It is our great pleasure to announce that on the website of Cipei - Centro interuniversitario di documentazione sul pensiero economico italiano at the University of Pisa (Sistema Bibliotecario di Ateneo), the link to the Database of Italian Academic Economists of the Nineteenth Century is active as of now. The database – which results from forty years of excavation work carried out by Massimo Augello (University of Pisa), with the collaboration of Francesco Celiano, Giovanna De Santi and Daniela Giaconi – contains complete data on the scientific biography and primary and secondary literature of seventy one economists, including well-known figures such as Gerolamo Boccardo, Luigi Cossa, Francesco Ferrara, Achille Loria, Angelo Messedaglia, Maffeo Pantaleoni, Antonio Scialoja and Giuseppe Toniolo. A simple query mask allows detailed reports for a very wide range of criteria and keywords.

The database will be constantly updated with new data. A new information system containing similar data on Italian economists of the twentieth century is also at an advanced stage of implementation.

Consultation is free in accordance with the principles of open and shared science. We are confident that it can be an extremely useful tool for all scholars of the history of economic and social ideas and for undergraduate, graduate and PhD students who wish to deepen their study of nineteenth-century Italian economic thought, its transnational circulation, and the role of economists in society and in the academic and political institutions of the Italian state. 

To access the database, each scholar must fill out a simple registration form, in response to which she/he will quickly (1-2-working days) obtain a password to access the consultation.

The credit for bringing this endeavor to a conclusion is first and foremost due to Chiara Bechelli and Elisa Cacelli of Cipei-SBA (initially also assisted by Raffaella Sprugnoli), who oversaw the revision of the nearly 30,000 cards in the database and the conception of the information system, and also to Massimo Augello, Marco Guidi, Daniela Giaconi and Alice Martini, who provided scientific supervision, and finally to Francesco Celiano, Antonio Laguardia and Marco Interdonato, who, together with Dario Besseghini of the University of Pisa, took care of the IT part. Finally, thanks are due to the many colleagues who tested the database before it was published online.

The Cipei team