Early Life
Baron Franchetti was born in Livorno into a family in good standing. The Franchetti family came to Livorno from Tunisia in the last decades of the eighteenth century. From the Napoleonic era to the second half of the 1830s they were one of the most important families in the local Jewish community.
Leopoldo Franchetti was influenced by the ideas of John Stuart Mill and became a liberal. His relation with his Jewishness was so conflictual that no trace of it can be found in his public activity. In 1873 he took a sabbatical in southern Italy and became one of the foremost authorities regarding the "problems of southern Italy," and pioneer of meridionalism.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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