Pietro Verri
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Pietro Verri (1728-1797) was born in Milan to a conservative noble family and received a strongly religious education, from which he began to rebel when he reached his twenties. He volunteered to serve in the Seven Years' War in order to escape his father's decision to register him for legal studies, but quit after a year. He wrote Gli elementi del Commercio (Elements of Commerce) and Discorso sulla felicità (Discourse on Happiness) but is most famous for his Osservazioni sulla tortura (Observations on Torture) and for his involvement in the journal Il Caffè (together with his brother Alessandro Verri, the famous philosopher Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Secchi), an important reference on Milanese illuminism. He argued (in 1770) that price depends on the "apparent abundance" of a good and the need for it.
