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The Italian Society of Accounting History was founded under the auspices of the “Comité International des Historiens de la Comptabilité” (Belgium), the “Institut Francais des Historiens Comptables” (France), the “Accounting History Society” (United Kingdom), the “Academy of Accounting Historians” (USA) and the “Accounting History Association” (Japan), at the IV International Congress of Accounting History, held in Pisa in August 1984. It is based in Pisa ([1]).
The association was designed to promote the study and research of Accounting History, begin researching, preserving, publishing and illustrating historical material, share the knowledge of Accounting History, and organise congresses and conferences. The Italian Society of Accounting History is a non-political no-profit association ([2]).
The “Society’s” logo makes use of the more evocative symbols taken from the “manifesto” of the 1984 Pisa Convention: the medieval R in Ratio, which means the reason, the account, the balance, in a single word Accounting in its ancient and noble expression “the art of bookkeeping ”; the temple, symbol of human creations that survive History, the foundation of that classical culture from which no self-respecting science should ever detach itself; the nautilus section, a graphic representation of the Fibonacci sequence of numbers founded on the “golden ratio”, symbol of “divine proportion”.
([1]) Article 1 of the 1993 Statute.
([2]) Article 2 of the 1993 Statute.
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Historical studies of accounting have been cultivated in the Italian higher institutes of university studies and in Italian universities since the second half of the 19th century; in this, a leading role belongs to Fabio Besta.
Professor of accounting at Ca' Foscari in Venice, Besta had devoted a large part of the third volume of his main work “La Ragioneria” (usually referred to as Besta's “Treatise”) to historical topics, beginning with the origins of the double-entry method and continuing with the analysis of the records of medieval Italian businesses and the discussion of account theories in Italy and abroad. A great merit of Fabio Besta, however, was also that of directing towards historical studies all the pupils who intended to devote themselves to research and university teaching, so much so that we owe to Alfieri, Vianello, Rigobon and Ghidiglia, in particular, many valuable historical monographs.
As a result of this love of the Venetian school for historical studies, both Besta and the pupils who sooner or later obtained university chairs used to devote part of their lecture courses to the history of bookkeeping or accounting.
After some time, two favourite pupils emerged from Besta's school: Gaetano Corsani and Alberto Ceccherelli, who – in turn founders of the Tuscan school – linked their names and prestige to valuable and important historical contributions, and did not disdain to base their teaching on historical knowledge and analysis.
However, it was not until the 1940s that a course specifically devoted to accounting history, treating the subject systematically, appeared.
In 1940, in fact, Francesco Della Penna, full professor of general and applied accounting at the Faculty of Economics and Commerce of the University of Rome, himself a pupil of Vittorio Alfieri, encouraging a young man's natural vocation for historical research, assigned him a degree thesis on a historical topic (Francesco Villa and Italian accounting) and then, appointing him assistant to his chair, entrusted him with teaching a course of “Historical readings in accounting”.
The young assistant was Federigo Melis, and so the first systematic course in our discipline began. The news was reported with some prominence by the Rivista italiana di ragioneria, then edited by Prof. Ugo Monetti, which in the third issue of 1940 took care to mention the circumstances and date of the opening of the course, as well as the “warm ovation” given to the young lecturer.
The young Melis's teaching was interrupted by the war and his call to arms. Della Penna, however, so as not to suspend the “historical readings”, entrusted the course to Prof. Nino Ghelli during Melis's forced absence, but kept the post for Melis and reassigned it to him in 1944/45, as soon as he returned from a long imprisonment. At the Faculty of Economics and Commerce of the University of Rome, accounting history was taught continuously by Melis until 1949, when the young scholar returned to his native Tuscany, to the Faculty of Economics and Commerce of the University of Pisa, where he took up the post of Economic History and celebrated the opening of the course with an inaugural lecture entitled “Bookkeeping as a source of Economic History”.
In Pisa, a course in economic and commercial studies had been active since the end of the First World War, first as a detached section of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce of Florence, then, from 1947/48, as a Faculty of the University of Pisa on a provisional basis and finally, from 1955, as a Faculty recognised by the Ministry.
In those years General and Applied Accounting was taught by Egidio Giannessi, who shortly afterwards would take up the chair of the same discipline at the University of Parma as associate professor, before returning permanently to Pisa in 1957. Giannessi, a passionate investigator of cultural phenomena in our disciplines and of the paths along which business economics thought was evolving, introduced into the first-year course in General and Applied Accounting a systematic treatment of accounting history, devoted both to the origins of double-entry bookkeeping and to the history of accounting and business economics thought from the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century.
This teaching became a tradition in the Pisan school and continued with Giannessi as long as he held the chair, and it is still carried on today by his pupils.
The custom of devoting part of the lectures in general and applied accounting courses to topics of accounting history was, moreover, fairly widespread in those years, although not always to the extent it was given in Pisa. We find evidence of this trend in the courses held at the universities of Naples, Rome, Bari, Perugia and Siena. In Milan, at the Catholic University, Prof. Tommaso Zerbi, who had devoted in-depth studies to the origins of the bookkeeping method, reserved a good part of his lectures for these historical topics.
Meanwhile, in 1957, Melis, having won a competitive examination, was appointed by the Faculty of Economics and Commerce of the University of Pisa to the chair of Economic History, and in that Faculty, from the academic year 1958/59, he also officially taught the first independent course entitled Accounting History, which he held continuously until the academic year 1967/68.
In the 1950s Accounting History had been included among the complementary subjects of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce, as shown by the amendments to the Statute of the University of Pisa introduced by Presidential Decree of 24/11/1958.
On Giannessi's initiative, in 1957/58 the Faculty of Economics and Commerce of the University of Pisa asked the Ministry of Education to hold the examination for the libera docenza (university teaching qualification) in Accounting History. The Ministry granted the request and appointed an examining board made up of Professors Alberto Riparbelli, Federigo Melis, Amedeo Salzano, Vincenzo Masi and Professor Mira of Economic History. The board set the examination, which was held on 14 February 1961 and ended with the award of the libera docenza to Carlo Antinori.
Prof. Antinori registered the qualification at the University of Parma and held free courses in Accounting History at the Faculty of Economics and Commerce of that University until he reached the age of seventy.
A second libera docenza examination in Accounting History, again at the request of the Pisan Faculty of Economics and Commerce, was entrusted to an examining board composed of Professors Tommaso Zerbi, Federigo Melis and Egidio Giannessi. The examination took place on 29 May 1969 and the qualification was awarded to Tito Antoni.
As libero docente, Prof. Antoni was confirmed that year in the post he had held since 1968/69 for the teaching of Accounting History at the Faculty of Economics and Commerce of the University of Pisa, a post that had been Federigo Melis's. Later, as legislation evolved, Antoni obtained a permanent post and then, with Presidential Decree 382/80, the chair of associate professor. Prof. Antoni was the first Italian university lecturer to hold a chair in Accounting History.
From 1977 to 1981 Prof. Zerbi held a free course in the History of medieval Lombard entrepreneurship at the Catholic University in Milan.
Many of the problems encountered in developing the teaching of Accounting History are undoubtedly linked to the lack of chairs allocated to this subject by the faculties.
Today, with the revision of the teaching regulations of degree courses in economics (Ministerial Decree of 23.10.1992), Accounting History is included among the subjects that faculties can activate, and it is fully maintained in the scientific-disciplinary sector (P02A Business Economics) identified by Presidential Decree 112/94.
There are many possible developments, and once again they are entrusted to the cultural sensitivity of university faculties.
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The study of Accounting History conveys to young researchers the stages of a journey with millennia-old cultural origins, during which lived experiences, expected and achieved results, hopes, failures, victories, symbols, values, tools and the processes for their use have been composed into a unified vision and almost added together, thus forming a kind of inheritance that is an indispensable source of information for those who wish to know the laborious path of humankind.