The Marquis Vilfredo Frederico Damaso Pareto was born in Paris on July 15, 1848. His father, the Marquis Raphael Pareto, came of an old Genovese family that had been ennobled in the eighteenth century. While still a young man, Raphael Pareto had fled Italy and moved to France in the eighteen thirties. Holding republican opinions and adhering to the libertarian cause of Mazzini, he had been persecuted by the House of Savoy, which had annexed Genova in 1815. While in exile, he married a Frenchwoman, Marie Metenier, and all his children, two daughters and the boy Vilfredo, were born in France. In Paris, Raphael Pareto worked as a civil engineer; shortly before the birth of his son he began the necessary formalities to become a naturalized French citizen. He decided, however, to return to Italy in 1855, and so his son, although bilingual, was educated in that country.

Pareto received a solid classical education in the very demanding Italian secondary school system and then proceeded to the Turin Polytechnical School to become a civil engineer like his father, who was by then a high-ranking member of the Piedmontese civil service. The five-year course in civil engineer- ing, the first two years of which were devoted to mathematics, deeply in- fluenced Pareto's future intellectual outlook. In 1870 he graduated with a thesis on "The Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium in Solid Bodies." His later interest in equilibrium analysis in economics and sociology is prefigured in this thesis.

From Coser, 1977:402-403.