Franco Venturi was an Italian historian, essayist and journalist, a scholar of the Enlightenment in Italy and of the history of Russia, and an anti-fascist active in the Resistance.
Background
In 1915, the year after Venturi was born, his father Lionello Venturi, having had his frustration reach its maximum point, decided to start another family in Turin where he won the competition to fill the chair of Film Director at the University.
Education
The younger Venturi attended Liceo classico Cavour and during the Resistance and later was active in the ranks of the Action Party. He was captured and subjected to confinement in Avigliano between 1941 and 1943.
Career
The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768-1776: The First Crisis
The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776–1789, I: The Great States of the West
In addition, he published a volume of his selected essays, under the title Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century. In 1969, he gave the G. M. Trevelyan lectures at Cambridge University, published in 1971 as Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment. Other than his work on the Enlightenment, Venturi made his greatest contributions in the field of 19th-century Russian history, concentrating on the history of ideas:
Studies in Free Russia.
Politics
The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776–1789, II: Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East
Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in 19th Century Russia.