Abstract
Belluzzi is an idealized description of the Republic of San Marino. Although this dialogue can be classified as a utopia, its peculiarity lies in the fact that it also extensively employs literary features that belong to other genres: city panegyric and classical analyses of the ideal state. Zuccolo’s synthesis of these genres permits him to explore the literary and conceptual potentialities of the utopian genre in original ways unknown to his contemporaries. Belluzzi also stands out among other Renaissance utopias owing to its unusual content. It describes a city that is ideal not because it enjoys many of the amenities of life and lacks the problem societies typically face, but since it possesses a feature that Zuccolo considers to be the greatest political value: freedom.
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Notes
- 1.
Bernardy, Il Belluzzi, 20; Montuoro, Come se non fosse nel mondo, 50–52.
- 2.
Firpo, Lo stato ideale della controriforma, 330–332.
- 3.
De Mattei, La Repubblica, 149; Negley and Patrick, The Quest for Utopia, 287.
- 4.
De Mattei, La Repubblica, 19–20; Fiorato , “L’empreinte du reel,” 187–189.
- 5.
Ellero , Relazione della Repubblica Sammarinese, 5.
- 6.
Eliav-Feldon, Realistic Utopias, 2.
- 7.
Garosci , San Marino, 36, 44, 46.
- 8.
Pissavino, Le Ragioni della Repubblica, 26–27.
- 9.
Zuccolo’s choice in adopting some of the literary features of the city panegyric should not be surprising since this genre, created in the Classical world, had been very popular throughout the Middle Ages and was further developed during the Renaissance. One of the texts which most likely influenced Zuccolo was Leonardo Bruni’s “In Praise of Florence” (Laudatio Florentine Urbis). For a detailed assessment of the literary features of city panegyrics , please refer to Hyde , “Medieval descriptions of cities”; Maxson , Brian, “The Many Shades of Praise”; Schlauch , “An Old English Encomium Urbis”; Smith , “Christian Rhetoric”; Zanna, “Descriptiones urbium and elegy.”
- 10.
In Renaissance utopias, some narrators strongly endorse the society they describe (e.g., Hythloday in More’s Utopia), others offer a factual account (e.g., the Genoese sailor in Campanella’s COS). However, they rarely employ the celebratory language we find in Belluzzi.
- 11.
Guicciardini, Dialogo del Reggimento, 399.
- 12.
An important exception is book one of More’s Utopia.
- 13.
More’s Utopia is the most notable exception to this tendency. Book one offers a detailed elucidation of some of England’s more pressing social and political problems to which the utopian society described in book two represents, to some extent, a solution.
- 14.
Firpo, Lo stato ideale della controriforma, 330–332.
- 15.
For an overview of the crisis of the second part of the Italian Renaissance, see Najemy , Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 246–267.
- 16.
On Machiavelli’s notion of freedom, see Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 69–112.
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Donato, A. (2019). An Introduction to Belluzzi or The Happy City by Lodovico Zuccolo. In: Italian Renaissance Utopias. Palgrave Studies in Utopianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03611-9_10
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