It is the fortune, or perhaps the misfortune, of the Enlightenment that its historians frequently write very long books. Franco Venturi's Settecento Riformatore, which must surely be one of the longest, has now reached its fifth and final volume. As an enterprise it can have few parallels even among dixhuitièmistes. It offers no less than the description of an entire culture seen from a single geographical viewpoint. The culture is the whole of Europe from 1730 until the demise of the ancien régime in the French Revolution. The perspective is Italy, for, as Venturi announced at the start of the project, the Italians were, because of their long tradition of social and political analysis, perhaps the most perceptive observers of the European scene.

LRB 21 February 1985 | PDF Download