LUZIO, ALESSANDRO. — Historian, born in S. Severino Marche on 25 Sept. 1857, died in Mantua on 22 Aug. 1946. He devoted himself to political journalism, polemicizing in moderate newspapers against socialists and Freemasons, and to studies in literary history. From 1882 to 1893 he directed the Gazzetta di Mantova.
Exiled in Vienna, following a trial, he took the opportunity to study the Risorgimento using Austrian sources and to combat legends and defamations dictated by political passions. The excessive importance given to unpublished material and the dispersion into brief refutations and polemics often prevented him from creating broad-ranging historical works and earned him many enemies. He placed particular emphasis on demolishing the myth of Freemasonry, which he demonstrated was the promoter and chief architect of the national Risorgimento; in fact, he showed that it reappeared and acted only after the question of unification had been addressed and resolved by others.
Upon his return to Italy, he was appointed in 1899 superintendent of the State Archive of Mantua, and in 1917 of that of Turin; he then worked to make state archives increasingly accessible to scholars, though this merit was not always recognized, and to procure donations for the archives from private individuals.
Among his principal works are to be noted: Le cinque giornate di Milano nelle narrazioni di fonte austriaca (Rome 1899); A. Salvotti e i processi del Ventuno (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, in addition to the edition of the Cavour correspondence (9 vols., ibid. 1926–33), the substantial volume Aspromonte e Mentana (Florence 1935).