Cipolla, Carlo

CIPOLLA, CARLO. - Historian, b. in Verona on 26 Sept. 1854, d. on 17 Jan. 1917. A pupil in Padua of Gloria and De Leva, in 1882 he succeeded Ercole Ricotti in the chair of history at the University of Turin, then passing in 1906 to that of the Istituto di studi superiori in Florence, which had been made illustrious by Villari. He is the typical erudite whose mastery of his subject, attained through knowledge of the sources and of the literature, is not tempered by the gift of the great historian of sure vision and powerful wing. Even his tone indulges in the slovenly, the uniform, the monastic.

C.'s activity opens with the work that brought him fame while still young, on the Italian Signorie from 1313 to 1530, in Vallardi's Storia politica (1881). He had already earlier studied the ideas and the action of Savonarola in relation to the Venetian constitution (1874) and begun those investigations of his into the sources for the history of the Veneto region in the early Middle Ages which he was thereafter always to continue, like the laborious surveys of publications on Italian and German medieval history continued for many years in the Archivio veneto and in the Jahresberichte der Geschichtswissenschaft. In the following period he was to illustrate Piedmontese and Venetian documents, to make himself a conscientious and sagacious editor of the ancient Veronese chronicles, of the documents for the history of diplomatic relations between Verona and Mantua in the 13th-14th centuries, of the Storie of Ferreto dei Ferreschi, of the Veronese rural statutes, of the monuments of the Novalesa and of the Codice diplomatico of the monastery of S. Colombano at Bobbio, on which grave undertaking he was to close his eyes. Likewise he studied and compared Jordanes and Cassiodorus, Dante and John of Paris, and then Petrarch's relations with the Avignon court and his activity there, and further the Bolognese factions of the late 13th century and the lords of Lombardy. But the greater and the better part of his work and of his passionate interest led him to deepen the social and political vicissitudes of the barbarian centuries, predominantly of the first barbarian kingdoms in Italy, Odoacer and Theodoric, Germanic and Italian institutions, and to reweave in a new way the arduous question of the fusion of the two nationalities and of their mutual influence: the ample book of researches Per la storia d'Italia e dei suoi conquistatori is from 1895; from 1900 the acute investigations on the Supposta fusione degli Italiani coi Germani; from 1911 the learned Considerazioni sul concetto di Stato nella monarchia di Odoacre. Nor should the memoir on the treatise De monarchia and the pamphlet De potestate regia et papali (Turin 1892) be forgotten, and, among paleographic studies, the Codici bobbiesi della biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino (Milan 1907).

Pier Fausto Palumbo