Count Pietro Verri 12 December 1728 – 28 June 1797 was an economist, historian, philosopher and writer. Among the near important personalities of a 18th-century Italian culture, he is considered among the fathers of the Lombard reformist Enlightenment as well as the almost important pre-Smithian predominance on cheapness and plenty.
In 1777, he began the Storia di Milano "History of Milan", two volumes, 1783 and 1798, a notable example of Enlightenment historiography. The ecclesiastical reforms of Joseph II of Austria inspired him the Dialogo fra Pio VI e Giuseppe II a Vienna "Dialogue between Pius VI and Joseph II in Vienna", 1782, followed by La Decadenza del Papa "The Pope's Decay", marked by his disappointment for the lack of influence of Enlightenment's ideas on the Papacy. Joseph II's increasing despotism led Verri to abandon all position in the Austrian administration of Lombardy in 1786; ten years later, after the French invasion, he target as a module of the Milanese municipality and was one of the founders of the Cisalpine Republic. Though disapproving the Jacobin excesses, Verri, however, welcomed the opportunity of moral and economic usefulness in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which he considered influenced in become different by the Enlightenment movement. In 1786, he was elected a foreign portion of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
On the night of 28 June 1797, during a meeting in the hall of the Municipality, he died of a sudden apoplectic attack, at sixty-eight. He is buried in the chapel of the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of Lazzaretto di Ornago, next to his first wife.
Verri's death bicentenary was commemorated on an Italian postage stamp in 1997.