I Dandolo. Dall'Italia dei lumi al Risorgimento

The book reconstructs the vicissitudes of the Dandolo family, centring them around a problematic unitary kernel: the contribution to the “cause of Italian progress”, identified with the economic and scientific development by the father Vincenzo (1758-1819) – an Enlightenment thinker, theorist of the new antiphlogistic chemistry and then enlightened agronomist-, with the civil and moral renewal entrusted to the civilizing function of the church by the son Tullio (1801-1870) – a Catholic man of letters-, with the political liberation and the independence of the country by the grandchildren Enrico (1827-1849) and Emilio (1830-1859) – martyrs of the Risorgimento struggle-. The study of the three generations leads us to the heart of a complex age of transformation of the history of Italy which goes from the Enlightenment to the Unity: it enables us to see how the Enlightenment legacy lived on in the children of the Risorgimento and how much its lesson – the awareness of the rising role of sciences and techniques in the lives of peoples and states – could still work with the Romantic generation, giving life to a new cultural patriotism, that is a new way of serving one's country, which linked the national identity to a cultural pre-eminence able to prepare its political deliverance. What comes out of it is the image of an Italian Risorgimento as an age of deep renewal and of commitment for a new society, open to scientific and technical achievements, inspired by a deep faith in a new Italy for which you could even die, but for which you could and chiefly had to live, in order to carry out its modernization and progress. For this reason, such an age greatly owed to men like Vincenzo, whose name still lives today in the agricultural college opened at Bargnano, in the district of Brescia, thanks to a bequest from countess Ermellina Maselli Dandolo and in the plaque set into a wall in the town hall of Varese, the site of his agronomic experiments, in 1879 according to the will of the local agrarian Comizio, a sodality of Lombard farmers, probably the grandchildren of those same whom the Count had in his time urged to carry out improvements and renovations in their farms.