San Sebastiano al Vesuvio 1753 – Vico Equense 1788
Neapolitan jurist, author of "The Science of Legislation", the work that makes the happiness of peoples the aim of the law. Goethe frequents him in March 1787 and admires his moral delicacy and freedom of mind; from him he receives Giambattista Vico's "New Science", the "old author" whom the Neapolitan jurists venerate as a patriarch. At the time, according to Croce, the Filangieri lived in the ancestral palace of his brother Cesare, on the Largo Arianiello. Filangieri died the following year, aged thirty-four, at Vico Equense.
Main image: AI reconstruction at the age 34, as in 1787, based on the period portrait (SPUN, 2026).
Sources: J. W. Goethe, Italienische Reise; B. Croce, Goethe a Napoli (1903).
Believing her as poor as the Filangieris, Goethe finds himself in the little princess's sumptuous palace, with liveried servants lining the stairs: he feels like the sultan in Wieland's fairy tale.
The portrait of Cavaliere Filangieri, author of the Science of Legislation: soldier, cavalier and man of the world, tempered by fine moral feeling.
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