A whole genre of literature belonging to what we would now call the political sciences lies buried in the annals of “geography,” a long-forgotten casualty of Whiggish history of the modern social scientific disciplines. Indeed, as this article shows, some of the earliest studies of modern polities were undertaken by geographers, both professional and amateur, although the attention their studies paid to geography per se was often no more than a preliminary introduction to the more sundry features of the polity in question. One such amateur was Giuseppe Maria Galanti (born Santa Croce del Sannio, 1743; died Naples, 1806), who under the rubric of geography undertook a survey account of the terrain, people, institutions, and resources of the Kingdom of Naples that was truly encyclopedic in breadth. Galanti's survey account, conventionally entitled the Geographical and Political Description of the Sicilies (4 vols.; 2 eds., Naples, 1786–94), is well known to historians of the Kingdom of Naples, who have often used it as a source for their own reconstruction of the history of the Kingdom in the early modern period. Yet, as I hope to show, what is most remarkable about Galanti's text is not its factual accuracy per se, but rather the type of data that is used, the provenance of its information, and the way in which Galanti analysed the constitution of the monarchy. For Galanti's geography was designed to disseminate for the reading public what were considered to be arcana regni, or secrets of the state—i.e. information about the political, economic, religious, and cultural organization of the polity that had hitherto been reserved for the sole use of the sovereign. In other words, Galanti's Description . . . of the Sicilies can be seen as an audacious and novel attempt to educate the Neapolitan public and to render the monarchy and the royal bureaucracy more accountable to its polity.
Galanti has always been recognized as one of the Italian peninsula's foremost illuministi, or philosophes, and he has been hailed as a clear-sighted reformer, who was distinguished by his radical critique of the Kingdom's historical institutions and by his concrete proposals for their reform.Footnote 1 However, much less attention has been paid to Galanti's making of his remarkable text and to the wider European significance of his project. While aspects of Galanti's work were typical of the conventions of non-mathematical geography, its hallmarks were representative of newer geographical interests. Like the humanist geographers of sovereign states, Galanti provided a “description” of a polity, composed of individual regional studies he technically referred to as “chorographies.”Footnote 2 Yet Galanti's geography was importantly distinct from that of his predecessors on a number of counts. First, Galanti prefaced his “chorographies” of the Kingdom with a general account of the Kingdom's finances. Second, in analyzing the regions of the Kingdom, Galanti supplemented existing accounts of their topographies with eyewitness observations of features that had been ignored by his predecessors. Earlier political geographers had usually obtained their information from secondary sources and had limited their analysis of the political landscape to the (seemingly indiscriminate) cataloguing of its topographical features and institutions: these usually included its situation, terrain, and climate; its natural resources and manufactures; its form of government and centers of commerce; and its hallmark beliefs and manners.Footnote 3 Galanti, on the other hand, physically traveled to the regions he studied, and he broadened the reach of his analysis by including population data and a discussion of the particular social and political problems of different regions. This discussion in particular gave Galanti's work a political and moral edge, which distinguished it from that of earlier writers and gave it an unprecedented significance in shaping policy and educating public opinion.
Despite his references and pronouncements, then, under the cover of geography Galanti undertook, and most finely crafted, what was essentially a most unconventional work. That work was not without its European analogues, however. The scope and purpose of Galanti's geographical work most closely resembled those of that new science which, within the world of university disciplines, would both subsume and supersede political geography by the end of the eighteenth century in transalpine Europe; that is, the science of statistics, or Statistik, first developed in the German-speaking lands.Footnote 4 At the influential Enlightenment University of Göttingen, for example, the new discipline of Statistik was the institutional heir of both political geography and Staatskunde and, as such, it melded the purposes of the latter to tasks of the former, adding an assessment of the material welfare of the polity to the traditional competencies of the political geographer. What is more, Statistik gave especial prominence and significance to what we would call the social elements of the landscape, and it further analyzed those elements in terms of their production of wealth.Footnote 5 Like the practitioners of Statistik, Galanti maintained the objective breadth of political geography, and, with his findings, he too sought to evaluate the material welfare of the polity to the end of facilitating its good administration, or what contemporary Europeans generally called the “police” of the land.Footnote 6 In other words, like the statisticians of central Europe, Galanti put the human element and its mark upon the landscape at the front and center of his work. At the same time, Galanti's work was more than a descriptive inventory and empirical tally of the diverse resources and manufactures of the polity. For Galanti especially sought to identify and account for the regional variations in demographics, the arts, and their products across the Kingdom. Therewith, Galanti's study broke the cardinal rule of contemporary statistics by treating these observed phenomena as the fruit not of political economy but of what we might call culture.
Galanti's approach to his subject was, then, importantly different from that of the statisticians of the European Enlightenment. It had something in common with that of travel writers of the Grand Tour who presented the terrain and peoples of the Italian peninsula as examples of all that was curious, wondrous, and even forbidden to European civilization.Footnote 7 Such accounts of the Grand Tour through Italy generally culminated in Naples, and depicted the Kingdom in the most hyperbolic of terms. But, however much Galanti's work smacked of the hyperbole of the Grand Tour literature, the narrative of his political geography neither followed the canonical itinerary of the Tour nor presented the educational profits of the same. Although an advocate of travel to the Kingdom's provinces, in his preface to the Description . . . of the Sicilies Galanti rejected the notion that such travel edified the mind and the moral sentiments of its subjects, thus adopting a value-laden perspective and a mode of inquiry that was more typical of that genre of literature produced by the so-called “civilized travelers” of the Enlightenment.Footnote 8
First and foremost, like these travel writers Galanti believed that “civilization” was a category that pertained to the metropolitan regions of contemporary Europe and thus excluded not only non-European but also peripheral European regions, or borderlands.Footnote 9 As has been splendidly shown, this perspective on the geography of civilization structured the century's best-known western accounts of eastern and southeastern Europe, where travelers (notoriously) found evidence for what they considered to be gradations of more primitive forms of nature, society, and culture, which were deemed to be ever more primitive as they were distant from the traveler's self-identified metropole.Footnote 10 As we shall see, this perspective also informed Galanti's own geographical thinking and, more generally, it would significantly inform his subsequent writing about the state of the Kingdom of Naples. Second, and as a direct consequence of his conviction about the geography of civilization, Galanti further sought to account for the gradations of primitivism he had ostensibly observed in the peripheral regions of the Kingdom by resorting to contemporary accounts of the principles of human nature. On this count, Galanti's geography embraced a mode of inquiry that resembled those of mid-eighteenth-century travelers commissioned to record organized expeditions to foreign lands.Footnote 11 Typically, those travelers had sought to explicate why different geographical spaces seemed to host discrete morphological forms, or stages, of society and culture, and to that end they purposefully employed the categories and framework of what was specifically called by contemporaries in France the science de l'homme, and by their counterparts on the Italian peninsula the scienza dell'uomo.Footnote 12 In eighteenth-century France, the science de l'homme was first and foremost a behavioral science that used the categories and principles of medical vitalism to make sense of the mental life and comportment of the individual and to account for the spectacle of diversity among world peoples, approaching a practice that contemporaries themselves would shortly call “ethnography,” or “anthropology,” and what Europeans would subsequently call “ethnology.”Footnote 13
This essay examines the political significance of the literary complexity of the Description . . . of the Sicilies, especially as it concerns the demands Galanti's work made on his readership and its influence on the political science of his successors. To this end, the essay first sketches the formation of Galanti as a public intellectual, who was staunchly committed to the publication of privy information about the state of the polity and to the shaping of what we would call public opinion. Second, the essay reveals how Galanti obtained and generated this privy information about the Kingdom and the way his project was received by his contemporaries. For the Description . . . of the Sicilies was a political novelty, whose very realization was the fruit of Galanti's political savvy, his uncanny ability to propose new cultural norms for the administration of the Kingdom, and above all his personal tenacity and his capacity to stand his ground in the face of a bureaucracy's bewilderment and resistance. Third, and most centrally, this essay shows how Galanti toured the Kingdom, studied its resources, and presented his conclusions, and it manifests the ways in which Galanti's analysis and representation of his own Kingdom resembled those of professional scientific travelers to peripheral and extra-European lands. Lastly, this study considers how Galanti's work was received by his contemporaries and its importance in shaping the imagination of an Italian “South” long after the relevance of his study had waned, and despite Galanti's own intentions.
From Law to Political Geography: Galanti, Publicist
Giuseppe Maria Galanti's career was shaped by a profound sense of ambivalence towards the worldliness of his profession, his adopted city, and his fellow intellectual cohort. For although he was the most urbane of city dwellers, and a thoroughly cosmopolitan intellectual, his own commitments were perpetually refashioned by a feeling of loyalty to the Neapolitan provinces and by the local exigencies of his professional career, especially once geographer of the Kingdom of Naples.
Born in Santa Croce del Sannio in the province of the Molise, Galanti, like so many privileged provincials, spent most of his childhood and adult life in the capital city, Naples, where he was educated and then inducted into the ranks of the capital's class of jurists. This path was typical of privileged male provincials, but Galanti's attitudes and ambitions were not. First, he strongly resented the conventional career choice his parents had imposed upon him; and his professional ambitions evidently lay beyond the lucrative court of law. Galanti only pursued his study of jurisprudence with the greatest reluctance, which he most frankly voiced as a student in correspondence with his father, as well as in a pair of eloquently written manifestos demonstrative of his sense of an alternative vocation.Footnote 14 In those manifestos, Galanti famously pronounced his commitment to “civil philosophy,” or what effectively was the new course of study on “civil economics” and its affiliated sciences as piloted by Antonio Genovesi, the famed pedagogue and titleholder of the newly established chair of mechanics and elements of commerce at the University of Naples.Footnote 15 Yet from his correspondence it is also clear that Galanti had imbibed not only what we would call the century's political and economic sciences but also, “in an area altogether new and strange,” the Enlightenment's “science of man.”Footnote 16
Although Galanti pursued a career in law, he clearly had not renounced his less conventional aspirations. Indeed, it seems that he harbored the ambition of defending the legacy of, if not replacing, Genovesi. Upon the death of Genovesi in 1769, Galanti took it upon himself to pen and publish without ecclesiastical imprimatur the Historical Eulogy of Abbé A. Genovesi (1772), a eulogy that most staunchly defended the programmatic teachings of his mentor. This earned Galanti the censorship of the Church and the attention of international luminaries within the Republic of Letters,Footnote 17 but failed to bring him the tangible professional rewards most contemporaries hoped to secure with self-financed encomia, such as recommendation to the chair of mechanics and commerce, which would remain vacant for years, or the promise of office from the Court.Footnote 18
Yet Galanti would manage to devise a professional course of action that better suited him than jurisprudence by making what Darnton calls a “business of the Enlightenment,” first as a publicist and later as a consultant to the Kingdom's administration. After a few years of experience as a bookseller in the capital, in 1777 Galanti founded the Società letteraria—a publishing house that was dedicated to the importation and select translation of foreign literature.Footnote 19 He would continue to direct it under a variety of corporate guises well into the 1790s. As a tradesman of literature in Naples, Galanti profited from the capital's insatiable demand for foreign books, especially those that were prohibited.Footnote 20 As a publicist, he printed a series of translations that made available in the capital collectanea of foreign authorsFootnote 21—literary, scientific, and juridical—and topical compendia of a decidedly global imprint,Footnote 22 such as anthologies of travel literature, world history, and of course geography. If Galanti invested his capital and energies in the importation and publication of world literature for the Neapolitan market, this cosmopolitan enterprise also provided the occasion for Galanti's initiative to undertake his own, decidedly local, exercises in writing and publication; that is, a survey of the state of the Italian peninsula and, in particular, another of his own native region, the Molise, which he hoped to rescue from the misinformation about the state of contemporary Kingdom of Naples. The latter was an exercise in revisionism which would culminate in his monumental political geography, conventionally known as the Description . . . of the Sicilies.Footnote 23
Galanti, Publicist and Political Geographer: The Description . . . of the Sicilies
After his work on compendia of history and literature, Galanti made his first foray into political geography with the Description of the Ancient and Contemporary State of the Molise, with a Historical Essay on the Constitution of the Kingdom, the “fruit of two sojourns” (villeggiature) in the Molise, which appeared with the Società, presumably in 1781.Footnote 24 In hindsight, the Description . . . of the Molise was evidently a public bid for the royal commission of a chorography of the entire Kingdom of Naples. After summarizing the contents of the Description . . . of the Molise, for example, he rather suggestively added that “it would be easy to supplement [this work] with particular descriptions of the other provinces.”Footnote 25 From the documentation conserved in the State Archive of Naples, it is apparent that important members of the Court would themselves shortly concur with Galanti, and provide him concrete means of support. Indeed, there is evidence that Galanti had already received the wholehearted endorsement of the king for his pursuit of a work on “universal geography” by September of 1781, when the king went so far as to order that Galanti be served all the information the latter deemed necessary for the undertaking of his publication.Footnote 26 Now patronized and ambitious, Galanti would henceforth devote himself to a “description” of the Kingdom, which would amount to what was not merely a traditional “chorography” of the remaining provinces, but a global survey of the crown lands that comprised little-known information about their history, political institutions, finances, commerce, and resources, both natural and human. As Galanti himself summarized the projected contents of his six-volume work:
In the first volume the political state of the Kingdom is treated, in the second volume the state of its finance, and in the third its economic state. In the fourth volume there is the chorography of Campania, the two Principalities and the Sannium, and in the fifth volume that of the three provinces of the Abruzzi and the three provinces of Apulia. Finally, in the sixth and last volume [there is] the chorography of Calabria. In an appendix to the fourth volume there is the description of Naples. The Island of Sicily shall be treated in a separate volume.Footnote 27
More than singularly thorough, the nature of Galanti's study was utterly unprecedented in aiming at a disclosure of what heretofore had been regarded as secrets of state. Earlier topographers of the Kingdom had mostly been amateurs, who had been able to offer little more than a second-hand survey of the geography, political institutions, and rituals of the Neapolitan provinces for an audience eager to learn about the natural wonders and political formalities of that modern nation.Footnote 28 By contrast, Galanti exercised his carte blanche to obtain privy information about the Kingdom from its various administrative departments and to present, analyse, and publicize information that had hitherto been known only to the Court. As Galanti proudly advertised in the Description . . . of the Sicilies,
Our enterprise has merited the approval of His Majesty for the part concerning the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily; and so that it result exact, he has ordered that the Royal Secretaries of Ecclesiastical Affairs and of His Majesty's Estate and Customs [Azienda] minister all the information and materials necessary for the disclosure of the true state of the provinces and the commerce that they practice.Footnote 29
Needless to say, disclosure of this sort demanded the cooperation of the Kingdom's various chambers, secretaries, and tribunals, and Galanti's relations with these bodies were often far from easy. Galanti often complained in print that in spite of the support of the king, his project had been continually obstructed by members of the royal administration – although “two ministers of state communicated to me the will of the King, and they ordered many tribunals and public offices to provide me with the information requisite for the composition of a geographical and political description of the Kingdom,” Galanti quipped, “there was not wanting the opposition of a number of ministers, who were ignored.”Footnote 30 In his correspondence with the Court, moreover, Galanti repeatedly submitted reports on the state of his working relationship with his interlocutors in the royal chambers and with secretaries, which noted not only a willingness to collaborate but also the uncooperativeness of named bureaucrats, recalcitrant officials whom Galanti evidently hoped the Court would help to bring into line.Footnote 31 If this was not enough, Galanti's resolution was further tested after 1783 by no lesser a person than Ferdinando Galiani himself, who reviewed the first volume of the Description . . . of the Sicilies for the civil imprimatur, ordered changes to be made, and then criticized the revised volume in print, delaying the release of the first volume by some three to four years.Footnote 32
Despite this opposition Galanti persevered, his determination strengthened by the support of the presidents of the foremost royal secretary, the Segreteria di Stato del Dispaccio di Azienda e Commercio, or Azienda, who probably saw in their support for Galanti's project a means of extending the powers of the Azienda over the older machinery of government. In collaboration with the Azienda Galanti sought to encourage a culture of political accountability, which was deeply offensive to many royal bureaucrats. With such opposition, however, the sheer volume of information about the Kingdom that Galanti was able to wring from his critics was truly extraordinary. This included an extensive array of statistics about the Kingdom's sources of revenue—such as, monies received from the provinces in the form of direct tributes, tariffs/customs, privileges, and excise taxes—and its expenditures, data which packed the second and third volumes of the Description . . . of the Sicilies.Footnote 33 And on these counts, those volumes represented not only an empirical companion to existing Neapolitan literature on taxation but also a milestone in European public-finance literature.Footnote 34 The Segreteria di Stato dell'Ecclestiastico further provided demographic data which was to be a primary feature of the volumes dedicated to the chorography of the provinces and was intended to provide a first comprehensive demographic account of the Kingdom.Footnote 35
If the Description . . . of the Sicilies provided contemporaries with a statistical study of incomparable breadth, the question remains why Galanti chose to make financial and social numbers so integral a part of his project. The reason, quite simply, seems to be that Galanti believed that numbers would provide what we would call transparency, and that transparency was essential to the formation of rational public opinion. In the preface to the second volume of the Description . . . of the Sicilies, for example, Galanti commented,
Secrecy in finance, as in all other branches of civil administration . . . is pernicious; because . . . it deprives the government of the public's trust . . . The public disclosure [pubblicità] of the administration of finances thus should be regarded as an important objective of the civil government . . . When they [the finances] are made evident to all the citizens, each one knows those interests which should be loved and pursued.Footnote 36
This belief that financial transparency would provide enlightenment hints at Galanti's admiration for the famous Compte rendu au roi by Jacques Necker, whose éloge of Colbert and tract on grains Galanti had already published in 1779–80. Indeed, Necker himself had once been officially invited by the Neapolitan Court to do for the finances of Kingdom of Naples what he had done for France. Yet Galanti's own achievement was not only to deliver an account of the Kingdom's finances to its sovereign, but to supply a survey of the population and resources of the Kingdom which was based upon a series of arduous journeys to the farthest reaches of the provinces.
From 1790 onward, Galanti was primarily engaged in fieldwork in the Kingdom's provinces, collecting materials for the chorographies of the Description . . . of the Sicilies and carrying out official duties. Importantly, these two functions were inextricably intertwined; for example, it is evident that the chorographies on the two Abruzzi regions—namely the Capitanata and Puglia Peucezia—that Galanti printed for publication in the fifth volume of the Description . . . of the Sicilies re-presented the thematic contents of those of the general surveys of the same regions that Galanti had written exclusively for the government.Footnote 37 The same holds true for Galanti's chorography of southern Calabria.Footnote 38 While the precise relationship between the governmental surveys and the chorographies has yet to be studied it is clear that Galanti's travels had yielded a body of confidential documents for the royal administration, which he had every intention of publishing in revised form in the Description . . . of the Sicilies.
In making these regional surveys, Galanti was able to draw on the help of several royal secretaries, who had their own reasons for supporting this aspect of his work. Although his first travels in Campania were largely unencumbered by official duties, it seems Galanti's fieldwork in the remaining provinces first and foremost was dedicated to reports on specific issues of the land requested by the Court for the royal secretaries of the Azienda and Giustizia. From its inception, Galanti's fieldwork for the Description . . . of the Sicilies was supported by the Azienda, which provided him with logistical support, financed his expeditions, and increasingly charged him with official duties.Footnote 39 After his travels in Campania, in 1791 Galanti was ordered to write a general account of all the Campanian regions he had visited, a practice which would be followed for all of his subsequent travels.Footnote 40 His “general visits”Footnote 41 to the Abruzzi and Apulia in 1791 (and 1793) and Calabria in 1792 were recompensed with a fee of three hundred Neapolitan ducats on 28 March 1792.Footnote 42 In return, Galanti produced both general surveys (relazioni) on those provinces for the kingFootnote 43 and further reports on the nature and potential remedies of the ills plaguing the economy and judicial system of the same for the royal secretaries of the Azienda and Giustizia.Footnote 44 Galanti enumerated his official obligations in his revised dedication to the Description . . . of the Sicilies:
After Your Majesty had given me the difficult task of the description of these Kingdoms, he also wished to honor me with two others, even more serious and superior to my forces—that is, [the task of] the general visit of the provinces, and to propose those legal and political expedients necessary for the reordering of the judicial system and economy.Footnote 45
If Galanti had begun his travels as a publicist, in other words, he would complete them in the name of the king, and effectively become a political consultant for the modernizing royal secretaries.
Despite his herculean work on the Kingdom's finances, Galanti considered his chorography of the provinces, which he designated for the final three volumes of his magnum opus, to be the centerpiece of his work. In contrast to his predecessors, Galanti saw the fundamental task of chorography as empiricism, which he hoped would counter the veil of exoticism shrouding the peoples and circumstances of the Kingdom's provinces. According to Galanti, the information about the provinces available in the nation's capital was “imperfect” at best.Footnote 46 “In Naples,” Galanti noted with irony, “the state of the island of Tahiti is probably better known than that of the provinces.”Footnote 47 While Galanti was concerned to remove the veil of exoticism obscuring the provinces, his allegiance to empiricism further signified a refusal to theorize like those armchair philosophers whom Galanti most loathed, the political economists. “Today in the capitals of Europe it has become fashionable to write books about agriculture, and to construct systems of public economy. Those works,” Galanti scoffed, “are only good for occupying the time of the many frivolous sedentary individuals, who are wont to speak of the good, of the public, and of government, in the same guise that they would read a newspaper or tell a story.”Footnote 48 As he insisted, “One does not know the state of the provinces without visiting the fields and huts of the peasant, without seeing how he cultivates, how he harvests, what he pays, and how much he suffers.”Footnote 49 To this extent Galanti was the author of his own motto, “I have described things as they are.”Footnote 50
A self-identified scientific observer of peoples, Galanti employed methods in the field of the Kingdom that were highly systematic and akin to those of contemporary ethnologists. Like contemporary scientific travelers to extra-European lands, he devised a questionnaire for use when interviewing people. “It will not be out of place to relate here the expeditious method I used in the visit of the provinces,” Galanti revealed:
I made myself a sort of catechism composed of various interrogative articles about the objects of the natural, political, economic, and ecclesiastical states, etc. I called together the different people of the town who could be informed about these things, and, in a session, read the articles of the catechism, discussed those of relevance to the region, and noted the result.Footnote 51
The results of Galanti's examination of village elders, along with his own observations, were then recorded in the form of a field journal.Footnote 52 From his journals, Galanti gives the impression of having attached great importance to the precise transcription of the evidence yielded by his examination and, in particular, of having taken great care in distinguishing between consensual and particular opinions about each locality visited. For instance, when he recorded a piece of information obtained from a single individual, Galanti was careful to cite his source, just as he categorized selected items as “fact[s] to verify,” when he suspected that his sources were unreliable.Footnote 53 He even noted the discrepancies between the cartographic and literary materials he had consulted in preparation for his trip and the reality he observed.Footnote 54 In terms of content, more importantly, the specific entries in the Calabria journal all faithfully followed the articles of the catechism. The narrative for each toponym regularly commenced with an inventory of the place's natural resources, then listed and qualified its prevailing political institutions and commercial arts, and finally culminated with a description of the “moral state,” by which Galanti meant not only the “character of the inhabitants” and their “singular customs” but also religious beliefs, social institutions, and even illnesses.Footnote 55
Galanti's journals formed the basis for those aggregate representations of the provinces designated for the final three volumes of the Description . . . of the Sicilies.Footnote 56 From the extant surveys and chorographies, it seems that the structure of the catechism generally permeated his representations of the provinces, which tended to depict the natural, political, economic, and cultural states of the provinces before charting the population and characteristics of their localities. As evenhanded as Galanti's method may have been, however, the importance it gave to the investigation of the culture, or what he called the “moral state,” of a province represented an important break with the tradition of political geography, and it made his work one of the first deeply documented treatments of society as a natural phenomenon.
However, Galanti's interest in the culture of the provinces was not an end in itself, but rather followed from his more fundamental belief that the “moral state” of the nation came to bear upon, or limit, as it were, its production of wealth. Galanti's attention to cultural phenomena was, in other words, a function of his analysis of the Kingdom's potential for wealth, or ricchezza. His primary interest was in what we would call the resources of the nation, which, he understood, were rendered valuable by the local arts of the indigenous residents of the provinces. In sum, for Galanti, nature was a resource to be exploited and human industry constituted the principal source of national wealth.Footnote 57 “We do not live under the felicitous climate of the Indies,” Galanti cautioned, “where the earth produces by itself, or with little culture, all that which is necessary for life. In our regions, although fertile, the life of man cannot be sustained and conserved without the industry of his hands.”Footnote 58 As concerned Galanti's project, this insight implied spending less time inventorying the Kingdom's topographical features than in assessing local use of them, and this, in turn, meant attending to the culture of the provinces’ laboring classes. “The peoples of the provinces are industrious only to the extent that moral causes do not oppose themselves to the dispositions of beneficent nature.”Footnote 59 As Galanti put it, “Today, the description of a nation must present observations of its economic administration, laws, and customs: Geography must principally serve politics.”Footnote 60
If the individual chorographies of the provinces focused upon culture, the overarching narrative of the Kingdom in the Description . . . of the Sicilies was structured by Galanti's preoccupation with the presumed socioeconomic distance between the metropole and its provinces. Beginning in Naples and terminating in Calabria, Galanti's account of the Kingdom moved seamlessly across its territory, as if emulating the journey of a traveler traversing the Kingdom from north to south. In reality neither was this route the one Galanti had followed, nor did it respect the conventions used in organizing the political geographies of the Kingdom.Footnote 61 As presented, Galanti's “journey,” in other words, was governed by his own interpretation of the state of the provinces rather than by the compass.
As the point of departure for his narrative journey, Galanti chose the capital of the Kingdom, the city of Naples. In contrast with the critical tenor of his work's first volume, Galanti's entry on the capital in his chorography of Campania was celebratory. Suspending his characteristic anti-urbanism, Galanti emphasized the beauty and civility of the gulf and city of Naples. “Naples is the first among the cities of Italy,” Galanti declared, “for its beauty, wealth, size, and population.”Footnote 62 The situation, culture, and populace, in sum, made the city a “superb metropolis,” where “everything invited one to reside and enjoy.”Footnote 63 Supporting the cultural refinement of the “metropolis,” then, were the fertile agricultural fields just beyond the confines of greater Naples, (early modern) Campania, which the ancients had appropriately called the Terra Laboria, or worked lands. Populous and productive, in Galanti's scheme they represented that agrarian foundation requisite for the urban civilization he had so lauded at their center, the city of Naples. In this land of plenty, furthermore, the people most closely resembled those Arcadian prototypes Galanti had hoped to encounter in his travels across the provinces. Galanti observed, “the nation is vivacious, the festivities, are frequent and the wine is communal,” as if the contemporary inhabitants of Terra di Lavoro had benefitted from both the industry and festive traditions of the ancient Campanians, despite the modesty of their present situation.Footnote 64
After a brief detour south to the Principato Citeriore, Galanti's narrative journey proceeded with respect to the geographical axes of the Kingdom and was marked by his ever stricter attention to the cultural features of its successive provinces. According to Galanti's plan, the Description . . . of the Sicilies would take its reader east across the Apennines, via the provinces of the Principato Ulteriore and the Molise, to reach the coastal province of the Abruzzi in the northeasternmost corner of the Kingdom, whence it was supposed to proceed south in a near linear fashion, first to the regions of Apulia and then to the Calabrias. Relative to the other provinces of the Kingdom, the peoples of Naples and its vicinity were depicted by Galanti as the inhabitants of a privileged space—that is, of a metropolitan center and its laborious agrarian hinterland. As Galanti put it, “Departing from Naples to Ariano [in the Principato Ulteriore], the Kingdom presents the appearance of a populated nation. Beyond that point, however, commences a desert.”Footnote 65 Beyond Naples, it was a matter of journeying to a less improved periphery, whose societies Galanti would then typecast according to their prevailing economic modes of organization.
Galanti's journey from Naples to the peripheries of the Kingdom thus simulated a journey backwards in social evolutionary time which exhibited the socioeconomic features of “civilized,” “barbarous,” and “savage” societies.Footnote 66 The passage from the civilization of Campania to its forerunners in the countryside was made in the foothills and mountains of the Apennines, or what were the early modern equivalents of the ancient Sannium: the Principato Ulteriore and the Molise. These two modern provinces figured as a transitional zone between the center of the Kingdom and its periphery, and, as such, represented an archetype of civilization for Galanti. Once beyond the Sannium, Galanti presented his chorography of the Abruzzi, that region located in the mountainous northeastern corner of the Kingdom; unfortunately, this account was censored mid-publication. From the large chunk of the chorography actually printed and those regional reports submitted to the royal secretaries, however, the outline of his account of the Abruzzi is clear. It figured as the most advanced region within a continuum of barbarous spaces stretching along the coast of the Adriatic, from the boundary of the Kingdom with the Papal State in the north to its southernmost point in the Terra di Otranto. In the Description . . . of the Sicilies, the Abruzzi Citra and Ultra were typified as complex societies, characterized by the coexistence of two distinct developmental stages, namely that of their small urbane cities, or civility, and that of a rugged mountainous landscape, or barbarism.
If the Abruzzi were presented as an intermediate mix of civility and barbarism, from the reports Galanti issued to the royal secretaries about the Apulias and Calabrias it is evident that the narrative journey Galanti had planned to recount in the final volumes of the Description . . . of the Sicilies was meant to culminate in unequivocal examples of barbarism and savagery. Galanti's most-often-repeated observation about the Apulias was his critique of their underpopulation, which he attributed to the region's primary means of subsistence, i.e. its pastoral economy.Footnote 67 Galanti thought that the reason for this underpopulation was “the establishment of the Tavoliere di Apulia,” a large, central-lying plain designated by the government exclusively for the pasture of sheep.Footnote 68 In Galanti's opinion, the establishment of the Tavoliere had only served to “render the desertion of the Capitanata permanent,” and to make it comparable to “a desert like the Tartary.” As Galanti criticized, “History has shown that shepherds are barbarous peoples and that one moves towards civilization to the extent that they become farmers.”Footnote 69 Generally speaking, the inhabitants of the Capitanata were “of great talent, but bereft of culture,” finding barbarism where the civilizing forces of industry and commerce were painfully wanting.Footnote 70
Galanti used his report on the Terra di Bari, in the center of the Apulian coast, to elaborate his thinking about the results of these barbarous customs. The report on the Terra di Bari particularly dwelled upon instances of illnesses, for which Galanti supposed there were primarily “moral causes.” In the Terra di Bari, for instance, there was the illness associated with the “tarantula,” which Galanti was quick to classify as an example of “hypochondria, born from the difficulty of conversation,”Footnote 71 and a variety of fevers, which Galanti considered just as much a product of custom as they were of the regional climate. If the landscape sickened, then the religious customs of the region were a further source of corruption. “Unfortunately,” Galanti noted, “in the place of religion there is mainly superstition,” a local example of which Galanti supplied for the bewilderment of his reader. “In Rutigliano,” Galanti wrote with a note of scorn,
there persists an abominable superstition. There is a Madonna of the hernias. On the day of the feast, men and women of all ages in need of that protectress are stripped nude and blessed by the cracked branch of a mastic tree. This [branch] is then bound with ties, and one waits a year to see if it is healed, which is the sign of an obtained grace [grazia].Footnote 72
Galanti had intended to conclude his chorography dramatically with an account of the most primitive stage of society present within the Kingdom, or “savagery,” as he put it. In terms of its population, Calabria Ultra manifested an utter “state of desertion” for Galanti.Footnote 73 Likewise, it contained the least significant of cities in the Kingdom, which, Galanti quipped, merely “carried that name, as in reality they were but villages without any beauty or objects of curiosity.”Footnote 74 The small populations of the Calabrias were inadequately sustained by the most primitive methods of animal husbandry and agriculture, furthermore. “The agricultural industry in Calabria,” Galanti remarked, “corresponds to the infancy of society.”Footnote 75 Not surprisingly, features of the landscape also recalled those of primitive societies for Galanti, who noted both the “houses made of mud” dotting the countryside and local usages governing “hospitality,” which occasioned Galanti's comparison of the Calabrians with the Tartars.Footnote 76
The most scathing of Galanti's observations about the Calabrias were saved for his treatment of their moral state. In general, Galanti equated “rudeness” (rozzezza) with the character of the Calabrians, which he illustrated with numerous scurrilous examples.Footnote 77 “The general character [of the Calabrian] is one of a degraded servant,” Galanti gibed. “They are rude, querulous, of bad faith, perjurers, informants, and calumnious. Naturally, there are indocile, obstinate in their ideas, resentful, given to violence and vindictive. In both friendship and hatred they are most tenacious.”Footnote 78 In the mountainous landscape so typical of the Calabrias, Galanti commented, “the inhabitants conserve a larger degree of savagery [selvatichezza] and ferocity”; it was as though their character were an unmediated product of their natural environment.Footnote 79 As evidence of the primitivism of the Calabrians, Galanti especially dwelled on their alleged melancholy. With some relish, in his reports he described those dramatic mourning practices to which he had devoted so much attention in his field journal, such as the ritualized wailing of women and their tearing of their hair. As he put it, “periods of mourning are subject to great rites and formalities,” and “each village has its own uses, which are as bizarre as they are barbarous.”Footnote 80 The moral turpitude of the Calabrians further made their physical condition susceptible to innumerable diseases, most of which were otherwise preventable. For example, Galanti reported that scabies was “general” in the province, where many feared that “curing the disease one runs the risk of death. This shows just to what degree politeness is wanting.”Footnote 81
Conclusion: The Reception of the Description . . . of the Sicilies
Galanti's account of the Kingdom as characterized by civilization amid the agricultural fields of Campania, barbarism across the plains of the Apulias, and savagery in the mountainous Calabrias carried the warning that peoples without commerce were not the masters but the products of their environments. Where they had neglected to transform the natural world by the cultivation of what Galanti called the “arts,” their lives were subject to the forces of nature. As Galanti commented in reference to the reputedly poor air of contemporary Fondi: “The insalubrity of the air derives just as much from the bad atmosphere as from the bad economy.”Footnote 82 The message of Galanti's individual chorographies of the provinces, whether drafted for the authorities or published for the reading public, was that the physical geography of the Kingdom had diversified its subjects, whose distance from civilization was as far as the naturalness of their particular terrain. Overall, the chorographies portrayed the Kingdom as though its different regions exemplified different stages of social evolution. They composed a portrait much like the one of the globe by Europe's first institutional anthropologists.
Given the message of the chorographies, the prospect of Galanti's publication of them in their entirety must have been at the very least worrying to the authorities. If the individual reports to the king on the state of the Abruzzi, Apulias and Calabrias had been published as part of the same work, the final volumes of the Description . . . of the Sicilies would have presented the Kingdom as a series of progressively barbarous spaces. It should thus come as little surprise that the publication history of the Description . . . of the Sicilies most abruptly came to a premature end.Footnote 83 While the reception of Galanti's project had been uneven since its inception, the material galleys for the fifth volume of the Description . . . of the Sicilies suggest that this penultimate volume was withdrawn just as Galanti began to print his description of the Abruzzi and Apulias circa 1794. This timing was not a coincidence, nor merely the outcome of a nervous (revolutionary) political climate, as the historiography has suggested to date. In retrospect, Galanti's hope for a comprehensive description of the Kingdom was surely compromised by the political delicacy of his project and the scientific language with which he represented the state of the provinces.
For these reasons it is important to bear in mind that the reception of Galanti's project was conditioned not only by its political but also by its literary context. Although he had meant to improve upon the literature about Italy by his transalpine colleagues, Galanti's analysis of the Kingdom evidently treated its subject in ways that recalled the tropes of “civilized travelers” on the Grand Tour. As a consequence, the Description . . . of the Sicilies had a number of prominent Neapolitan detractors, who squarely contested Galanti's literary perspective, and his aspiration to the role of rapporteur on the provinces to the Court. For example, Michele Torcia, the renowned publicist and Court librarian, charged Galanti's work with the presumption of foreign travelers to the Kingdom, a criticism which doubtless harmed the reputation of the Description . . . of the Sicilies. For Torcia's was the crticism of a professional traveler. Torcia had himself visited the provinces of the Kingdom at the behest of the government (in 1785) and published a series of short articles containing firsthand observations about them with a variety of Neapolitan journals, such as the reputed Analisi ragionata, articles which he amalgamated and revised for a book entitled An Essay on a Trip Made through the Region of the Peligni in 1792.Footnote 84 In that book, besides his many observations about the antiquities and customs of the Peligni, Torcia notably expressed his utter contempt for Galanti's work, which he denounced (in a most lengthy discursive footnote) as marred by both the inaccuracies and the misunderstandings typical of foreign writers.Footnote 85 And Torcia's opinion was by no means unique. So too did the highly reputed publicist Lorenzo Giustiniani have little patience for Galanti's high-handed criticisms of local institutions, which he characterized as exhibiting “excessive temerity.” The content and tone of Galanti's work made it comparable to those of impugnable “foreign writers,” of whom Giustiniani sharply disapproved.Footnote 86 If Galanti's geographical work was comparable to that of contemptible foreigners, then it was also rivaled by the geographical work of the contemporary political economist Francesco Longano, whose “praiseworthy” study of the Molise and Capitanata provided, Giustiniani polemicized, the template for a study of the Kingdom that “would contribute most to public happiness.”Footnote 87 Prior to his “general visits” of the provinces, in other words, Galanti was under fire from his colleagues, and be their criticism just or the product of envy and political intrigue, their stature surely raised questions about Galanti's project before he could complete his publication of the Description . . . of the Sicilies.
Naturally, the question remains why Galanti adopted such a rhetorical strategy in the first place; that is, why had he wished to represent the Kingdom in terms that clearly would have appalled his reader? The answer lies, I believe, in the supposed value of hyperbole, which was traditionally used as a rhetorical device by which to reeducate the heart and, thereby, to move the individual to a higher state of awareness and action. Given what we know about him, it seems beyond doubt that Galanti believed that such a hyperbolic account of the state of the Kingdom and its peoples would educate his reader politically. Indeed, it is unequivocal that he had hoped to wield the narrative and categories of the stage theory of society to the advantage of the provinces, by shaming and thereby persuading the public to promote the welfare of the Kingdom's periphery.
Yet, more important than winning moral authority, for Galanti this rhetorical strategy ultimately undercut the political authority previously granted him and radically changed the status of his project. For with the censorship of the Description . . . of the Sicilies, the Court would effectively reappropriate for the chambers of the royal administration those facts of state that Galanti had intended for disclosure to the public sphere, restricting anew public access to information about the polity and rendering that science of state that Galanti had pioneered in the spirit of a publicist the exclusive prerogative of government.
