La grandezza delle capitali nel dibattito dei riformatori illuministi: Napoli, Parigi, Londra, by Giorgio Simoncini

Abstract

The debate over the size of Europe’s rapidly growing capital cities was one of the most interesting of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The two capitals which had grown most rapidly were Paris and London: both are estimated to have had more than 500,000 inhabitants by 1700, though London had surged ahead by 1800. In third place came Naples, Europe’s largest city in the sixteenth century, which remained strikingly populous despite being ravaged by plague in 1656; by the 1730s, when it became the capital of an independent kingdom, its population was once again close to 300,000. (If anything, as Jan de Vries showed in European Urbanization 1500–1800 [1984], Naples was an exception to all patterns across this period, a genuine historical puzzle.) Debate prompted by such growth was increasingly grounded in political economy, and intersected with other issues high on the intellectual agenda in the eighteenth century, notably the luxury question. Contributors included economic writers, philosophers, social commentators, government officials, urban designers and architects, many of them associated with the Enlightenment. The classic treatment of the debate, focused on Naples but covering contributions from Paris, London and elsewhere, remains Franco Venturi’s 1971 essay, ‘Napoli capitale nel pensiero dei riformatori illuministi’, in Volume VIII of the Storia di Napoli.