (Biographical Schedule of Italian Women renowned in the Literary Field from the 14th Century up to the present time) edited by Ginevra Canonici Fachini. This bibliography, addressed to Lady Morgan, aims to refute all her malicious judgements about Italian women. It takes strength from a sense of belonging in order to emphasize women’s rich poetical tradition, starting from the “big mothers” of the 16th Century; moreover, it starts an interesting analytical reflection on spaces, shapes, intensity and strength of a women’s widespread presence on the literary scene at the turn of the 19th Century.
Examining the pages of the Bibliography, Adriana Chemello inquires into women’s real literary frameworks at the beginning of the 19th Century. The author analyses some interesting publishing experiences: her purpose is to outline a first, although approximate, map of the women’s presence on the literary scene. She also takes into account the fact that, in such a peculiar historical context, women shift between “private” and “public” in their historical and narrative coming and going. In these editorial works the word “woman” becomes text interacting and conversing with other texts in an open but clearly-defined and shaped system, such as the “collection”, the “miscellany”, the “anthology”, the “gift”. Each of these literary products gives the reader a little series of personal data and, most of all, it shows “a synchronic cross-section” of the literary products of the period, creating a hierarchy of the prevailing literary forms.
Keywords: 18th -19th Century; Lady Morgan; Ginevra Canonici Fachini; Bibliography.

This unpublished Diary was written by Emilia Toscanelli Peruzzi (1827-1900), wife of the leading statesman Ubaldino Peruzzi. She created one of the most influential salons in Italy in the second half of the 19th Century. Over a period of four years (1854-58), she recorded a wealth of information on her private life and deepest attachments in her diary, as well as detailed accounts of her intense social and cultural life. As an example of 19th Century private writing, these memoirs are of outstanding interest, revealing a form of private and personal expression that, as far as we know, was used by the author for most of her life; the intensity of the writing reveals the most hidden areas of her feelings, her secrets, joys and sorrows.
However, Emilia’s diary is not merely a private journal. It is also a faithful mirror of the national and international political events that she observes and records. The Diary covers the period up to the start of the second war of Independence, at the height of the Risorgimento; it refers to military actions, political decisions and social events, all of which Emilia Peruzzi comments on with knowledge and equanimity. The Diary is important as an autobiography and as a memoir, but also as a literary and historical document. As a rich documentary source of the kind of language used by a cultivated woman in the 19th Century, it is also of relevance to the history of language.
Keywords: 19th  Century; Emilia Toscanelli Peruzzi; Autobiography.

Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci was a pedagogist and a literate (Giacomo Leopardi considered only her among well read women): born in 1803 and dead in 1887, she was the witness of the most important political and cultural events of the 19th  Century. The dichotomy between her thought and her life is the most fascinating aspect in Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci.
On one hand, she worked as a modern writer: she published many essays and books on pedagogism, she was the principle of a female college and she was one of the few women belonging to the most important literature academies of this period. Although she was a wife and a mother (she married the classical scholar Ferrucci and adopted his name), she succeeded in dedicating herself to studies. On the other hand, her works reflected a conservative view of female education, according to which a girl should be educated especially to be a good mother.
Keywords: 19th Century; Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci; Education.

The education of women is a crucial theme in Italy in the years immediately preceding the Unification. The contribution of women to the national cause requires the formation of a new subject, inspired by love for the country and able to educate a generation of patriots. The emphasis placed on the figure of the “national mother” fosters the debate about women’s education: lay schools are created that quickly replace religious schools and convents, which in the 18th Century were the only institutions dedicated to the education of young women. The numerous handbooks of pedagogy (written by women) take into account anti-female prejudice, and they propose precepts and teachings specifically conceived for women, while particularly limiting women’s creativity. Besides domestic economy and other practical subjects, schools offer classes in literature, music, singing, and occasionally dance, geometry, and mathematics. A second modern language is considered fundamental, and its result is the formation of a numerous group of women translators, strategically positioned as popularizers of European culture (as in the myth of Nicostrata, patroness divinity of women in childbirth and popularizer of writing among the Romans). A fundamental stage in the circulation of the new pedagogical model is the diffusion of biographies of educated women, whose portrayals, however, insist on their domestic talents and devotion to house and family; and the birth of handbooks (for singing, painting etc.) specifically for women.
Keywords: 18th Century; Women writers; Pedagogy.

The paper concerns Galileo Galilei’s Trial. The analysis of the decree issued on March 1616 brings the author to draw the conclusion that on February 1616 the Pope Paul V did not issue any doctrinal condemnation of Copernican Astronomy but condemned only the Copernican Theology.
This conclusion brings Vittorio Frajese to reconsider a very discussed document of Galileo’s Trial: the so called “precetto Seghizzi”. The author’s conclusion is that the “precetto” was written by the notary Andrea de’ Pettini in 1616 and contains false informations.
Keywords: 17th Century; Galileo Galilei’s Trial; Pope Paul V.

Francesco Giuseppe Borri (1627-95), as a controversial historical figure, could be considered similar to other adventurers and men of science of his time, but the circumstances in which he led his life, the wide spectrum of interests that engaged him, the religious tensions that animated him, his journeys across most part of Europe savante and the important cultural and political personalities that he encountered, give remarkable interest to his story. By comparison between the myth of him outlined by contemporary edited sources and entirely unedited trials conducted against him and his group of disciples, the “pelagini”, by the Inquisition of Milan conserved at the archives of the Catholic  Congregation of Doctrine of the Faith of Rome and others italian archives, it emerges a problematic figure, more complex than a mere impostor. According to his father Branda, famous doctor from Milan, and other witnesses, Borri was touched by an internal and melancholic suffering that lasted his entire life and that brought, when he was child, several exorcisms on him. From this point of view Borri’s alchemical and medical experimentations, meant to heal suffering someone else’s, togheter with his religious torment and his tensions to reform Church and save entire World could be considered as expressions not only of his time’s angsts, but even symptoms of a certain difficulty in adaptation to social rules, differents sides of his elusive personality.
Keywords: 17th Century; Francesco Giuseppe Borri, Alchemy; Heresy.

The correspondence of Prince Andrea IV Doria Pamphilj, kept in Rome at the private family archives, shows the fear experienced by a great aristocratic family in Italy during the transitional phase from the Jacobean period to the collapse of the Napoleonic regime. In the uncertain climate of those years, Andrea IV continues the traditional policy of heritage conservation by implementing the established patrimonial policy. He makes alliances with the Serra family in Genoa, the d’Avalos, the Caracciolo and the Orsini in Naples, the Pallavicini in Parma, in conjunction with the defeat of the royalist coalition or the rise of General Bonaparte. The letters of young Doria ladies show the deep laceration of the household: on one side their father, the authoritarian censor who controls their moral conduct, on the other the mother, pious and charitable, an actual bond of the good family governance and a mediator between the public spaces and private ones. The harmonious enclave crumbles after her death due to reasons of interest. With great commitment the women of Casa Doria conquer their spaces within the families they constituted in keeping with their nature.
Keywords: 18th -19th Century; Doria Pamphilj family.

The paper tries to collocate the work of Albert Soboul in the historical context of the Sixties and Seventies of the 20th Century. It concentrates on the later part of the historiographical writings of the historian of the French revolution. Those writings are less esteemed than the study on the sans-culottes and frequently considered to be strongly influenced by Soboul’s Marxist orientation.
During the Sixties and Seventies Soboul focuses his work on the study of the manifold dynamics of the capitalistic transformation in France in the course of the 18th and 19th Century. Soboul’s decision to dedicate a large part of his scientific activity to this thematic was partly caused by the polemic with François Furet, who had incriminated the classic historiography of the revolution to be strongly influenced by communist ideology. In this polemic, which quickly turned into a cultural battle, Soboul tries to recover the heritage of Georges Lefebvre. Lefebvre states that the understanding of the transition from feudalism to capitalism should have been based on the analysis of specific historical contexts instead of being based on abstract theoretical models – either Marxist or Liberal.
Analyzing Soboul’s later historiographic writings and the studies that he coordinated, this paper tries to recover their scientific and innovative value, overcoming their alleged ideological partiality. The studies on the development of capitalism in rural France combine a profound knowledge of the sources and the theoretical instruments of Marxism, allowing thus a synthesis of economic, political, social and cultural elements. It’s in this sense that it can be said that there are rudiments of an anthropological history in the work of Soboul.
Keywords: 20th Century Historiography; Albert Soboul’s works.