Italy outside Italy. Italian intellectual migration and the emergence of a modern European identity

The project aims to develop a new model for studying the Italian migration of people, books and ideas in early modern Europe; in fact, this was the means by which the conceptual foundations of a common European identity were laid. Some examples are: a) the exiles religionis causa who spread ideas of tolerance and pacification (such as Francesco Pucci with his intertwining of the anthropology of human innocence, prophetic millenarianism and political perspectives); b) the dissemination of texts by Machiavelli (published in the vernacular in London during the 1580s, then also circulating in Latin translation in various countries, including Holland where they played a central role in the reformulation of the concept of "prudence"), by Pomponazzi (influential on French thought as a vehicle, still to be investigated, of Pomponazzi’s philosophy in the English panorama), and by Campanella (whose works, such as Civitas solis and Monarchia di Spagna, translated in England, circulated in those circles interested in utopia and political and apocalyptic prophecy): c) G. Bruno’s crucial activity for the radical rethinking of relations between state, church and religion (such as in Bohemia at the court of Rudolph II), d) the incidence of radical Italian thought (from P. Pomponazzi to Cardano and Bruno himself) on Theophrastus redivivus, manifesto of the libertine movement. Lesser-known examples can also be cited as confirmation of the phenomenon’s spread - from the presence in England of Lodovico Castelvetro’s commentary on Poetics, the modern circulation of Pietro da Ravenna's Phoenix, the Lettere di philosophia naturale by Camilla Erculiani published at the end of the 1500s in Krakow, and those, published by Celio Secondo Curione, of Olimpia Morata exiled for religious reasons in Heidelberg, where she established extensive correspondence with important members of the reformed world. On the other hand, the same Counter-Reformation thought asserted itself through an impressive process of circulation, as demonstrated by the biographical background and translations of the sermons of Francesco Panigarola by G. Chappuys, leading to strong criticism by Protestant authors as in the case of G. Pacard's Antipanigarole (1597). In the early modern age there was a vast twofold process of circulation and re-elaboration, driven by various Italian philosophical and religious reflections. The project (and this is the new model) intends to study this specific outcome of the Italian migration in a unified (albeit exemplifying) way, focusing on the original reinterpretations available, on the different conceptual matrices that nourished it and on the European intellectual profile which it helped to define. The various results of the research will be available via the creation of MAMIE- Mappa della migrazione intellettuale italiana nell’Europa moderna, a multimedia, interactive and diachronic geographical map for the study of the formation of European intellectual identity.