Pietro Maestri

Pietro Maestri (28 February 1816 – 4 July 1871) was an Italian risorgimento-patriot. Although he trained as a physician, he is better remembered for his activism in support of a democratic and liberated Italy, as well as for his subsequent career as an economist-statistician. He inherited a passion for statistics from his father, and worked for the government after 1861 as Director of the National Statistical Council (la “Giunta centrale di statistica”). He was something of a pioneer in the field of government statistics and probability theory, although for Maestri Statistics were very much a device of politics and national economics. It would be left to his successor in the post, Luigi Bodio, to demonstrate the extent to which, during a time of rapid social and economic change, government statistics could become a tool to build understanding of social facts and developments.