The Political Functions of Virtue in the Eighteenth-Century Italian Debate

This study is an attempt to reconstruct the eighteenth-century Italian intellectual perspective on virtue and to reveal its geographical complexities, its semantic evolutionary curve, and its interconnections in different fields. The aim is not to create a simple ‘map’, but rather to focus on the limits of the intellectual debate in defining and communicating virtue, and to envisage the understanding of the political functions of virtue through more popular and widespread media such as poetic texts.