[Economic thinking and public institutions]

Essays and memories for Italo Magnani. Edited by Silvio Beretta and Stefano Colloca

The essays and memories contained in this Quaderno pay tribute to the memory and work of Italo Magnani, economist and man of culture, three years after his sudden death, and follow the conference in his memory held on 20 October 2021 at the Collegio Giasone del Maino in Pavia.
Winner of a professorship in Finance and Financial Law at the age of just thirty-three, and also enriched by the study experience gained during two stays in the United States at the Universities of Illinois and Virginia, Magnani carried out almost all of his teaching activities in the Faculty (now Department) of Law at the University of Pavia, with the sole exception of two brief periods of teaching in the Faculties of Economics and Business and Political Science at the same university.
In his role as a teacher, Magnani was for decades a point of reference both intellectually and even physically: his study, regardless of formal affiliations, was in fact a fixed point for those, colleagues and students, who wanted to meet him. It was, in fact, ‘his’ study, untidily overflowing with papers and books, with some images on the walls that identified his intellectual and professional references, but also sentimental ones: first and foremost the photograph of Giannino Parravicini, with Emilio Gerelli his main ‘mentor’, at least among the Italians. He was very fond of his workplace, and therefore represented a point of reference for those who worked there, also from a ‘spatial’ point of view, as emerges from more than one of the writings collected in this Notebook.
And ‘space’ was, on the other hand, the first object of his attention as a scholar, practised (in numerous volumes, both written and edited, as well as in the essays that make up his conspicuous bibliography) through a refined combination of categories of economic and financial analysis and real correlations (the city, the region, but also transport, parks and forests). However, by using the conceptual tools of economic analysis, Magnani then traced their formulation (and application) in the history of Italian political economy, particularly in the second part of his scientific production. Thus Pantaleoni and Montemartini, Barone and Pareto, de Viti de Marco and Einaudi, Nitti and Griziotti, Corbino and Parravicini himself are ‘visited’ by Magnani with the help of an extraordinary knowledge of both the texts and the places (especially the journals) in which those texts had found a place throughout the centuries-long formation of the Italian tradition of political economy.
This ‘excavation’ of the texts (at once rigorous and emotionally involved) has occupied the most recent years of the intellectual work of Magnani the economist: work never separated, however, from his familiarity with the classics, particularly Latin and Greek, which had accompanied him since his high school years. Anyone who entered his study to ask for advice, or even just to have a chat, only had to cast his eyes over his desk (but also the furniture next to it) to find an abundance of those classics: from Tacitus to Herodotus (but there was no shortage of Manzoni or Dante either). Following Italo Magnani's donation, today the books from his study, together with others that belonged to him, are kept at the Giasone del Maino College. In front of those donated a few years earlier by his friend Amedeo G. Conte, they occupy a well-defined and recognisable space in the main hall of the College library, a space that continues to be visited, even by generations of students and teachers who were not able to meet Italo personally.
The variety of his research topics, as well as the human richness of his person, are referred to, and quite intentionally, in the essays and memories contained in this Quaderno.