His widow left a sum of Ioo,000 francs to the Institut de France, to found in his memory scholarships in political economy or law.
In 1817 a Roman Catholic theological faculty was added, with a seminary called the Konvikt, and there are now also faculties of law, medicine, philosophy, political economy and natural science.
If, however, they are not published, and are given to certain persons as individual favours, they become a prolific source of abuse, and are quite indefensible from the standpoint of political economy.
He studied history and humanities at the university of Moscow, and, after having gone through his military training in a grenadier regiment, left for Germany where he read political economy in Berlin under Prof. Schmoller.
Although bitterly opposed by the partisans of scholastic routine, Genovesi found influential patrons, amongst them Bartolomeo Intieri, a Florentine, who in 1754 founded the first Italian or European chair of political economy (commerce and mechanics), on condition that Genovesi should be the first professor, and that it should never be held by an ecclesiastic. The fruit of Genovesi's professorial labours was the Lezioni di Commercio, the first complete and systematic work in Italian on economics.