LUZIO, ALESSANDRO. - Historian, b. at S. Severino Marche on 25 Sept. 1857, d. at Mantua on 22 Aug. 1946. He devoted himself to political journalism, polemicizing in the moderate papers against socialists and Freemasons, and to studies of literary history. From 1882 to 1893 he directed the Gazzetta di Mantova.
An exile in Vienna, following a trial, he took advantage of this to study the Risorgimento on the basis of Austrian sources and to combat legends and defamations dictated by political passions. The excessive importance he gave to unpublished material and his dispersion in brief confutations and polemics often prevented him from creating historical works of broad scope and raised many enemies against him. He made a particular effort to demolish the myth of Freemasonry as the promoter and chief author of the national Risorgimento; he demonstrated in fact that it reappeared and flourished anew only after the problem of unification had been confronted and resolved by others.
Having returned to Italy, he was appointed in 1899 superintendent of the Archive of Mantua, and in 1917 of that of Turin; he then worked to make the state archives ever more accessible to scholars, who, however, did not always acknowledge this merit to him, and to procure for the archives themselves gifts from private individuals.
Among his principal works should be remembered: Le cinque giornate di Milano nelle narrazioni di fonte austriaca (Rome 1899); A. Salvotti e i processi del Pentuno (ibid. 1901); Il processo Pellico-Maroncelli (Milan 1903); I martiri di Belfiore (ibid. 1905); Felice Orsini (ibid. 1914); Carlo Alberto e Mazzini (Turin 1923); Garibaldi, Cavour, Verdi (ibid. 1924); La massoneria e il Risorgimento italiano (2 vols., Bologna 1925); and, besides the edition of the Cavour correspondence (9 vols., ibid. 1926-33), the thick volume Aspromonte e Mentana (Florence 1935).
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Fausto Fonzi