RICERCA ITALIANA     

Urban identities and political aggregations in Italy in the long term, XIth to XVth century.

Università degli Studi di Trieste

Abstract

The research program aims at investigating, through the coordinated work of five research units, the relations between two crucial issues of italian civic history from romanic age to the late Middle Ages. On one side, the cultural evolutions that led to the shaping of local identities, mainly the city identities, as cities became from XIIIth century on the focuses of literacy and of all the proceedings of cultural life. On the oher side, the social and political dynamics will be investigated that led to the shaping of the ruling classes, in the frames of kingdoms, dynastic and ecclesiastic principalities or city-states. The five research units are representatives, in their scientific works as well as in their respective academic locations, of a plurality of regional and urban realities of Italy - from north-western to north-eastern Italy to Emilia, Tuscany and Sardinia. Their comparative effort will led to stress the deep differences among italian local evolutions, but also to point at some important convergences in the political culture and in the identitary urban feelings. As to say, a contribution to the overcome of the alternative between an anachronistic "unitary" view of italian history and a plate juxtaposition of a lot of supposed "idiomatic" case-studies. Historical analysis will be constantly supported by a large experience of published and unpublished sources, those being also representative of basic similitudes and at the same time of >>>

Principal Investigator

Paolo Cammarosano Università degli Studi di TRIESTE

Research Objectives

The research program aim can well be extrapolated from the abstract previously issued. It consists in a complex but clear statement
about the links between two historical evolutions: on one side, those cultural and religious experiences, scholastic developments,
political and administrative practices that converged toward the shaping of urban identities in Italy from the romanic age to the eve of the Renaissance; on the other side, those forms of solidarity and aggregation that were mainly aimed at the political government
of the cities. Also economic evolutions and social redistributions of wealth underlied those links, and have also to be accurately
identified. The scientific aim has to be attained through the convergence of different methodical approaches, while differences also
subsist in the ranges of sources and of geographical frames in which the various research units are involved: to say only of the
political framework, the difference has to be stressed between monarchies and principalities and among these and the territorial
city-states as well as the simply autonomous communal cities. A clarifying about the different paths that conveyed to city identities in Italy is at the top of this collective scientific interest and effort, as well as the enucleating of some constant features in those so different experiences: among the constants, the growing integration
between cultural improvements and government >>>

First Results

The main result of national research project will be a thorough appreciation of the historical process that led in Italy to the hegemony of cities in political and cultural life. This result will be attained through the comparison among a very large set of cities and regions, all over northern and central Italy and in Sardinia. It has to be stressed that all the cities studied by the five Units, as in fact almost all the cities of Italy, were not completely sovereign city-states, but were submitted in various foms to crowns, principalities or major territorial city states such as Venice. A first result ot the comparative research will then be the understanding, in every city, of the dialectics between cities’ autonomy and larger state frames: modes and timings of such framings, their consequences from the point of view of political life, legislation, civic administration, justice, public finances and fiscality. It is also important to consider the attitudes, of acceptation or of renitence and opposition to a higher sovereignity: these attitudes relate to cities’ identity shaping and to the rising of municipal pride, mainly consisting in the string defense of cities “liberties”.
These are by far not new historiographical issues. But a novelty in our project consists in the effort of comparison among so different areas, which knew rather different mechanisms of the relation between sovereigns and subjects. Innovative is to our mind also the aim at seizing di the >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Cities’ continuity and cities’ everlasting role in Italy during the Middle Ages are a standard theme, also renewed in recent synthesis works concerning pre-communal age, such as Renato Bordone, La società cittadina del regno d'Italia. Formazione e sviluppo delle caratteristiche urbane nei secoli XI e XII (1987) and Paolo Cammarosano, Nobili e re. L'Italia politica dell'alto medioevo (1998). But a still open research field is represented by the social dynamics that led from a situation in which cities were an important but not exclusive theatre of the linkage between social mobility and the shaping of political isnstitutions to an ever more overwhelming action by the cities and their ruling classes in regard of political entities framed in the rural areas and around the castles. These items are connected with the relations between cities’ identities and political aggregations: urban “populus” in the first instance, then government structures of communal cities and of seigneuries and principalities. From this point of view, the utmost importance has to be devoted to social mobility, concentration of wealth, as to the cultural evolution including the shaping of adiministrative, judiciary and political professionalism. In recent times attention has been devoted to the nature of urban “populus” in XIIIth century as well as to structural and cultural components of the contrast that opposed “populus” to “milites” (Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur) and to the dymamics of >>>