Giuseppe Pecchio

File:Giuseppe Pecchio dis.jpg

Giuseppe Pecchio

Count Giuseppe Pecchio (15 November 1785 – 4 June 1835) was an Italian politician and man of letters.

Biography

Giuseppe Pecchio was born in Milan to an old Milanese patrician family. While his mother Francesca Goffredo was the daughter of a lawyer, his father Antonio came from a family that had been admitted to the Milanese patriciate since 1543. He was educated in a religious school in Merate (near Como) and in Bellinzona, where he had Alessandro Manzoni as a classmate. In 1806, he graduated in law at the University of Pavia. He held the position of auditor to the Council of State of the Kingdom of Italy (1810–1814), and distinguishing himself for his expertise in economic and administrative aspects; in 1819 he became a deputy to the provincial congregation of Milan.

In that period he was among the promoters of peer tutoring alongside Federico Confalonieri and Luigi Porro Lambertenghi, by introducing the Lancasterian method in Lombardy. On October 1, 1818, the first school of mutual education was inaugurated and Pecchio, as secretary of the organizing committee, chaired by Confalonieri, was very active in teaching and in the search for funding, affiliating businessmen and industrialists such as Enrico Mylius.

He attended the salon of the Earl of Oxford (Edward Harley and Jane Elisabeth Scott) in Geneva. In 1820, he participated in the Lombard-Piedmont conspiracy and for this he was forced into exile. He was one of the "Carbonari counts" who became involved in the Greek Revolution while in exile in England. In England he gained fame as an economist. He later attempted an organic arrangement of the writings of Italian economists, Storia dell'economia in Italia (1829), a book that was translated into French and was preparatory to subsequent developments in political economy.

Other works include Vita di Ugo Foscolo (1830) and Saggio storico sull'amministrazione finanziaria dell'ex-regno d'Italia dal 1802 al 1814 (1830), in which he manifested his knowledge of the administration in Lombardy during the Napoleonic period. He was also interested in literature, particularly in the publication Dissertazione sino a qual punto le produzioni scientifiche e letterarie seguano le leggi economiche della produzione in generale (1832). He wrote the essay Storia critica della poesia inglese (1833–1835), in which he considered English poetic production from the Anglo-Saxon period to the eighteenth century.

He died in Brighton.

See also

• Gino Capponi
• Giovanni Arrivabene
• Guglielmo Pepe

External links

• Pecchio, Giuseppe
• "Da funzionario napoleonico a liberale europeo: Giuseppe Pecchio (1785-1835)" at AIDA Online
• Works by Giuseppe Pecchio at Open Library
• Works by Giuseppe Pecchio at Gallica