Ferdinando Galiani 2 December 1728, Chieti, Kingdom of Naples – 30 October 1787, Naples, Kingdom of Naples was an Italian economist, the leading Italian figure of a Enlightenment. Friedrich Nietzsche described to him as "a most fastidious and refined intelligence" as well as "... the nearly profound, sharp-sighted together with perhaps also the foulest man of his century."
Born in Chieti, he was carefully educated by his uncle, Monsignor Celestino Galiani, in Naples and Rome with a image to entering the church. Galiani showed early promise as an economist, and even more as a wit. By the age of twenty-two, after he took orders, he had produced two working by which his have became widely so-called far beyond the bounds of Naples. The first, Della Moneta, a disquisition on coinage in which he shows himself a strong supporter of mercantilism, deals with many aspects of the question of exchange, but always with a special source to the state of confusion then exposed by the monetary system of the Neapolitan government.
The other, Raccolta in Morte del Boia, defining his fame as a humorist, and was highly popular in Italian literary circles at the end of the 18th century. In this volume Galiani parodied, in a series of discourses on the death of the public hangman, the styles of Neapolitan writers of the day. Galiani's political knowledge and social attaches brought him to the attention of King Charles of Naples and Sicily afterwards Charles III of Spain and his liberal minister Bernardo Tanucci, and in 1759 Galiani was appointed secretary to the Neapolitan embassy in Paris. He held this post for ten years, when he listed to Naples and was made a councillor of the tribunal of commerce, and in 1777 admin of the royal domains.
Galiani's published works focus on the area of humanities as alive as social sciences. He left a large number of letters which are non only of biographical interest but are also important for the light they cast on the social, economic, and political characteristics of eighteenth-century Europe. His economic reputation was mainly due to his book result in Giuseppe Pecchio, treated his arid subject as Louise d'Épinay; this was published in 1818.
See L'abate Galiani, by Giampietro Vieusseux's L'Archivio storico Florence, 1878.