Numeri e territorio. Statistica e geografia nell'Italia dell'Ottocento

Scientific disciplines are not fixed and immutable structures: they are true historic entities with their own mutable characters, relationships, and borders. The Nineteenth Century, owing to the consolidation of positivism, was a favourable time for the development and transformation of some disciplines related to the interpretation of society. Geography is one of the oldest branches of science, while statistics was just emerging as a new branch of knowledge. The objective of both was to describe and analyze the socio-economic situation of the new States and, in the great transformation underway, their respective scopes, functions, and inner logics were often confounded. The goal of this paper is to delineate an analysis of how, responding to societal stimuli, some thinkers chose “patriotic statistics” overshadowing geography. Some of these scholars can even be considered forefathers of modern geography: Melchiorre Gioja for his “regional monographs”, Pietro Mestri as the originator of administrative regions, and Luigi Bodio for his studies on emigration.