The justification for Bertolotti’s interest in Portuguese culture is not immediately obvious, but there are several possible interpretations. For example, this interest could have been the result of the numerous works he read, especially in the 1820s. However, the hypothesis that the writer was simply interested in Portugal’s current political affairs cannot be excluded either. We should remember that Portugal was of interest to Italian public opinion thanks once again to the events of the first twenty years of the century. In fact, at that time, Lisbon welcomed various Neapolitan, Milanese and Piedmontese political exiles. A certain plausibility can also be given to the hypothesis that the author had been stimulated by works of other writers: in fact, Bertolotti’s work was preceded by Adriano Balbi’s Essai Statistique sur le Royaume de Portugal et d’Algarve (1822), a work of great scientific significance and fervently vintista. However, despite Bertolotti’s interest being sporadic, it is not of secondary importance in his collection of works; for instance, the Piedmontese writer also organized a critical Italian edition of Camões’s masterpiece (I Lusiadi di Luigi Camones, 1821). Whatever the reason for it, the SdP is his most relevant publication. It is a compilation of various earlier contributions, such as those of French historians and scholars who at that time seemed to channel their interests towards the history of peoples and nations. In the SdP, Bertolotti works with sources, commenting on them by using other sources. But unlike other similar attempts, he does not steer away from adding his own comments and he provides his own analysis. The sources play a fundamental role, but he continues to examine and comment on concrete cases even though he contradicts himself at times. (The same thing happens with his studies on Switzerland (1823) and China (1825), both included in the compendium series mentioned above.)

Divided into three volumes, with an analytical index at the end of the third volume, the SdP was first published in 1824, a time when, in Portugal and in the Italian peninsula, absolutist power, shaken by vintismo in the former and by the Neapolitan and Piedmontese revolutions in the latter, began a period of adjustment. This was a particularly lengthy period in the Italian states, being challenged only by the revolutionary wave of 1848 and slightly shaken by the 1830-31 revolutionary attempts in the territories controlled by the Habsburgs and the Papal territories of central Italy.

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