CIPOLLA, CARLO. – Historian, born in Verona on 26 September 1854, died on 17 January 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, moving in 1906 to that of the Istituto di studi superiori of Florence, made illustrious by Villari. He is the typical scholar whose mastery of his subject, attained through knowledge of the sources and the literature, is not matched by the great historian’s gift of a sure vision and a powerful wing. His tone, too, tends toward the slovenly, the monotonous, and the monastic.
C.’s activity began 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 studied Savonarola’s ideas and activity in relation to the Venetian constitution (1874), and had begun those investigations of the sources for the history of the Veneto region in the early Middle Ages that he was thereafter always to continue, as well as the painstaking surveys of Italian and German publications on medieval history that he continued for many years to publish in the Archivio veneto and the Jahresberichte der Geschichtswissenschaft. In the following period he was to illustrate Piedmontese and Venetian documents, become a conscientious and discerning editor of the ancient Veronese chronicles, of the documents concerning 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 Novalesa, and of the Codice diplomatico of the monastery of S. Colombano at Bobbio, on the arduous undertaking of which he was to close his eyes. He also studied and compared Giordano and Cassiodoro, Dante and Giovanni da Parigi, and then Petrarch’s relations with the Avignonese court and the activity carried on there, as well as the Bolognese factions of the late thirteenth century and the lords of Lombardy. But the greater part and the best of his work and passionate interest went into deepening his study of the social and political history of the barbarian centuries, principally of the first barbarian kingdoms in Italy, Odoacre and Teodorico, Germanic and Italian institutions, and into reweaving in a new manner the difficult question of the fusion of the two nationalities and their reciprocal influence: the extensive research work Per la storia d’Italia e dei suoi conquistatori dates from 1895; the acute investigations on the Supposta fusione degli Italiani coi Germani from 1900; and the learned Considerazioni sul concetto di Stato nella monarchia di Odoacre from 1911. Nor should we forget the paper on the treatise De monarchia and the booklet De potestate regia et papali (To-
rin 1892), or, among the palaeographical studies, the Codici bobbiesi della biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino (Milan 1907).