Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Origins and Duecento
- The Trecento
- The Quattrocento
- The Cinquecento
- The Seicento: Poetry, Philosophy and Science
- Narrative prose and theatre
- The Settecento
- 22 The first half of the Settecento
- 23 The theatre from Metastasio to Goldoni
- 24 Opera
- 25 The Enlightenment and Parini
- 26 Alfieri and pre-Romanticism
- The Age of Romanticism (1800–1870)
- The Literature of United Italy (1870–1910)
- The Rise and Fall of Fascism (1910–45)
- The Aftermath of the Second World War (1945–56)
- Contemporary Italy (since 1956)
- Bibliography
- References
25 - The Enlightenment and Parini
from The Settecento
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Origins and Duecento
- The Trecento
- The Quattrocento
- The Cinquecento
- The Seicento: Poetry, Philosophy and Science
- Narrative prose and theatre
- The Settecento
- 22 The first half of the Settecento
- 23 The theatre from Metastasio to Goldoni
- 24 Opera
- 25 The Enlightenment and Parini
- 26 Alfieri and pre-Romanticism
- The Age of Romanticism (1800–1870)
- The Literature of United Italy (1870–1910)
- The Rise and Fall of Fascism (1910–45)
- The Aftermath of the Second World War (1945–56)
- Contemporary Italy (since 1956)
- Bibliography
- References
Summary
The Enlightment in Naples
The various reforms undertaken in the Settecento theatre should be seen against the background of the general questioning of traditional thinking and the adoption of more ‘enlightened’ views in society as a whole. By ‘Enlightenment’ we mean the movement, which affected all branches of learning and which was more or less explicitly political, of emancipation from ignorance, prejudice and authority based on superstition and the abuse of power, a campaign undertaken by the most original and open-minded thinkers of the first half of the century, but more systematically in the second half, on a basis of reason and freedom of criticism, aiming at a fairer social organisation and (in the last analysis) a better life for all. The works of the main proponents of the new philosophy, the philosophes – Locke, Newton and Hume in Britain, Montesquieu/Voltaire and Diderot in France, to mention only a few of the more important – were read and admired in Italy, although their influence varied according to the economic, legal and political situation in the different Italian states.
What has been said about Goldoni would lead one to assign his comedies to the ‘progressive’ culture of his time or to label them ‘enlightened’, but if by this term we mean the followers of the French philosophes and ‘Encyclopaedists’ (from the great Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers which Diderot and D'Alembert began publishing in 1751), who devoted their lives to the ‘spread of light’, then we must concentrate on certain states in particular which we earlier labelled ‘new’ (p. 343): Naples, Florence to some extent, and especially Milan.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Italian Literature , pp. 371 - 386Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997