Marino Berengo

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Marino Berengo (born November 8, 1928 in Venice ; † August 3, 2000 ibid) was an Italian historian who dealt primarily with the Republic of Venice and the history of Lucca in modern times, as well as with the European city.

Life

Berengo was born into an educated middle class family; his father was Pietro, descendant of an old Venetian family, his mother was Diana Melli, a Jew from Ferrara . He attended the Liceo classico Marco Polo and was admitted to the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 1947 . But because of a lung disease, he had to forego the visit of the prestigious institute and go to a sanatorium for three years. He enrolled at the University of Padua , but moved to Florence , where he presented his laureate with Delio Cantimori in autumn 1953 under the title Saggio di ricerche sulla struttura sociale e l'opinione pubblica degli Stati veneti (1770–1797) . In it he dealt with the spread of democratic ideas towards the end of the Republic of Venice. He expanded this work into a fundamental work on the socio-economy of Dalmatia . As early as 1955 he presented his first overview work under the title La società veneta alla fine del Settecento , which was printed in 1956. He did not develop a preference for the Venetian culture of the 17th and 18th centuries, as he wrote in a letter, a culture in which he could discover only slight traces of the Enlightenment . His work, on the other hand, was often perceived as fundamental.

Berengo was admitted to the corsi di perfezionamento at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, where he received a scholarship for Zurich in 1955/56. His work “La via dei Grigioni” e la politica riformatrice austriaca emerged from this stay . In the same academic year he also studied with Federico Chabod at the Istituto di studi storici in Naples . In Venice he was mainly influenced by the economic historian Gino Luzzatto , who died in 1964 , to whom he dedicated a profile in the Rivista Storica Italiana .

In 1957 he won a competition ( concorso ) so that from 1958 he was able to work at the Venice State Archives . He stayed there for five years, on the one hand publishing on the Giornali veneziani del Settecento in 1962, and on the other hand writing two other monographs. These dealt with Lucca in 1962: Nobili e mercanti nella Lucca del Cinquecento and in 1963 with Veneto: L'agricoltura veneta dalla caduta della Repubblica all'Unità . His spectrum now ranged from agriculture and agronomy through the social history of the country to individual agronomists such as Francesco Tommasi di Colle Valdelsa or Africo Clementi on the one hand, to the history of the press and printing on the other. In the 1960s and 70s he also dealt with the restoration phase and Austrian rule. The work Intellettuali e librai nella Milano della Restaurazione , published in 1980, grew out of the latter interests . His book on Lucca, which focused on the period between 1520 and 1560, is likely to be the most widely read, and it also pointed the way to the history of the European city, a topic that occupied Berengo in the last 15 years of his life.

In 1959 Berengo became a freelance lecturer in modern history, i.e. for modern times, but also taught in Padua. In 1963 he switched to an apprenticeship at the University of Milan and thus finally left the archive service. At the end of the 1960s he was increasingly distancing himself from the college, as he expressed sympathy for the demands of the students and confessed to having elected the Communist Party . In view of the extensive teaching tasks, however, Berengo's research productivity was reduced, but at least he succeeded in initiating the Atlante storico italiano , which was never completed. Berengo also became a member of the Scientific Council of the Rivista Storica Italiana .

In 1974, on an offer from Gaetano Cozzi , Berengo returned to Venice to teach the history of institutions and social history. In 1975 he married Renata Segre, with whom he had worked since 1963. The less extensive number of theses he had to supervise at Ca 'Foscari left Berengo more time for publications. With his work Intellettuali e librai nella Milano della Restaurazione , which he had already started in Milan , he became one of the founders of book history in Italy. In addition, he dealt with the relations between Padua and Venice before the Battle of Lepanto as well as with Venice's rule over Ravenna and with the history of the Jews and the Venetian cultural institutions after the unification of Italy. But he did not shy away from reaching into the Ottoman Empire or South America. He was also politically active. In 1985 he was elected consigliere comunale for the Mestre district as an independent on the PCI list. In it he dealt primarily with the library system, an occupation that gave rise to a 1993 conference on Sulle biblioteche pubbliche statali to hold, on public state libraries. This took place at the Accademia dei Lincei , of which he had been a member since 1988. As well as Nobili e mercanti , which appeared in Turin in 1999, his magnum opus is his enormous L'Europa delle città , which has almost 900 pages and a 76-page bibliography.

After a stroke, Berengo experienced the publication without being able to put a final touch on it. He died on August 3, 2000. At his request, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Ferrara. He bequeathed his library and that of his friend Lucio Gamba to the Biblioteca Classense of Ravenna. Thanks to his extensive didactic activity, he had numerous students who continued his work.

Publications (selection)

  • La società veneta alla fine del Settecento , Sansoni, Florence 1956.
  • L'agricoltura veneta dalla caduta della Repubblica all'Unità , Milan 1963.
  • Nobili e mercanti nella Lucca del Cinquecento , Einaudi, Turin 1965.
  • Intellettuali e librai nella Milano della Restaurazione , Einaudi, Turin 1980, again Franco Angeli, Milan 2012.
  • L'Europa delle città. Il volto della società urbana tra Medioevo ed Età moderna , Einaudi, Turin 1999.
  • Cultura e istituzioni nell'Ottocento italiano , Il Mulino, Bologna 2004.
  • Città italiana e città europea. Ricerche storiche , ed. V. Marco Folin (= Collana Cliopoli, 6), Diabasis, 2010, new edition Viella, Rome 2017.

literature

  • Carlo Capra: Berengo, Marino , in: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (2018)
  • Corrado Vivanti: Ricordo di Marino Berengo , in: Studi Storici 41 (2000) 593-604.
  • A bibliography can be found in Città italiana e città europea. Ricerche storiche on pages 275 to 290.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Marino Berengo: Problemi economico-sociali della Dalmazia veneta alla fine del Settecento , in: Rivista storica italiana LXVI (1954) 469-510.
  2. ↑ Marino Berengo: “La via dei Grigioni” e la politica riformatrice austriaca , in: Archivio storico lombardo, s. 8, VIII (1958) 5-111.
  3. ^ Marino Berengo: Profilo di Gino Luzzatto , in: Rivista storica italiana LXXVI (1964) 879-905.
  4. ^ Marino Berengo: Giornali veneziani del Settecento , Milan 1962.
  5. ↑ Marino Berengo: Nobili e mercanti nella Lucca del Cinquecento , published 1962, then revised Turin 1965.
  6. ↑ Marino Berengo: L'agricoltura veneta dalla caduta della Repubblica all'Unità , Milan 1963.
  7. ↑ Marino Berengo: Un agronomo toscano del Cinquecento. Francesco Tommasi di Colle Valdelsa , in: Studi di storia medievale e moderna, per Ernesto Sestan , Florence 1980, pp. 495-518.
  8. ↑ Marino Berengo: Africo Clementi agronomo padovano del Cinquecento , in: Miscellanea Augusto Campana, Padua 1981, pp. 27-69.
  9. ^ Alberto Caracciolo: Il grande atlante storico che non si fece mai , in: Quaderni storici XXX (1995) 253-260.
personal data
SURNAME Berengo, Marino
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Venice
DATE OF DEATH August 3, 2000
Place of death Venice