Pietro Verri's Meditazioni sulla felicità represents one of the most important Italian contributions to the eighteenth-century debate on the nature and attainability of happiness. Written in the spring of 1763 and published anonymously in Livorno shortly thereafter, this pamphlet fills a mere twenty-nine pages. Its publisher was Giuseppe Aubert, who would go on to print Beccaria's De’ delitti e delle pene as well as a reimpression of the Encyclopédie. The publication history of the Meditazioni is an interesting one. By the time Verri resolved to publish an extended version of the text in 1781, the Meditazioni had been reprinted twice in their entirety: first by Venetian clergyman Ferdinando Facchinei, who did so in 1765 with the addition of paratexts refuting Verri's arguments; then by Dalmazzo Francesco Vasco, who, in 1766, produced an edition of Facchinei's refutation adding to the text a second layer of annotation aiming to support the original author's ideas. Only ever translated in its entirety once, into French by Swiss pastor Gabriel Mingard (in 1766), Verri's text has now been made available to the francophone public in a new translation by Pierre Musitelli.Based on the two existing Italian critical editions of the text, both by Gianni Francioni, Musitelli's translation masterfully renders Verri's deliberately plain and straightforward style. Unlike Mingard's 1766 translation, moreover, it respects the fluid structure of the original by refraining from introducing any artificial subsections. In addition to the translation and the relevant annotation, which clarifies some linguistic issues for francophone readers while also highlighting unnoticed connections between Verri's text and various French Enlightenment works, the book under review also includes two essays by Musitelli.In the first one (“Politique et économie du bonheur dans l'Italie des Lumières”), Musitelli introduces the Meditazioni, analyzing it in the broader contexts of the Milanese Enlightenment and of Verri's literary and philosophical production. In addition, Musitelli situates the text relative to eighteenth-century European utilitarianism and literature on happiness. Insisting that individual and social happiness are inextricably linked and that human beings ought therefore to gain a better understanding of human nature to increase their own personal well-being, Verri breaks with both the Christian and the Stoic traditions (79). The radicalism of Verri's theory of ethics, among other considerations, pushes Musitelli partly to reconsider Franco Venturi's interpretation of the Italian Enlightenment as a solely reform-oriented, moderate phenomenon (106–107). On the contrary, Musitelli argues, Verri's intellectual experience demonstrates that a reform-oriented position could coexist, in eighteenth-century Italy, with “more radically dissenting views that do not rule out revolution as a means of action or the ideal of equality as a legal aim.” After all, it is as “la maggiore felicità possibile divisa colla maggiore uguaglianza possibile” (emphasis mine) that Verri renders, in the Meditazioni, the fundamental maxim of eighteenth-century utilitarianism that Jeremy Bentham later formulated as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”The second essay in the volume, “Genèse et réception des Méditations sur le bonheur en Europe,” then turns to the genesis and European circulation of Verri's text. It devotes ample space to the two editions of the Meditazioni produced by Facchinei and Vasco and aptly describes Verri's text as a “book-debate livre-débat that epitomizes the intensity of Italian intellectual life in the mid-1760s” (133). In keeping with this interpretation of the text as a trigger for intellectual discussion, Musitelli's volume also reproduces as appendices four reviews of Verri's pamphlet published in French and British literary gazettes as well as the dedicatory epistle with which Facchinei opens his refutation/reprint of the Meditazioni. This choice on Musitelli's part puts readers in a privileged position, allowing them fully to appreciate the impact and historical significance of Verri's text.Extremely well researched although occasionally overlapping, the two essays open up many avenues of research. It would be worth exploring in more detail, for instance, the similarities and differences between the views on happiness expressed by Verri in the Meditazioni and by Muratori in Della pubblica felicità (or even by Facchinei in his Discorso con cui si pruova in quali cose si ritrova la felicità). Likewise, it would be interesting to investigate the identity of the “donna di spirito” who, according to a letter sent from Alessandro to Pietro Verri in February 1767, embarked on a further French translation of the Meditazioni.All in all, the volume under analysis represents an excellent contribution to the study of Pietro Verri. Musitelli's translation of the Meditazioni is likely to rekindle interest in a key text of the Italian Enlightenment among the francophone public, and it is only to be hoped that an English translation will follow suit. Musitelli's first essay represents a good introduction to the life and works of Pietro Verri as well as to the literary activity of the Accademia de’ Pugni. Moreover, dealing as it does with crucial concepts such as happiness and utilitarianism, the volume as a whole will be of interest to eighteenth-century scholars even outside Italian studies. Given the breadth of Musitelli's scholarship, it is only regrettable that the publisher did not acknowledge more clearly his general editorship of the volume and substantial scholarly contribution by featuring his name on the front cover, rather than somewhat confusingly reiterating Musitelli's role as author or translator at the beginning of each section.
RUGGERO SCIUTO (Wed,) studied this question.