An epistemology of the province: Alessandro Serpieri and experimental physics in Italy across unification (1851–1878)

Abstract

In Italy, in the decades surrounding Italian Unification—especially in the early years of the Kingdom of Italy—figures such as Pietro Blaserna and Carlo Matteucci commented critically on the state of the physical sciences, addressing institutional and pedagogical arrangements as much as research practices. At the same time, an alternative mode of knowledge production was emerging: an “epistemology of the province”—an analytical and historiographical category for forms of scientific research and experimental practice that were locally rooted yet sustained by supra-local circuits of communication and validation. This article examines such a provincial epistemic configuration through the work of Alessandro Serpieri (1823–1885), a scientist whose career at the University of Urbino spanned thirty-seven years. The analysis centres on three paradigmatic case studies: the first Italian replication of Foucault’s pendulum (30 March 1851); pioneering research into duplex telegraphy (1854–1855); and investigations of the first Bell telephones in Italy (1877–1878). These episodes collectively demonstrate how Serpieri’s locally grounded practice remained consistently engaged with the most advanced international technological debates. Across these episodes, Serpieri’s trajectory moves from mechanical and astronomical phenomena to electrotechnical questions and culminates in his study of the telephone, which foregrounds the listener as an active component in the device’s operation. He argued that much of the apparatus’s effectiveness in transmitting sound should instead be attributed to the listener’s interpretative capacity. This claim invites a retrospective comparison with later themes in cybernetics and the cognitive sciences, while remaining grounded in Serpieri’s nineteenth-century vocabulary of perception, judgement, and interpretation. Serpieri’s work thus encourages us to read provincial science not as a peripheral appendage, but as a productive epistemic environment, capable of transforming marginal constraints into methodological opportunities and of challenging centre–periphery hierarchies in the production of original knowledge.