Giuseppe Pasquale Ricci
Giuseppe Pasquale Ricci (d. 1791)[1] was a leading figure in late-18th-century Trieste,[2] at the time a free port within the Habsburg Empire.
Ricci came from a merchant family from Livorno, and probably came to Trieste initially as a merchant, in the early 1750s. He married Marianna Grossel, daughter of a merchant from Ljubljana, in 1754. He quickly developed a network of contacts and forsook business for a career as a government official.[1]
By 1761, Ricci was Commerce Councilor of the Intendancy (Trieste's de facto government), in which capacity he recommended in a report to Vienna that Greeks and Jews should be invited to the city to develop its commerce, on the strength of those groups' reputations as merchants.[2] In 1763 he proposed a commission to study manufacturing and factories on the Habsburg littoral; he was appointed head of the commission, serving from 1763 to 1776. He held a number of other posts in the Trieste administration as well, among them: government delegate to the non-Uniate Greek community, president of the tribunal of the mercantile exchange, president of the police commission, provisional health magistrate, and interim governor.[1]
He was ennobled in 1776, and made patrician by the Trieste city council in 1779. He died in Trieste in 1791.[1]
