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142 - MINGHETTI, Marco (1818–1886). The Personal Library of Marco …
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Estimate €40,000 - €60,000
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MINGHETTI, Marco (1818–1886). The Personal Library of Marco Minghetti. A significant surviving portion of Marco Minghetti’s personal library, comprising over 230 titles in approximately 300 volumes, together with a substantial collection of pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, commemorative publications and iconographic material, preserved through inheritance from Pietro Paolo Beccadelli of Bologna, 10th Prince of Camporeale (1852–1918), the statesman’s adopted son and sole heir. The collection provides a remarkable record of the working library of one of the central figures in the political and intellectual life of the Risorgimento and post-Unification Italy. Assembled mainly between the 1840s and 1870s, it closely reflects the interests that shaped Minghetti’s intellectual development and subsequently informed his parliamentary and governmental career: political economy, public finance, constitutional and administrative law, institutional history, statistics, political and moral philosophy, the social question, and relations between Church and State. Particularly extensive is the section devoted to political economy and public finance, bringing together many of the leading figures in European economic thought, from Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say and John Stuart Mill to Sismondi, Bastiat, Pellegrino Rossi, Karl Heinrich Rau and Wilhelm Roscher. Alongside these is a significant body of works on political science and representative government, including writings by Cesare Balbo, Massimo d’Azeglio, François Guizot, Henry Hallam, Joseph Story and James Kent, as well as treatises on public and administrative law and studies of European and American constitutional systems. Particularly revealing of Minghetti’s practical role as a statesman are the numerous materials relating to public finance, taxation and administration. Economic and financial treatises sit alongside ministerial budgets, statistical publications, industrial surveys, reports on Piedmontese finances, and studies of credit and the economic conditions of the Italian provinces. In these sections, the collection takes on the character of a genuine working government archive, where economic and political theory is continually tested against the practical challenges of building and administering the newly unified Italian state. The library is further enriched by works on agrarian and social issues, the relationship between economics, morality and law, and relations between Church and State – subjects that occupied a central place in Minghetti’s own writings. Its intellectual breadth is striking: classical liberalism and the German Historical School stand alongside liberal Catholic thought and some of the earliest systematic investigations into the condition of the working classes. Far from representing the library of a single school or doctrine, the collection reveals Minghetti’s sustained engagement with the principal political, economic and social currents of contemporary Europe. The collection also includes approximately thirty pamphlets containing Minghetti’s parliamentary speeches and other political and occasional publications, twelve commemorative pamphlets published following his death, and several newspapers featuring articles devoted to his passing. An important group of iconographic material completes the collection, including a large photographic portrait of Minghetti, several dozen prints of a lithographic portrait of the statesman, and a large photographic portrait of King Umberto I bearing a dedication to Minghetti. A number of volumes also bear dedications and other significant marks of provenance. A complete catalogue of the works comprising the library, accompanied by an essay on its formation, contents and transmission, is available on request. Provenance: Marco Minghetti (1818–1886); Pietro Paolo Beccadelli of Bologna, 10th Prince of Camporeale (1852–1918), Minghetti’s adopted son and sole heir; thence by descent to the present owners. The provenance is of particular significance in the context of the history and subsequent dispersal of Minghetti’s library. As early as 1880, he donated 7,822 nineteenth-century pamphlets to the Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio in Bologna; upon his death, he also bequeathed his papers to the same institution, forming the core of the present Fondo Marco Minghetti. A further portion of his personal library is now preserved at the Biblioteca Nicola Matteucci of the University of Bologna. The present collection thus represents a distinct surviving portion of Minghetti’s historically dispersed library, preserved through the descendants of his adopted son, Paolo Beccadelli di Camporeale. Marco Minghetti (Bologna, 1818 – Rome, 1886) was an economist, statesman and one of the foremost representatives of Italian moderate liberalism. A leading figure of the Risorgimento and of the political construction of a unified Italy, he held ministerial office on several occasions and twice served as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Italy. His political career was matched by an extensive body of intellectual work devoted to economics, public administration, representative institutions, and the relationship between morality, law and economic science. The library offered here vividly embodies this dual identity as scholar and statesman. It is not an antiquarian collection assembled according to bibliophilic criteria, but a genuine working library: books acquired to be read, consulted, compared and applied. The major traditions of European political economy coexist with legal treatises, statistical works, parliamentary documents and administrative publications, revealing the intellectual foundations of Minghetti’s political activity. Taken as a whole, the collection constitutes a significant material record of the political culture, intellectual networks and practical instruments through which one of the leading figures of Italy’s Destra storica tackled the formidable task of building and governing the new Italian liberal state. (300)
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About the sale BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS
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Auction time 10/15/2026 at 2:45 PM
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