Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, finding Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism impractical to human life, and he was an apologist for classical antiquity and the Renaissance humanities, in addition to being the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics. He is recognised as one of the first Counter-Enlightenment figures in history.

The Enlightenment in Italy was a cultural and philosophical movement that began in the second half of the eighteenth century, characterized by the discussion of the epistemological, ethical, and political issues of the Enlightenment thought of the eighteenth century.