Cities, capitals and statistical description in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy - article ; n°2 ; vol.111, pg 733-745

Patriarca Silvana

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Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée - Année 1999 - Volume 111 - Numéro 2 - Pages 733-745
Silvana Patriarca, Cities, capitals and statistical description in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy, p. 733-745. This essay focusses on the changing descriptive conventions and on the objects which characterized statistical descriptions of cities and capitals in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy. It examines this literature of fact with the aim, on the one hand, of identifying whether there was a specificity in the description of capital cities, and, on the other, of locating the emergence of the big city as an autonomous object of investigation. The essay argues that in the tradition of statistical description which existed in the peninsula before unification, capitals were not a very distinctive object of observation and analysis. Rome and Milan (as respectively the legal and the self-defined moral capitals of the new kingdom) became more relevant after 1870, but then in connection with various trends (increasing role of city governments, budget crises of several large cities) the Central statistical directorate and increasingly the municipal administrations themselves also began collecting and publishing data on big cities. In these works, the representation of big cities escaped the boundaries of the locality. This change preceded, and may have helped, the emergence of the more quantitative statistical studies of the early twentieth century in which demographie behavior became an exclusive concern.
13 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.

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• Publié par: MELANGES_DE_L-ECOLE_FRANCAISE_DE_ROME
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 20
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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Silvana Patriarca
Cities, capitals and statistical description in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Italy
In: Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée T. 111, N°2. 1999. pp. 733-745.
Abstract
Silvana Patriarca, Cities, capitals and statistical description in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy, p. 733-745.
This essay focusses on the changing descriptive conventions and on the objects which characterized statistical descriptions of
cities and capitals in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy. It examines this "literature of fact" with the aim, on the one
hand, of identifying whether there was a specificity in the description of capital cities, and, on the other, of locating the emergence
of the big city as an autonomous object of investigation. The essay argues that in the tradition of statistical description which
existed in the peninsula before unification, capitals were not a very distinctive object of observation and analysis. Rome and Milan
(as respectively the legal and the self-defined "moral" capitals of the new kingdom) became more relevant after 1870, but then in
connection with various trends (increasing role of city governments, budget crises of several large cities) the Central statistical
directorate and increasingly the municipal administrations themselves also began collecting and publishing data on big cities. In
these works, the representation of big cities escaped the boundaries of the locality. This change preceded, and may have helped,
the emergence of the more quantitative statistical studies of the early twentieth century in which demographie behavior became
an exclusive concern.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Patriarca Silvana. Cities, capitals and statistical description in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy. In: Mélanges de
l'Ecole française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée T. 111, N°2. 1999. pp. 733-745.
doi : 10.3406/mefr.1999.4666
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/mefr_1123-9891_1999_num_111_2_4666SILVANA PATRIARCA
CITIES, CAPITALS, AND STATISTICAL
DESCRIPTION IN NINETEENTH- AND EARLY
TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALY
In the nineteenth century the term statistics referred among other
things to compilations of information, mostly but not exclusively of a
quantitative kind, on states and any other territorial entity deemed worthy
of a description. As state and local administrators increasingly looked at
numbers as an indispensable instrument of government and scholars saw
in them the embodiment of a scientific approach to the study of any kind
of issues, quantitative data were eagerly collected and analyzed. In an era
in which liberals were committed to make governments accountable for
their deeds and even absolute rulers could not ignore the issue of consent
among their subjects, both governments and individuals became
increasingly interested in publishing works of statistics which fitted their
distinct agendas. Thus numbers found their way into the public sphere and
fed the growing public of readers.
An important component of this «literature of fact»1 was devoted to
the description of cities and capitals. In the following pages, I examine the
statistics of cities as a genre and analyze what its descriptive conventions
and its changes over time can tell us about changing perceptions of, and
projects about, the city among a segment of the Italian educated elites
imbued with a positivistic culture2. The study of these texts can add a new
dimension to our understanding of the ways in which these elites related to
1 1 borrow this term from H. White, The Fictions of Factual Representation, in
Id., Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore-London, 1978,
p. 121. He uses it to point to the main characteristic shared by both fiction and non -
fiction, namely that of being a verbal artifact.
2 In examining these works, I am therefore not interested in the reliability of the
data that they furnish, but in their nature as cultural artifacts. I will bracket the fact
that information about capital cities was also gathered that did not reach the public,
and in what follows I shall limit my observations to what actually did enter the pub
lic sphere.
MEFRIM - 111 - 1999 - 2, p, 733-745. 734 SILVANA PATRIARCA
cities and urban development in the highly urbanized reality of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Italy. While exponents of an older generation
of urban historians insisted on the «backwardness» of nineteenth-century
Italian culture with respect to the study of and the intervention on urban
realities,3 in recent years some valuable studies have pointed to the
existence of a host of competing knowledges of, and approaches to, the
urban phenomenon in the late nineteenth century on which eventually the
new discipline of urban planning («urbanistica») imposed itself after the
turn of the century. Guido Zucconi sees the emergence of this new
discipline in the Italy of the early twentieth century as the victory of an
idealist tradition over the more quantitative traditions of urban
investigations embodied in the work of hygienist doctors and sanitary
engineers4. Yet this victory did not represent the end of another
quantitative tradition of investigation which is often overlooked by
historians, namely the tradition of statistical descriptions. In fact, if we
consider the central role that statistics and demography in particular
acquired later as a power tool of the fascist regime, the importance of this
tradition cannot be overstated.
Social and cultural historians of the urban past have noticed how
European observers of the first half of the nineteenth century had an
interest in the phenomenon of the big city which went beyond its real
demographic weight. As Raymond Williams observed some time ago, in
England «as early as the 1840s writers began to speak of the period as an
'age of great cities'» and this «more in terms of their significant novelty and
their economic dominance than in any absolute sense»5. Significantly, he
added, it was in Manchester, a new big city and the product of industrial
development, that began the so-called «statistical movement»6. In France
in contrast the attention was all focussed on Paris, which experienced a
remarkable growth, indeed almost a doubling of its population between
1801 and 1851. The important statistical investigations of the hygienist
Louis René Villermé on differential mortality in Paris (published in 1828)
relied on the wealth of statistical documents concerning the French capital
which the prefect of the Seine, Chabrol de Volvic, had begun to publish in
3 See for example I. Insolera, L'urbanistica, in Storia d'Italia. 5. I documenti,
Turin, 1973, p. 425-486.
4 G. Zucconi, La città contesa. Dagli ingegneri sanitari agli urbanisti (1885-1942),
Milan, 1989.
5 The Country and the City, New York, 1973, p. 217.
6 Ibid., p. 222. STATISTICAL DESCRIPTION IN ITALY 735
1821 (the famous Recherches statistiques sur la ville de Paris analyzed in this
volume by Marie- Vic Ozouf-Marignier).
In light of this interest it is not surprising that the international
congresses of statistics which began to meet in the 1850s almost
immediately made the big city (defined then as an urban agglomerate of
more that 50,000 people) into an object of specific investigation. It was at
the Second International Statistical Congress held in Paris in 1855 that the
issue was presented to the attention of European statisticians. The French
political economist and statistician Charles Dupin, one of the Congress'
organizers, elaborated the rationale of the projects and illustrated the
objects that this kind of statistics had to include. The Congress then
produced a long questionnaire for the compilation of the statistics of big
cities, a questionnaire which aimed to cover «methodically», that is
through a comprehensive approach and a thorough classification, all the
objects which were deemed to make up a complete picture of the city7.
These objects - topography, area size, public buildings, means of
communication, population, public hygiene, consumption, industry and
commerce, municipal organization, budget, public entertainment, public
assistance, institutions of social security («prévoyance») and of
security, the civil and criminal justice system, public instruction, religion
(«culte») - still reflected the tradition of topographical statistics which had
dominated the Napoleonic period and the early Restoration8. A large city
was a territory to be described as any other falling under the all-
encompassing eye of the administrator. At the same time, it was a distinct
type of collectivity, often wealthier than the countryside, but also
exhibiting a specific set of social and moral problems requiring a special
knowledge.
European city governments do not seem to have heeded the call at the
time. Outside England and France, the interest in big cities and capitals
was less intense and did not become greater than towards the end of the
nineteenth century : in Germany, as Andrew Lee