CIPPOLLA, CARLO. — Historian, born in Verona on 26 Sept. 1854, died on 17 Jan. 1917. A pupil in Padua of Gloria and De Leva, he succeeded Ercole Ricotti in 1882 in the chair of history at the University of Turin, later moving in 1906 to that of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Florence, made illustrious by Villari. He was the typical scholar whose mastery of his subject, achieved through knowledge of sources and literature, was not matched by the gift of the great historian for a sure vision and a robust sweep. His tone was also inclined to indulgence towards the slipshod, the uniform, and the moralistic.
Cipolla opened his career with the work, which brought him fame while still young, on the Italian Signories from 1313 to 1530, in the Storia politica of Vallardi (1881). He had already previously studied the ideas and actions of Savonarola in relation to the Venetian constitution (1874) and begun those investigations into the sources for the history of the Venetian region in the early Middle Ages which he was to continue thereafter, as well as his laborious surveys of publications on Italian and German medieval history, continued for many years 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 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 rural statutes of Verona, of the monuments of Novalesa and of the Codice diplomatico of the monastery of S. Colombano at Bobbio, on whose arduous undertaking he was to close his eyes. Likewise, he studied and compared Jordanes and Cassiodorus, Dante and John of Paris, and then the relations of Petrarch with the Avignonese court and the activity he carried out, as well as the Bolognese factions of the late 13th century and the lords of Lombardy. But the greater and better part of his work and of his passionate interest led him to delve deeply into the social and political vicissitudes of the barbarian centuries, predominantly of the early kingdoms of the barbarians in Italy, Odoacer and Theodoric, Germanic and Italian institutions, and to weave anew the thorny question of the fusion of the two nationalities and their reciprocal influence: the extensive book of researches Per la storia d'Italia e dei suoi conquistatori appeared in 1895; in 1900 the acute investigations on the Supposta fusione degli Italiani coi Germani; in 1911 the learned Considerazioni sul concetto di Stato nella monarchia di Odoacre. Nor should be forgotten the memoir on the treatise De monarchia and the pamphlet De potestate regia et papali (Turin 1892), and, among his palaeographical studies, the Codici bobbiesi della biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino (Milan 1907).