Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Political Economy in the Accademia dei Pugni in Austrian Lombardy, 1760–1780

This essay focuses on the Accademia dei Pugni, or The Academy of Punches, a celebrated institution which flourished for a few years in 1760s Austrian Milan, and its journal Il Caffè (1764–1766). It does so to revisit one of the cardinal questions of Italian Enlightenment studies, the vexing relationship between ‘patriotism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the so-called ‘age of reason’. How, in short, historical actors mediated between local loyalties, transnational allegiances and universalist ethics. More specifically, this essay considers the question as it relates to the economic identity of eighteenth-century Lombard reformers. Where previous studies have tended to simply conflate the two categories ‘patriotism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ as twin expressions of an ‘enlightened’ spirit based on ‘doux commerce,’ what follows will reassess the Accademia's project by analysing it not only in the context of a cosmopolitan coffee-shop culture, but also of the realities of international competition at the time, of Lombardy’s complex economic past amidst rival zones of foreign influence, and the role of Milan in the larger projects of the House of Habsburg in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. Though the Accademia has often been heralded as a pre-eminent example of the forces at play in the emergence of a ‘public sphere’ in eighteenth-century Italy, and political economy has often been discussed as the science of Enlightenment par excellence, the two issues have not hitherto been considered organically.