Filippo Mazzei, the Tuscan who helped form America’s founding

Florence marks the 260th anniversary of Grand Duke Peter Leopold’s rule with a public convention on Friday, November 28, spotlighting Mazzei’s bridge between Enlightenment Tuscany and revolutionary America.

A Tuscan thoughts behind America’s founding beliefs

Filippo Mazzei (1730–1816) was born in Poggio a Caiano, close to Florence, and lived probably the most extraordinary international adventures of the 18th century. A doctor, service provider, agronomist and thinker, he was among the many first Italians to participate within the American Revolution, not as a soldier, however as a thinker and mediator of concepts.

Mazzei embodied a uncommon mix of Tuscan Enlightenment rationality and revolutionary enthusiasm. He spent his early years in Livorno, Smyrna and London, absorbing the liberal local weather of Northern Europe earlier than embarking on the Atlantic journey that might make him, within the phrases of many historians, “the primary Tuscan citizen of America.”

The American years: Jefferson’s neighbor and mental ally

In 1773, Mazzei sailed from Livorno aboard the Triumph, bringing with him Tuscan farmers, grapevines, olive timber, silkworm eggs, and books, amongst them Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments. His vacation spot was Virginia, the place his good friend Thomas Jefferson persuaded him to settle close to Monticello. The two males quickly turned shut neighbors and lifelong correspondents.

Mazzei established his farm, which he named Colle, after Colle Val d’Elsa in Tuscany. There he launched a number of the first systematic experiments in viticulture within the colonies. But agriculture quickly gave method to politics. Immersed within the debates of the Virginia Convention, Mazzei wrote and spoke passionately about pure rights and the equality of males, ideas that might echo powerfully in America’s founding texts.

His pamphlet Instructions of the Freeholders of Albemarle County to Their Delegates in Convention (1776) argued that “all males are by nature equally free and impartial,” language that resonated intently with the preamble of the Virginia Declaration of Rights drafted by George Mason, and later, the U.S. Declaration of Independence penned by Jefferson himself.

“All males are created equal”: a Tuscan phrase throughout the Atlantic

Scholars word how this formulation, which circulated amongst Jefferson’s papers in 1776, resonates unmistakably with the celebrated line within the Declaration of Independence: “All males are created equal.”  While Jefferson remodeled it into the concise, common phrase that turned a cornerstone of American democracy, Mazzei’s broader reflection helped convey to the colonies a distinctly European consciousness of pure rights, civic advantage and ethical equality, ideas already debated in Florence and Pisa in the course of the reforms of Grand Duke Peter Leopold.

Historians have lengthy debated how straight Mazzei’s phrases influenced Jefferson, however few deny that his writings bolstered the rising American vocabulary of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. In the wealthy correspondence between the 2 males, spanning greater than 4 a long time, Jefferson typically mirrored on European political thought by Mazzei’s lens, mixing Tuscan Enlightenment concepts with the pragmatism of a brand new republic.

Friend to 5 American presidents

Mazzei’s time in Virginia and his later diplomatic work introduced him into contact with 5 of the primary U.S. presidents, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, in addition to with jurist George Wythe, certainly one of America’s most revered authorized minds.

• George Washington revered Mazzei’s diplomatic ability and pragmatic intelligence, referring to him as “an sincere and zealous good friend to the reason for liberty.”
• John Adams exchanged letters with Mazzei throughout his missions in Europe, recognizing their shared admiration for civic advantage and republican authorities.
• Jefferson, in fact, was his closest good friend and mental twin; the 2 males’s correspondence coated philosophy, agriculture, politics, and the ethical foundations of the brand new nation.
• James Madison supported Mazzei’s efforts to safe European financing for the Revolutionary trigger, and
• James Monroe, who served as a younger officer in the course of the conflict, later met Mazzei once more in Paris as a part of the diplomatic circle surrounding the early American missions overseas.

Through these connections, Mazzei turned a transatlantic conduit—a voice translating European Enlightenment beliefs into the vocabulary of American democracy, whereas additionally introducing the revolutionary power of the New World again to Europe.

Beyond America: from Paris to Warsaw and Pisa

After the Revolution, Mazzei continued his travels. In Paris, he served as Virginia’s consultant and as an agent for the King of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski, whom he later joined at courtroom in Warsaw as a political adviser. There, he contributed to the drafting of the Polish Constitution of 1791, the primary fashionable constitution of its form in Europe.

Returning to Italy within the 1790s, he settled in Pisa, the place he lived out his ultimate a long time writing memoirs, financial essays, and reflections on freedom and ethical progress. His treatises on forex and public welfare reveal the identical pragmatic idealism that had impressed him in America. He died in 1816 and was buried in Pisa’s cemetery, his tomb inscribed merely: “Free thinker and adventurer.”

An Enlightenment bridge between Tuscany and America

Mazzei’s thought stood on the crossroads of Florentine civic humanism and American republicanism. Like many disciples of Tuscany’s Grand Duke Peter Leopold, he believed in reform grounded in purpose, training and private advantage. His life mirrored the mental migrations of the age: concepts born in Tuscany’s academies discovered new soil in Jefferson’s Virginia, and the ideas of self-government traveled again throughout the Atlantic to form Europe’s personal revolutions.

Though his identify hardly ever seems in U.S. textbooks, Mazzei’s contribution to the American founding is commemorated by a 1980 U.S. postage stamp bearing his portrait and the phrases: “Filippo Mazzei (1730–1816) — Patriot Remembered.”

Florence remembers Mazzei

On Friday, November 28, 2025, Florence pays tribute to this exceptional Tuscan at the convention “Filippo Mazzei, Grand Duke Peter Leopold and the Rediscovery of America,” hosted by ISFE (Istituzione di Studi Firenze per l’Europa) at ITACA, Via San Domenico 22.

The occasion marks 260 years since Peter Leopold’s accession as Grand Duke of Tuscany and celebrates the enduring cultural ties between Tuscany and the United States. Organized by ISFE in collaboration with Kent State University Florence, beneath the patronage of the U.S. Consulate in Florence and with the assist of the Region of Tuscany, the convention will function students, historians, and representatives of the Tuscan-American group.

Discussions will discover Mazzei’s letters preserved in Florence’s National Central Library, his philosophical hyperlinks with Jefferson, and the broader position of the Grand Duchy within the Enlightenment community that helped form fashionable democracy. ISFE president Elisabetta Catelani will shut the proceedings.

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Marco Bastiani is an Italian journalist based mostly in Florence. He is the founding father of Florence Daily News, launched in 2011, and has been working in journalism since 1998. Formerly political editor at Il Giornale della Toscana, he later took on senior communication roles in each private and non-private establishments. A board member of the Tuscan Foundation of the Order of Journalists, he loves the ocean and Greece, and has two youngsters.

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