Translations of Hume’s Works in Italy

The article is a survey of Hume’s Italian translations. Hume himself was not indifferent to the problems of translations, especially of his own works. The first Italian translations appear in 1767, even though the first translations to have currency in Italy were French: during the 1760s Verri reads read the Political Discourses, Algarotti and Beccaria the History of England in French. The reception of Hume in Europe was shaped by French influences. The article offers an examination of Hume’s reception in Italy and the roots of the Italian Hume scholarship (important scholars are also important translators): the eighteenth-century political and economical writer, the nineteenth-century historian and the twentieth-century metaphysician. The article discusses Prezzolini’s 1910 translation of the two Enquiries, which Croce wanted both faithful and Italian: “very faithful, and almost literal”, as he writes in his Instructions to the translators; and it deals with some interpretative problems connected with Italian today translations and their indifference to a precise uniform terminology.