Fabio Besta. Le dispense didattiche

Fabio Besta was the most important scholar and professor of Accounting in Italy, as to deserve the name ‘Unsurpassed Master’. He is best known for his treatise published in three volumes between 1909 and 1916. However, his bibliographic production is much more extensive, and it has appeared mainly in the form of handouts for the students of the then Scuola Superiore di Commercio di Venezia (Ca’ Foscari Business School) where he taught for almost half a century, most notably in the courses of Accounting, Computisteria and State Accounting. Moreover, some of these writings formed the basis for the extensive treatise that was published at the beginning of the twentieth century. Published on the occasion of the centenary of the Master’s death, this volume analyses in detail the content of these handouts, which is not widely known due to their exclusive use for didactic purposes and their rarity. The first part of this work presents a brief biographical profile of Fabio Besta, and it illustrates the topics that are addressed in the various handouts and their specific characteristics. Lastly, it proposes an interpretative and critical layout of their contents. The second part of the work contains a large analytical and comparative bibliographic repertoire of these works, which were published between 1882 and 1921. This part contains all the bibliographic information of the various versions of the aforementioned handouts – some of which were not present in any repertoire until now – as well as the detailed indices highlighting the differences between the various editions. Worthy of note is also the mapping of the location of the known copies for each of them, among other things. This work ends with the chronological index of the Master’s works and their different editions.