The project of the 21st Annual Conference of the Academia Europaea in Naples on ‘Risks, Environment and Sustainable Development’ included a session in homage to the international cultural tradition of the host city, which sought to exemplify the three basic aspects of the title in connection with the humanities. As chair of this session, I devised a programme of ‘case-studies’, bringing together a variety of leading figures active in Naples, who faced ‘risks’ that were the risks of intellectual life within a dangerous social, historical and political ‘environment’. Although situated against various backdrops – history of ideas, musicology, philosophy of science, and related to different ages (Pre-Enlightenment; Neapolitan Revolution and Restoration; Italian Fascism) – the three papers were interconnected by the issue of the ‘sustainable development’ of forms of knowledge and sensibility and their legacies. In different ways and with diminishing consequences for the lives of the protagonists, the series of papers reconstructed, respectively, the delegitimation and persecution to death, the misfortune and exile, the oblivion and marginalization of intellectuals who struggled to establish the political values, aesthetic taste and scientific methodology that have shaped our modern European cultural consciousness.

The first paper presented here considers the trials of history in the age of Giannone (1676–1748), who died in prison. In Pietro Giannone's innovative work, which opposed papal interference in Naples, Brendan Dooley celebrates history as a dangerous form of knowledge. He reconstructs the strategy of the attacks upon Giannone following their increasing success based on misinformation, misinterpretation, ignorance, and alleged offense to popular religious beliefs. As with the case of Vico, to deal with changes involves memory of the past and collecting empirical data to interpret the present, offering also inconvenient truths when representing an age still dominated by conflicts of interest between civil authority, government officials and a Church that encroached too much upon state prerogatives.

The author of the second lecture, who unfortunately was unable to submit a version of his paper for the present publication, is a musicologist specializing in Neapolitan comedy and theatre in the second half of the eighteenth century. Takashi Yamada focused on the reasons for Domenico Cimarosa's difficult life (1749–1801) under the Ancient Règime between Revolution and Restoration. Cimarosa, one of the most representative Neapolitan composers of opera, acclaimed throughout Europe, in 1793 returned to Naples from Russia and Vienna, where he stayed until 1799. Yamada contrasted his case with Giovanni Paisiello's, who, although similarly compromised with the Republic, soon regained the favour of the restored King, while Cimarosa was sentenced to death and then exile. The conflict between Cimarosa's artistic ambitions and the Royal Family was elucidated by how this conflict shines through Artemisia regina di Caria (1797); the reasons for Cimarosa's conviction were exhibited through the cantata No che più fausto giorno (1799), which was dedicated to the restored King, and through historical documents relating to Cimarosa's pre-revolutionary activity and ‘artistic’ awareness, which led him to join the activities of the musically and politically ‘enlightened’ Masonic ambience of Queen Maria Carolina's court.

The third lecture, the second paper presented here, focuses on a different kind of intellectual risk: oblivion following upon the honours of a successful career. Massimo Stanzione casts light on the now relatively neglected work of Filippo Bottazzi (1867–1941), university professor of physiology and director of the Neapolitan Zoological Station ‘A. Dohrn’. During Italian Fascism, his innovative work explored the relationship of physiology to biology and to physical chemistry, while his interests in the philosophy of biology opposed the prevailing idealistic trend of his time. Stanzione offers a detailed account of the international level of Bottazzi's contributions to his scientific field and reveals political and ideological reasons behind the silence surrounding his achievements after his death.