Benini demografo (Benini as a demographer)

Rodolfo Benini, having started as a State employee of the Italian Direzione generale della statistica, improved his instruction learning economy and statistics under the guide of R. Böck, W. Lexis, A. Wagner and E. Engel in Berlin and of L. Cossa, C. F. Ferraris, G. B. Salvioni and A. Messedaglia in Pavia and Padua. Under the direction of Luigi Bodio he performed his formal and practical training in population studies in a period – from the last quarter of the 19th century to the first one of the 20th – when the international debate both on the role of social sciences as a tool of government and on the role of statistics as a method of knowledge was at its peak. A debate whose implications obviously involved in depth whatever research referring to population. The advancement of demography, with the undeniable contribution of Benini in Italy, was facilitated by the development of statistical and mathematical tools and by the gradual accumulation of quantitative and related information, in the analysis of which these and other tools may be employed, together with advances in the social and the life sciences – as anthropology and sociology, for instance. Demography as a science – just as Benini outlined in his writings – is not a unitary field, and not only it combines the interests of a number of separate scientific disciplines, but it also straddles the natural and social sciences. It turns out to be a hard core of interest, anyway autonomous, but with a peripheral area merging into all the disciplines which are involved in studies concerning the population, such as anthropology, biology, ecology, sociology and economics