Michele Rosi

Michele Rosi was an instinctive conservative. He lived through momentous times, but never displayed any appetite to become politically involved. He was hostile to "militant politics" and to any attempts by its adherents to distort "pure scholarship" in support of political objectives. In his diary he was severely critical of the government's decision to lead Italy into the First World War and the abrupt (unexplained at the time) change in alliances that directly preceded it. The final twelve years of Rosi's life, after 1922, were lived under fascism. With greater conviction than ever, Rosi identified himself as apolitical during the Mussolini years. He never supported Fascism, disapproving of the systematic intimidation and attacks on the liberal institutions of the state by which it obtained and then retained power in Italy. Deeply attached to his Catholic faith, Rosi was critical of the 1929 "Lateran treaty" because of the way in which, by institutionalising the partial return of temporal power to the Holy See, he saw it as a step back from the separation between church and state which had been a major achievement of the Risorgimento. In his opinion a far simpler form of church:state concordat would have sufficed. At the same time, he never involved himself in active antifascist activism. In 1931 the government made it mandatory for university teachers to swear an oath of loyalty to the party: Rosi complied in what he evidently saw as a meaningless gesture which would make no difference to him: he had never been politically engaged in the first place. A widely held interpretation was that the fascist oath of loyalty seriously compromised the freedom to teach. For his part Rosi continued to believe, even after taking the oath, that teachers must be at the service "of scholarship and not of governments.[1]

Rosi's early covered the late medieval and early modern periods, but quite early on he switched his focus to the Risorgimento. Unusually among his contemporaries, he had little direct family connection to the events that led to Italian unification. He was part of a generation of scholars for which there was a strong need to give the Risorgimento story an entirely new focus. Once and for all, there was a need to distance risorgimento scholarship from the hagiographic and dilettante vision which, at the start of the twentieth century cloaked the whole subject. There was a need to address what, at the time, still counted as "contemporary history" with the same methodological research approach as that employed for earlier periods. That drove an insistence on placing archival sources at the heart of the subject, and applying the time honoured philological-critical approach.[1] Rosi himself tended to hold back from pronouncing too many verdicts on history, but the passage of time nevertheless clarified his own inclination to root Italian unification firmly in the eighteenth century, rather than as some sort of newly discovered nineteenth century manifestation of realpolitik, rampant nationalism and the self-perpetuating imposition across the western half of the continent of Anglo-French style nation states.[7]

Fundamental in Rosi's switch to the History of the Risorgimento was his meeting with the Risorgimento veteran Antonio Mordini. He had originally sought out Mordini in order to try and obtain the great man's backing over the threatened nationalisation of the Royal College of Lucca, following a ministerial decision of Education Minister Guido Baccelli in 1899. Rosi and Mordini entered into a close friendship based on shared values and mutual respect, so that when Rosi learned of Mordini's death on 14 July 1902 he decided to dedicate a biographical study to his friend. The work was published in 1906 under the title "Il Risorgimento italiano e l’azione di un patriota, cospiratore e soldato" ("The Italian risorgimento and the actions of a patriot, a conspirator and a soldier").[1][8][9] Mordini's son Leonardo allowed Rosi unrestricted access to the family papers. Rosi was thereby supported in pursuit of his ambition, as he later expressed it, finally to write "a series of pages on the history of the Risorgimento".[10] Keen to contextualise the information he was able to distil from the Mordini archive, Rosi also sought out some of the few remaining survivors of Risorgimento incidents and events, such as Luigi Guglielmo Cambray-Digny (1820-1906) and Giovanni Cadolini (1830-1917), in pursuit of documents and personal testimonies. Otherwise he contacted descendants of key Risorgimento protagonists. Several of these were well disposed to his researches and keen to help, notably the children and remoter heirs of Carlo Cairoli, as well as surviving members of Angelo Bargoni's family. Rosi followed up his study based on the Mordini papers two years later with "I Cairoli" ("The Cariolis", 1908), which was again based on a major archival research project. "I Cairoli" was republished in 1929, with amendments and additions.[1]

Rosi's preference for presenting history through the prism of biography is also apparent in his more broadly focused history books such as "Storia contemporanea d’Italia" ("History of Italy today": 1914) and "L’Italia odierna. Due secoli di lotte, di studi e di lavoro per l’indipendenza e la grandezza della patria" (loosely, "Italy today: two centuries of struggle, progress and work for the independence and greatness of the homeland": 1916-1919), to which, for as long as he was able, the author kept returning in order to incorporate updates. It is also striking that in these works, as in most of his published work, Rosi hesitated to impose his own historiographical interpretations too prominently, preferring to let the facts and source documents tell their own tales, thereby providing a more rigorously grounded vision. Whether he was dealing with the eighteenth century or with contemporary history, the bias was generally in favour only of research-based objectivity.[1]

More than eighty years after his death, Rosi's best known published work is the "Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale" ("National Lexikon of the Risorgimento"), a series conceptualised and started between 1909 and 1913, and divided into two series: "Facts" (vol. 1) and "People" (vols. 2-4).[1][11] Rosi was successful in attracting contributions from some of the most widely respected scholars of the age, such as Benedetto Croce and Pasquale Villari, as well as from other well-known writers such as Ferdinando Martini. There were also contributions from known Risorgimento scholars such as Giuseppe Gallavresi, and from a younger generation of historians, including Ersilio Michel and Alberto Maria Ghisalberti. The contributors were united only by a shared passion for and fascination with the Risorgimento. Some had unlikely backgrounds: Gaetano Badii, who would produce dozens of entries for the "Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale", was an accountant by training and profession, even if in retrospect he is better remembered by scholars for his contributions as an historian.[12] Rosi directed the entire enterprise closely, personally supervising most of the entries, especially those that might be construed as historiographically contentious or otherwise problematic. The long careful introduction that he added provided him with the chance to set out, more unambiguously than before, his own assessment that the origins of the Risorgimento were to be found in the writings and activities of eighteenth century Italian reformist thinkers such as Pagano and Beccaria.[1][13][14] The project was halted by the outbreak of the First World War, which from an Italian perspective meant the early summer of 1915. It was only some years later, during the 1920s, after a protracted and at times acrimonious series of diatribes and other communications had been exchanged between Rosi and the Vallardi publishing house, that a decision was taken to go ahead and publish the "Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale" in four volumes. It was a major undertaking, undertaken between 1930 and 1937: the final volume appeared only after Rosi's death.[1]