Leopoldo Franchetti was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 publicist and politician. He was a deputy in the Italian Chamber of Deputies

Italian Chamber of Deputies

The Italian Chamber of Deputies is the lower house of the Parliament of Italy. It has 630 seats, a plurality of which is controlled presently by liberal-conservative party People of Freedom. Twelve deputies represent Italian citizens outside of Italy. Deputies meet in the Palazzo Montecitorio. A...

 and later became a Senator

Italian Senate

The Senate of the Republic is the upper house of the Italian Parliament. It was established in its current form on 8 May 1948, but previously existed during the Kingdom of Italy as Senato del Regno , itself a continuation of the Senato Subalpino of Sardinia-Piedmont established on 8 May 1848...

. He was very active in promoting education and concrete solutions for economic, social and political problems in Italy.

Early life

Baron Franchetti was born in Livorno

Livorno

Livorno , traditionally Leghorn , is a port city on the Tyrrhenian Sea on the western edge of Tuscany, Italy. It is the capital of the Province of Livorno, having a population of approximately 160,000 residents in 2009.- History :...

 into a family in good standing. The Franchetti family came to Livorno from Tunisia in the last decades of the eighteenth century. From the Napoleonic era

Napoleonic Era

The Napoleonic Era is a period in the history of France and Europe. It is generally classified as including the fourth and final stage of the French Revolution, the first being the National Assembly, the second being the Legislative Assembly, and the third being the Directory...

 to the second half of the 1830s they were one of the most important families in the local Jewish community.

Leopoldo Franchetti was influenced by the ideas of John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...

 and became a liberal

Liberalism

Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...

. His relation with his Jewishness was so conflictual that no trace of it can be found in his public activity. In 1873 he took a sabbatical in southern Italy and became one of the foremost authorities regarding the "problems of southern Italy," and pioneer of meridionalism.

Inquiring the Mafia

In 1876, Franchetti travelled to Sicily with Sidney Sonnino

Sidney Sonnino

Baron Sidney Costantino Sonnino was an Italian politician.Sonnino was born in Pisa to an Italian father of Jewish heritage and a Welsh mother...

 to conduct an unofficial inquiry into the state of Sicilian society. In 1877, the two men published their research on Sicily

Sicily

Sicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...

 in a substantial two-part report. In the first part Sonnino analysed the lives of the island's landless peasants. Franchetti's half of the report, Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily, was an analysis of the Mafia

Mafia

The Mafia is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct, and whose common enterprise is protection racketeering...

 in the nineteenth century that is still considered authoritative today. Franchetti would ultimately influence thinking about the Mafia more than anyone else until Giovanni Falcone

Giovanni Falcone

Giovanni Falcone was an Sicilian/Italian prosecuting magistrate born in Palermo, Sicily. From his office in the Palace of Justice in Palermo, he spent most of his professional life trying to overthrow the power of the Mafia in Sicily...

 over a hundred years later. Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily is the first convincing explanation of how the Mafia came to be.

Franchetti saw the Mafia as an “industry of violence” and described the designation of the term “Mafia”: “the term mafia found a class of violent criminals ready and waiting for a name to define them, and, given their special character and importance in Sicilian society, they had the right to a different name from that defining vulgar criminals in other countries”. He saw the Mafia as deeply rooted in Sicilian society and impossible to quench unless the very structure of the island’s social institutions were to undergo a fundamental change. The Franchetti-Sonnino report was attacked, disbelieved and labelled as ‘unpatriotic’. It is now considered one of the most coherent and comprehensive accounts of the Sicilian mafia and its surroundings.

In Eritrea

Franchetti, as an agricultural advisor of the Italian government in Eritrea

Eritrea

Eritrea , officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea derives it's name from the Greek word Erethria, meaning 'red land'. The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast...

, estimated that there was plenty of land and few people in Eritrea and recommended the colonisation of the highlands by Italian settlers. He undertook the first land expropriations in 1893 with the vision that two million Italian peasants would settle down in Eritrea. Large tracts of land were declared public and all grazing land was declared state owned, which was a clear interference with the traditional land right system in the highlands.

However, the highlands were only sparsely populated because of the great famine in 1888-92 as a result of rinderpest

Rinderpest

Rinderpest was an infectious viral disease of cattle, domestic buffalo, and some other species of even-toed ungulates, including buffaloes, large antelopes and deer, giraffes, wildebeests and warthogs. After a global eradication campaign, the last confirmed case of rinderpest was diagnosed in 2001...

 and subsequent epidemics. Returning to their villages they had abandoned because of the famine, they saw their land confiscated. Riots and revolts broke out. Most of the Italian settlers returned to Italy in dismay.

Civil passion

In 1880 Franchetti moved to Città di Castello

Città di Castello

Città di Castello is a city and comune in the province of Perugia, in the northern part of the Umbria region of Italy. It is situated on a slope of the Apennines, on the flood plain of the river Tiber. The city is north of Perugia and south of Cesena on the S3bis. It is connected to the A1...

 and in 1900 married Alice Hallgarten born in New York in 1874, with whom he moved to into the recently completed Villa della Montesca. The educator and reformer Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori was an Italian physician and educator, a noted humanitarian and devout Catholic best known for the philosophy of education which bears her name...

 held her first training course for teachers in 1909 at Villa della Montesca.

Franchetti died of mysterious causes, perhaps suicide, after the dawn of the defeat in the Caporetto

Battle of Caporetto

The Battle of Caporetto , took place from 24 October to 19 November 1917, near the town of Kobarid , on the Austro-Italian front of World War I...

 in World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

and left his estate to a charitable organization and his farm to the farmers who worked it.

External links

• Città di Castello