Abstract

The article traces the origin of a work that, on many accounts, can be considered as one of the landfalls of 18th century debate on sensibility, Petro Verri’s Discorsosull’indole del piacere e del dolore. Firstly published in Livorno in 1773 under the title Idee sull’indole del piacere, the text was signifi cantly revised at the end ofthe ’70, when Verri was at work on his most controverse book, Osservazioni sulla tortura (Milano 1804), and then fi nally included in Milano 1781 edition of theDiscorsi. As noted by Franco Venturi, in Italy the debate concerning the notions of pleasure, pain and happiness was started around the middle of the centuryby the Italian translations of Maupertuis’s Essai de morale and of La Mettrie’sAnti-Sénèque. Traces of such a debate can be seen also in Verri’s booklet, thoughpleasure is defi ned there as »sudden breaking of pain«, mainly under the infl uence of Locke, Dubos and Helvétius. Moreover, signifi cant clues are reminiscentalso of Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which, through the French translation, already found a profi table use inBeccaria’s Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile. Verri’s synthesis is an original achievement where philosophical and medical refl ections on sensibility meet thecrucial issue of the relationship between law and justice, which was at the heart of his Osservazioni sulla tortura. The latter work was left unpublished until thebeginning of the 19th century, but many of its themes can be traced in the Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore, whose concluding sections give therefore a decisive contribution to the illuministic struggle against death penalty and torture, which was started in 1764 by Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene.