Italy’s Various Middle Ages

Abstract

In his famous essay Quale dei governi liberi meglio convenga alla felicità d’Italia (1797), the political writer Melchiorre Gioia described the Italian republics of the Middle Ages as a fiercely fratricidal world: for him it amounted to a history that Italy would do well to leave behind. A few years later the same experience would be viewed quite differently. In his summary of Italian history published in 1846 Cesare Balbo, a member of the Piedmontese nobility and one of the leading figures of the Catholic liberal movement for independence and constitutional government, though not particularly keen on the republican tradition, would explicitly point out the central role of the Middle Ages in the history of the nation. Balbo labelled the memory of the Roman Empire as ‘inopportune’ in the perspective of national emancipation and the creation of a new Italy.² Although the adverse side emphasized so strongly by Gioia — the constant refrain of those bemoaners of civil strife that figure so centrally in the historiography of the age — would not be forgotten, the republics came to be hymned as a golden age of independence and political liberty, the history of which should inspire the rebirth of national awareness.

The text is a joint venture. Sections 1, 2, and 6 were written by Ilaria Porciani, sections 3, 4 and 5 by Mauro Moretti.