Preliminary Programme

The government of the territory in Southern Italy during the 17th century was delegated to numerous local “powers” by the central power in order to get a better control of countryside, towns and villages. This does not mean that Naples did not exercise its duties of governing in the different peripheral areas of the Kingdom; however, the capital city often delegated some of its tasks to firmly rooted powers, which sometimes were really strong in their territory. Things could change during an epidemic, even though during the 17th century the management of the two plague epidemic broken out in the Kingdom in 1656 and in 1690 was different, in particular more centralized in the second case. It is this the case I would like to deal with, because it is a really peculiar case. In fact, in 1690 almost an absolute power was delegated to a single minister, who acted successfully at the local level. Powers given to this minister, sent by central government to control the far Apulian periphery, transformed him in a little viceroy, with powers never seen till then. Powers which allowed him to have a good and successful control of the epidemic. (Show less)

The sudden collapse of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies during the summer of 1860, due to Garibaldi’s expedition and Anglo-Sardinian pressure, was a major trauma for everyone who served inside its institutions, especially the military one. Thousands of men were first involved in several arduous campaigns and battles, mostly lost ones, then forced to integrate into the newly formed, but starkly Piedmontese-style Italian Army. As in every institution, the upper echelons of the Neapolitan military one were held and managed by an élite of field-experienced, socially-coopted or academy-selected officers. What kind of badly assorted mix of these three ingredients did originate its stunning disintegration? Who were its members? How did they reach the upper ranks of the institution, and how did they perform during its final crisis? Last but not least, which strategies did they adopt to reposition themselves after 1860? The proposed paper will deal with these issues analyzing a database including almost 600 Neapolitan officers, using the tools supplied by prosopography and social sciences to build a dynamic portrait of an élite facing establishment, downfall and rearrangement. (Show less)

Local finance looks like a privileged observation post in order to investigate the shapes that the territorial government takes in Southern Italy in the 19th century.
During the French decade, the redefinition of the local asset underlines the deep change in local bodies. Towns play the role of “terminals” of the central administration and have therefore to tackle the question of a greater financial commitment in entire sectors of public significance – such as school, public order, road system assistance and, more generally, urban building industry.
The direction that local administrators – the authorities which had a leading role in issuing the asset and liability statements – try to give to the expenditure, i.e. the different and privileged intervention fields, suggests the way in which those administrators look at territorial management.
The way of managing the territory combines with the control exercised by government authorities - the other institutional actors engaged in the compilation of financial statements - on those choices, approving or rejecting them. Bringing to the fore the Centre-periphery relations, these initiatives show the Southern space construction in the nineteenth-century. (Show less)