PLATO IN ITALY

Description

Historical novel written in epistolary form, which the author pretends to have translated from Greek from a manuscript found in Heraclea. The plot centres on a journey of the young Cleobolus, a disciple of Plato, to Magna Graecia in the company of his master. The primordial nature of Italian civilisation emerges, considered by Cuoco to be more ancient than the Hellenic one (it was in the famous school of Crotone that Pythagorean philosophy was born). Important from an ideological point of view, the work aims to assert Italy's cultural supremacy over France and the rest of Europe, and can be seen as a prodrome of the wave of national pride that would pervade the entire early 19th century. Vincenzo Cuoco (1770-1823), the most famous of Molise's intellectuals (born in Civitacampomarano), a historian and scholar of literature, jurisprudence and philosophy, is best remembered for his ‘Historical essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799’, a work of fundamental importance that examines the reasons for the failure of the project to free Naples from Bourbon obscurantism.