Filippo Mazzei, the Tuscan who helped shape America’s founding

Florence marks the 260th anniversary of Grand Duke Peter Leopold’s rule with a public conference on Friday, November 28, spotlighting Mazzei’s bridge between Enlightenment Tuscany and revolutionary America.

A Tuscan mind behind America’s founding ideals

Filippo Mazzei (1730–1816) was born in Poggio a Caiano, near Florence, and lived one of the most extraordinary global adventures of the 18th century. A physician, merchant, agronomist and philosopher, he was among the first Italians to take part in the American Revolution, not as a soldier, but as a thinker and mediator of ideas.

Mazzei embodied a rare blend of Tuscan Enlightenment rationality and revolutionary enthusiasm. He spent his early years in Livorno, Smyrna and London, absorbing the liberal climate of Northern Europe before embarking on the Atlantic journey that would make him, in the words of many historians, “the first Tuscan citizen of America.”

The American years: Jefferson’s neighbor and intellectual ally

In 1773, Mazzei sailed from Livorno aboard the Triumph, bringing with him Tuscan farmers, grapevines, olive trees, silkworm eggs, and books, among them Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments. His destination was Virginia, where his friend Thomas Jefferson persuaded him to settle near Monticello. The two men soon became close neighbors and lifelong correspondents.

Mazzei established his farm, which he named Colle, after Colle Val d’Elsa in Tuscany. There he introduced some of the first systematic experiments in viticulture in the colonies. But agriculture soon gave way to politics. Immersed in the debates of the Virginia Convention, Mazzei wrote and spoke passionately about natural rights and the equality of men, concepts that would echo powerfully in America’s founding texts.

His pamphlet Instructions of the Freeholders of Albemarle County to Their Delegates in Convention (1776) argued that “all men are by nature equally free and independent,” language that resonated closely with the preamble of the Virginia Declaration of Rights drafted by George Mason, and later, the U.S. Declaration of Independence penned by Jefferson himself.

“All men are created equal”: a Tuscan phrase across the Atlantic

Scholars note how this formulation, which circulated among Jefferson’s papers in 1776, resonates unmistakably with the celebrated line in the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal.”  While Jefferson transformed it into the concise, universal phrase that became a cornerstone of American democracy, Mazzei’s broader reflection helped bring to the colonies a distinctly European awareness of natural rights, civic virtue and moral equality, concepts already debated in Florence and Pisa during the reforms of Grand Duke Peter Leopold.

Historians have long debated how directly Mazzei’s words influenced Jefferson, but few deny that his writings reinforced the emerging American vocabulary of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. In the rich correspondence between the two men, spanning more than four decades, Jefferson often reflected on European political thought through Mazzei’s lens, blending Tuscan Enlightenment ideas with the pragmatism of a new republic.

Friend to five American presidents

Mazzei’s time in Virginia and his later diplomatic work brought him into contact with five of the first U.S. presidents, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, as well as with jurist George Wythe, one of America’s most respected legal minds.

• George Washington respected Mazzei’s diplomatic skill and pragmatic intelligence, referring to him as “an honest and zealous friend to the cause of liberty.”
• John Adams exchanged letters with Mazzei during his missions in Europe, recognizing their shared admiration for civic virtue and republican government.
• Jefferson, of course, was his closest friend and intellectual twin; the two men’s correspondence covered philosophy, agriculture, politics, and the moral foundations of the new nation.
• James Madison supported Mazzei’s efforts to secure European financing for the Revolutionary cause, and
• James Monroe, who served as a young officer during the war, later met Mazzei again in Paris as part of the diplomatic circle surrounding the early American missions abroad.

Through these connections, Mazzei became a transatlantic conduit—a voice translating European Enlightenment ideals into the vocabulary of American democracy, while also introducing the revolutionary energy of the New World back to Europe.

Beyond America: from Paris to Warsaw and Pisa

After the Revolution, Mazzei continued his travels. In Paris, he served as Virginia’s representative and as an agent for the King of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski, whom he later joined at court in Warsaw as a political adviser. There, he contributed to the drafting of the Polish Constitution of 1791, the first modern charter of its kind in Europe.

Returning to Italy in the 1790s, he settled in Pisa, where he lived out his final decades writing memoirs, economic essays, and reflections on freedom and moral progress. His treatises on currency and public welfare reveal the same pragmatic idealism that had inspired him in America. He died in 1816 and was buried in Pisa’s cemetery, his tomb inscribed simply: “Free thinker and adventurer.”

An Enlightenment bridge between Tuscany and America

Mazzei’s thought stood at the crossroads of Florentine civic humanism and American republicanism. Like many disciples of Tuscany’s Grand Duke Peter Leopold, he believed in reform grounded in reason, education and personal virtue. His life mirrored the intellectual migrations of the age: ideas born in Tuscany’s academies found new soil in Jefferson’s Virginia, and the principles of self-government traveled back across the Atlantic to shape Europe’s own revolutions.

Though his name rarely appears in U.S. textbooks, Mazzei’s contribution to the American founding is commemorated by a 1980 U.S. postage stamp bearing his portrait and the words: “Filippo Mazzei (1730–1816) — Patriot Remembered.”

Florence remembers Mazzei

On Friday, November 28, 2025, Florence will pay tribute to this remarkable Tuscan at the conference “Filippo Mazzei, Grand Duke Peter Leopold and the Rediscovery of America,” hosted by ISFE (Istituzione di Studi Firenze per l’Europa) at ITACA, Via San Domenico 22.

The event marks 260 years since Peter Leopold’s accession as Grand Duke of Tuscany and celebrates the enduring cultural ties between Tuscany and the United States. Organized by ISFE in collaboration with Kent State University Florence, under the patronage of the U.S. Consulate in Florence and with the support of the Region of Tuscany, the conference will feature scholars, historians, and representatives of the Tuscan-American community.

Discussions will explore Mazzei’s letters preserved in Florence’s National Central Library, his philosophical links with Jefferson, and the broader role of the Grand Duchy in the Enlightenment network that helped shape modern democracy. ISFE president Elisabetta Catelani will close the proceedings.

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