AMERICA FELIX IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ITALIAN CULTURE

The consideration about America and the American man in the Italian cultural context began with the receipt of the image projected by Christopher Columbus after the Discovery. The story of an earthly paradise gave way to controversy about the effectiveness of Spanish power structure in the New World, especially from Ramusio considerations and arguments of Bartolome de las Casas. During the Eighteenth Century, in the context of the controversy about the New World appears Italians intellectuals that recovered the projection of the "America felix". The Jesuit Muratori published in 1743 Il cristianesimo nelle Missioni dei felice della Compagnia di Gesu padri nel Paraguay, where he gets the praise of nature and the idyllic life of the 'barbari' in communities Jesuits of Paraguay. In front of criticism of Voltaire or Robertson, intellectuals like Ferdinando Galiani or Jesuits Juan de Velasco, Giolli, Rafael Landivar or Francisco Javier Clavijero considered about the hope of the future in the American world like a lost paradise against the European decadence.