LIBRI, CENSURA E CULTURA A PALERMO NELLA SECONDA METÀ DEL ‘700

Abstract

The essay traces the events related to the censorship of books during the 18th century and the first part of the 19th century, a time when Bourbon Sicily experienced an administrative upheaval that also involved the control apparatus. Against the backdrop of political upheavals and an overall redefinition of the cultural sector, enabled by the expulsion of the Jesuits in the late 1760s and the suppression of the Inquisition Tribunal (1782), the lives of significant figures from the island's culture and beyond unfold. These allow us to consider the political and cultural dynamics that supported these strong transformations and help to properly contextualize and understand the complex path of the kingdom's modernization, moving past some portrayals that for too long insisted on the idea of a backward island defined only in contrast.