Cities, capitals and statistical description in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy

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.