LUZIO, ALESSANDRO. — Historian, born in S. Severino Marche on 25 September 1857, died in Mantova on 22 August 1946. He devoted himself to political journalism, polemicizing in moderate newspapers against socialists and Freemasons, and to the study of literary history. From 1882 to 1893 he directed the Gazzetta di Mantova.
Exiled to Vienna following a trial, he took advantage of the opportunity to study the Risorgimento in Austrian sources and to combat legends and defamations dictated by political passions. The excessive importance he attributed to unpublished material and his dispersion in brief refutations and polemics often prevented him from creating wide-ranging historical works and aroused many enemies against him. He devoted particular effort to demolishing the myth of Freemasonry as the promoter and principal author of the national Risorgimento; he in fact demonstrated that it reappeared and flourished only after the question of unity had been addressed and resolved by others.
Upon returning to Italy, he was appointed superintendent of the Mantova Archives in 1899, and of those of Torino in 1917; he subsequently worked to make the State archives increasingly accessible to scholars, who did not always acknowledge this merit, and to secure gifts from private individuals for the archives themselves.
Among his principal works are: Le cinque giornate di Milano nelle narrazioni di fonte austriaca (Roma 1899); A. Salvotti e i processi del Pentuno (ibid. 1901); Il processo Pellico-Maroncelli (Milano 1903); I martiri di Belfiore (ibid. 1905); Felice Orsini (ibid. 1914); Carlo Alberto e Mazzini (Torino 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 (Firenze 1935).