Tamassia, Nino

TAMASSIA, NINO. - Historian of Italian law, b. at Revere di Mantova on 1 Dec. 1860, d. at Padua on 11 Dec. 1931.

After graduating at Pavia and completing his studies at Strasbourg, he taught at Parma from 1886, at Pisa from 1888 and at Padua from 1895 until his death. The history of law, which with his predecessors (Sclopis, Pertile, Schupfer, Del Giudice) had not yet asserted its autonomy from foreign schools, received with T. a new direction that was not happily called "nationalistic" and that reduced to more just limits the influence of Germanic law, exaggerated by German historians and by Schupfer (v). With more than two hundred specialized studies T. brought to light the heritage of Rome and the continuous action of the Church "converging on the natural qualities and the historical conditions of the Italian people" (Calisse). He preferred scholarly communications to treatises and monographs, rich in thought in their brevity: hence the accusation of fragmentariness of his work, contradicted, however, by the volumes on Odofredo and on La famiglia italiana nei secc. XIV e XV. He went back beyond classical Roman law to that of the Italic regions emerging in popular customs, and used the sources of the 5th and 6th centuries, previously neglected, among them the patristic sources, dedicating specialized studies to ecclesiastical writers (St. Gregory the Great, Zeno of Verona, St. Maximus, St. Peter Chrysologus, Lanfranc of Pavia, Paulinus of Aquileia).

Fulvio Crosara