The Gino Luzzatto Archive
The Gino Luzzatto archive was donated as a collection to the Economic Library of Ca’ Foscari University in 1965 by Evelina Polacco, Luzzatto’s niece who was in charge of the first arrangement of the archive. Nowadays the archive consists of 18 boxes comprising more series and sub-series and includes different materials: letters, manuscripts, typescripts, publications drafts and proofs, archival annotations and transcriptions. The most coherent unit is the one devoted to private correspondence – about 1330 items: letters, postcards, telegrams dating from 1920 to 1964.
Gino Luzzatto (1878–1964), professor and rector in Ca’Foscari before and after the Second World War, was not only a pioneer of Economic History studies in Italy, but thanks to his commitment as editor and politician he was one of the main figures of cultural and political Italian life in the XX century.
"…sia che tracciasse le grandi linee della storia economica mondiale o le vicende commerciali di un patrizio veneziano del Quattrocento lui andava diritto alla sostanza delle cose. Una qualità questa che lo caratterizzava anche nella vita ché non c’era nulla in lui che ricordasse l’immagine stereotipo del dotto confuso ed impacciato di tra i problemi pratici della vita. Gino Luzzatto amava e capiva la vita che fosse quella dell’alto medioevo o quella dei suoi giorni, nelle tendenze secolari di massa o nei fatti spiccioli d’ogni giorno."
— C.M. Cipolla, in Gino Luzzatto o dei rapporti tra teoria e storia economica, in Ricerche economiche, 33/1, 1979, p. 4.
In 2016 a new digitization project is started: its aim is to point out the importance and civil authority of the economic historian thanks to the publication of discourses and lessons between 1945 and 1955.
Further information, bibliography and a complete list of the archive.
On Gino Luzzatto see the record edited by Paola Lanaro in Dizionario Biografico Treccani.
Paola Lanaro, Gino Luzzatto, storico dell’economia veneziana, 2006, in Note di Lavoro, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, No. 08/NL/2006.
In Phaidra you can read some of the inaugural lectures given by Gino Luzzatto:
- discourse of year 1922–23
- discourse of year 1947–48
- discourses between years 1948–49 and 1951–52
- discourse of year 1952–53
In Bollettino (edited by Associazione ‘Primo Lanzoni’ tra gli antichi studenti di Ca’ Foscari) n.1 (n.s.), 1959 you can read an article by Davide Beltrami in occasion of the 80th birthday of Gino Luzzatto.
OTHER MATERIALS IN UNIVE
Gino Luzzatto, L’Alto Adige, edited by P. Lanaro in Leggere l’Unità d’Italia, pp. 74-76.
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