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The myth of the “Gothic Queen” between tradition and modernization

Siena’s pursuit of an identity blending “small hometown” and “great homeland” (1800-1945)
Le mythe de la « reine gothique » à Sienne entre tradition et modernisation : à la recherche d’une identité entre petite et grande patrie
Saverio Battente

Résumés

Pour la classe dirigeante siennoise, la culture a constitué un outil essentiel afin de construire et d’inventer une identité collective qui lui a permis de contrôler la ville au fil des siècles. Grâce à l’élaboration du mythe de Sienne comme « reine gothique », l’aristocratie a ainsi pu s’assurer de la stabilité économique, politique et sociale. La tradition est devenue le moyen de donner à la ville une identité qui lui permette d’affronter les défis de la modernisation sans être submergée ni bouleversée. L’équilibre reposait sur la défense d’un système de métayage rural, considéré non pas comme un vestige réactionnaire, mais comme une forme de contrôle paternaliste de la modernité. La position de la ville sur le Grand Tour, qui favorisait la rencontre avec un public international, a facilité et encouragé cette démarche. De même, les élites siennoises ont su utiliser le mythe de la « reine gothique » pour mettre en relation leur pouvoir local avec le processus de construction de la nation. Le Palio et les contradictions qu’il charrie ont donc fini par servir de point d’équilibre original entre la petite ville et la grande patrie, entre modernisation et tradition : en somme, un modèle à donner en exemple à la nation, comme l’a fait le mouvement nationaliste italien.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 Saverio Battente, “Nation and state building in Italy: historiographical interpretations. Unificati (...)
  • 2 Rosario Romeo, Italia mille anni, Milan, Mondadori, 1981; Giovanni Spadolini (ed.), Nazione e nazio (...)
  • 3 Marco Fincardi, Maurizio Ridolfi (eds.), “Le trasformazioni della festa Secolarizzazione, politiciz (...)
  • 4 Ilaria Porciani, La festa della nazione, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1987; Stefano Cavazza, Piccole patrie. (...)
  • 5 Raffaele Romanelli, Il comando impossibile. Stato e società nell’Italia liberale, Bologna, Il Mulin (...)
  • 6 Antonio Cardini, Il grande centro. I liberali in una nazione senza stato: il problema storico dell’ (...)
  • 7 Mario Insenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria, 3 vol., Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1996-2010.

1The process of nation and state building in Italy has long been a focus of historiographical debate.1 In this context, the relationship between “grande patria” – great homeland – and “piccola patria” – small hometown – has developed an extremely original cultural character, due to the peculiar connotation of the concept of an “Italy of a thousand village bell towers”.2 In fact, nation building on the peninsula has had to coexist with the strong sense of local community identity, a remnant of the Medieval and modern ages.3 The liturgy of the idea of Italy, unable to unseat the sacrality of small towns, had to rework and convert the peninsula’s pre-existing regional and municipal feasts and rituals into unifying events, juxtaposed with national ones.4 All of this was compounded by the diversity of pre-unification and Risorgimento political and ideological sensibilities that came together in the unified state, which were often geographically based.5 Finally, there was the central matter of the challenges of modernization that had to be accepted and met within the young Italian state in order for it to bond with the rest of the continent, while at the same time coming to terms with the difficult-to-offset weight of rural-world tradition.6 The path towards finding loci of shared memory in a national key in Italians’ collective imagination without repudiating localistic ones was by no means simple or linear.7

  • 8 Antonio Cardini, Storia di Siena dal Risorgimento al Miracolo economico, Florence, Nerbini, 2009.
  • 9 Consider the series “Storia delle città italiane” published by Laterza (Rome-Bari) or the series “S (...)

2In this context, Siena is a singular case study packed with meaning, unique in its capacity to contribute to an understanding of the main pivot points of the Italian unification process in the 19th and 20th centuries and the concurrent challenges of modernization.8 In fact, a study of the Tuscan provincial capital relates to a consolidated line of research centered around the history of some of the peninsula’s main cities and their insertion into the process of national unification.9 In any case, Siena, in a different and perhaps better way than any other Italian municipality, ended up being a laboratory in which tradition and modernization fused rather than clashed, as wary defense of local autonomy and respect for the primacy of the nation managed to coexist. This essay aims to analyze how the city of the Palio generated a balance between piccola and grande patria, slotting its own identity into the groove of unification with an equilibrium between tradition and innovation, being influenced by national events and, in turn and in part, influencing them.

Cultural and municipal autonomy: from the Risorgimento to Unity in the liberal age

The origins of the creation of the myth of the “Gothic queen”

  • 10 Mauro Barzanti, Giuliano Catoni, Mario De Gregorio (eds.), Storia di Siena, 3 vol., Siena, Alsaba, (...)
  • 11 Ibid.

3In 1555, the end of the Republic of Siena brought about by Imperial and Florentine forces meant a loss of independence for the city, but not of its autonomy.10 The city’s aristocratic ruling class, renouncing any form of rebellion, convinced Florence to allow it to maintain its prerogative in the management of public affairs, as was the long-standing custom.11 In the modern era, then, Siena constructed its own identity, which, while seemingly rooted in Medieval history, was actually the result of an artificial process, structured on the spot as a cultural revisitation of its glorious history.

  • 12 Mario Ascheri, Storia di Siena, Pordenone, Ebi, 2013; id., Il rinascimento a Siena, Siena, Cantagal (...)
  • 13 Peter Burke, Il Rinascimento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001; Alberto Tenenti, L’età moderna, Bologna, Il (...)

4Behind the veil of its Medieval culture, evoked to support a long-awaited and hoped-for autonomy, on the part of the ruling class there was a denial of the true cultural identity upon which the city had been structured beginning in the 13th century, replaced by an oligarchic and elitist revisitation dating to the aristocratic era, in the shadow of Pandolfo Petrucci, “il Magnifico” of Siena, the antagonist of Florence’s “Magnifico” Lorenzo de Medici.12 In line with the re-feudalization that began in Italy between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the modern age, Siena was also in the hands of a “consortium” or consorteria of large landowners of noble ancestry who exploited a revisitation of the city’s Medieval mythology to maintain their primacy, beyond the loss of independence.13 So, well before the rediscovery of the Medieval invention, the Sienese ruling class launched a cultural construction process in which to anchor its own primacy in terms of the city’s sense of identity.

  • 14 Attilio Brilli, Siena, una regina gotica. L’occhio del viaggiatore 1870-1935, Città di Castello, Ba (...)
  • 15 Id., Viaggiatori stranieri in terra di Siena, Milan, De Luca, 1986.
  • 16 Id., Siena, una regina gotica…, op. cit.; Giuliano Catoni, “Siena nell’Ottocento. Un limbo come val (...)
  • 17 Ernesto Sestan, “Siena avanti Monteaperti”, Bullettino senese di storia patria, LXVII, 1961, p. 28- (...)
  • 18 Mario Barzanti, Giuliano Catoni, Mario De Gregorio (eds.), Storia di Siena…, op. cit.

5Indirectly creating the myth of the city over the course of centuries were numerous illustrious travellers who, visiting the city, had “interpreted, misunderstood and in their own way discovered Siena”.14 Drawing support from the image evoked by travellers along the Via Francigena who stopped in Siena, the city’s consorteria structured a solid municipal identity, recognized as the original fruit of a culture deeply rooted in a Medieval period and thus worthy of preservation, but in reality spurious and contrived.15 The city assumed the attribute of “Gothic queen” in the wake of the Grand Tour, not so much to acquire international recognition as to preserve itself in a sort of “limbo state”.16 “Daughter of the road” as Ernesto Sestan nicely defined it, Siena was an obligatory stop along the Via Francigena towards Rome for many intellectuals, who were attracted not by its past political and economic glories, but rather by its jealously-conserved and protected artistic treasures.17 In fact, despite the impact of the Baroque period, Siena could almost characterize itself, architecturally, as a “original Gothic”.18

  • 19 Charles de Brosses, Lettres familières écrites d’Italie à quelques amis, en 1739 et 1740, Paris, Po (...)
  • 20 Jean Pierre Grosley, Observations sur l’Italie et les italiens, donnés en 1764, sous le nom de deux (...)
  • 21 James Boswell, Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France 1765-1766, London, Heinemann, 1 (...)
  • 22 Giuliano Catoni, Il Monte dei Paschi di Siena nei due secoli della Deputazione amministratrice (178 (...)
  • 23 GabrieleTuri, Viva Maria. La reazione alle riforme leopoldine (1790-1799), Florence, Olschki, 1969.

6The ruling class managed to fuse the city’s artistic and cultural aspirations with the idyllic beauty of the surrounding countryside, thus structuring the concept of “limbo”. While foreign intellectuals, stirred by Enlightenment or Romantic enthusiasm, scrutinized and admired its nature as a “pure” place uncontaminated by progress, the Sienese aristocracy used the image to preserve an ancien régime, without making recourse to reactionism, but leveraging aesthetics. In fact, foreigners’ reports waxed poetic in describing the city’s artistic beauty, as well as the pleasant and fertile countryside and nature around it, with which they associated the culture of its inhabitants, with their perfect Italian language. By inhabitants they meant the members of the local nobility, who they met in salons, as Charles de Brosses attested.19 Aside from the aristocracy, however, the Sienese were viewed as people to steer clear of.20 The traits of men uncorrupted by the falsity and artifice of modernity were idealized. James Boswell recalled that the nobles had a simple and amiable social life, of “openness and gaiety,” even though they were “terribly ignorant” if compared critically with the social climbing of dynamic Anglo-Saxon society.21 Culture was thus employed as a pervasive instrument in the service of politics and the Sienese rural economic structure. The arrival of the French forces to the sound of the Marseillaise seemed to shake this long-standing equilibrium.22 For the first time since the Middle Ages, modernization had managed to breach the perimeter of the ancient city walls, raising challenges that had not been heard for centuries. Napoleon aimed to open the city to his idea of progress, but not in a frontal clash. The city’s ruling class put up strong cultural, as well as indirectly violent, resistance by means of rural Sanfedismo, as exemplified by the Viva Maria rebellions, aiming not so much to maintain their independence as to, once again, obtain a certain autonomy.23 Indeed, Napoleon placed Siena at the head of the Dipartimento dell’Ombrone, effectively recognizing its status as the capital.

  • 24 Giuliano Catoni, “Siena nell’Ottocento. Un limbo come valore”, art. cited.

7So, at the dawn of the long century, a heated debate began over what would be the most opportune identity to attach to the city.24

  • 25 Giuliano Catoni, “Sviluppo e università nella Siena dei lumi”, Studi senesi, XCI, 1979, p 92-116.
  • 26 Ibid.
  • 27 Id., Il Monte de paschi di Siena…, op. cit.
  • 28 Id., “Dimenticar la francese…”, art. cited.

8Hosting the discussion were a few of the city’s salons, organized by the Sienese aristocracy’s most important noblewomen. The more progressive component of the city’s ruling class, attentive to Enlightenment influences, customarily met in Porzia Sansedoni’s salon.25 The Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo – the Roy pasteur, to use Diderot’s definition – had sought to introduce some reforms in Siena in keeping with his enlightened despotism, like the abolition of the old Magistratures, replaced by the civic community and by the Deputation of Monte dei Paschi, which aroused discontent among the city’s nobles. The fulcrum and encapsulation of the principles of conservation, on the other hand, was the city’s other main salon, that of Faustina Sergardi.26 The influence of the Church was determinant here, in terms of a rigid aversion to any sort of innovation and a defence of the old regime, embodied by the Archbishop Tiberio Borghesi.27 Teresa Regoli Mocenni’s salon, of which Vittorio Alfieri was a guest, was the seat of a sort of confluence of progressive ideals and the demands of the city’s early Risorgimento.28 At the time, what prevailed was the desire to maintain the economic, political and social framework, for which culture would serve as a binding, synthesizing agent.

  • 29 Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on antiquities, arts, and letters during an excursion in Italy in the years (...)
  • 30 Maurice Aymard, “La fragilità di un’economia avanzata: l’Italia e le trasformazioni dell’economia”, (...)
  • 31 Franco Venturi, “Nota introduttiva a Sallustio Bandini”, in id. (ed.), Illuministi italiani, vol. 3 (...)
  • 32 Ferdinando Adorno, Accademie ed istituzioni culturali in Toscana, Florence, Olschki, 1988.
  • 33 Antonio Cardini, Al suono della lumaca. I mezzadri nel primo Novecento, Manduria, Lacaita, 2004; Le (...)

9In fact, prior to the Leopoldine reforms, Siena’s grand old families, who held a monopoly on the land, did not even produce enough wheat for their own consumption, while after the Napoleonic age, they actually became exporters of “large quantities” of it, “undeservedly” making a fortune thanks to “improvement to which they had contributed nothing”. The “city-born and bred” nobles “rarely visited their lands, with the exception of the autumn vacation… only to gad about”.29 The agriculture crises tied to the price of wheat in the last decade of the 18th century, the result of the Napoleonic wars, nonetheless led to the reintroduction of price caps, effectively vindicating the conservatism of the Sienese aristocracy, who were hostile to the rules and logic of the market.30 And yet, Siena and its university had been the site of studies in agriculture by Sallustio Bandini, with their physiocratic and liberalist spirit.31 It was the image of an ancien régime – shaken by an attempt at dynamism dictated first by Enlightened despotism, then by physiocratic principles, and finally by Napoleonic mercantilist notions – desperate to survive. Siena’s old Academy of Physiocritics, established thanks to Pirro Maria Gabrielli, remained more scientific and less practical, unlike the Florentine Academy of the Georgofili, where science and technology were beginning to join forces to not only generate theoretical answers but also apply them to concrete problems.32 The sharecropping system that had made such an impression on Sismonde de Sismondi with its anti-revolutionary and anti-reactionary milieu was in fact the encapsulation of the old-regime rural world.33

  • 34 Giuliano Catoni, Un treno per Siena, Siena, Accademia degli Intronati, 1981.
  • 35 Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Maurizio Degl’Innocenti, La città nostra, Siena, Protagon, 2011.
  • 36 Giuliano Catoni, I goliardi senesi e il risorgimento dalla guerra del Quarantotto al monumento del (...)

10The Gothic myth of the city accentuated by foreign travellers in artistic terms had become the link between two different visions of Siena: one reactionary, pertaining to an ancien régime rural world expressed by vast lands held by a few old Sienese families like the Piccolomini, Sergardi, Tolomei, Spannocchi, Sansedoni, Bichi Ruspoli, Ottieri della Ciaia and Petrucci clans; the other more moderately progressive, embodied by the figure of the city’s Governor, Luigi Serristori. The latter in fact pushed for the railway’s arrival in Siena, in an attempt to break out of isolation and the concept of “limbo”; the railway was viewed as a driver of new entrepreneurship in the city, to be supported by the genesis of a second Sienese bank, albeit without revolutionizing its venerable identity.34 Soon enough, a significant portion of the city’s ruling class was able to use the “Gothic myth” as a balancing point between two antithetical visions, in the face of the risk represented by the rise of new socialist ideas.35 Siena thus embraced the ideas of the Risorgimento, with its monarchical overtones, as a guarantee or order and stability preferable to democratic and republican views, which seemed to potentially herald excessive upheavals that would be difficult to control and keep in balance. The city’s University had played an important cultural role in Siena’s shift towards Risorgimento notions, as the presence of Sienese goliards in Curtatone and Montanara testified.36 Yet the school ended up being a cradle of the progressive aims of the unification process, with a more middle-class social connotation. These ideals were opposed by the aristocratic faction, which was more receptive to a monarchy-based view of unification, as a guarantee of moderation and conservation. In fact, the Sienese ruling class had no intention of abdicating, preferring to embrace unification as a lesser evil, once they had perceived the impracticability of defending the old regime, and aiming to safeguard their own prerogatives. Similarly to what had happened with the end of the Republic, Siena once again seemed willing to trade independence for autonomy, not generically adhering to the appeals of the Risorgimento, but this time backing the Savoia royalty.

The contradas and the Palio

  • 37 Achille Mirizio, I buoni senesi, Brescia, Morcelliana, 1993.
  • 38 Antonio Cardini, Storia di Siena…, op. cit.
  • 39 Duccio Balestracci, Il Palio di Siena. Una festa italiana, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2019.

11After the annexation to the Kingdom of Italy, the patriotic tones used at the commemorative mass for those fallen in the battle of Curtatone and Montanara by Don Carlo Sancasciani in the church of San Domenico on September 16, 1859 were strongly criticized by the legitimist component of the nobility, including the bishop.37 Still, King Vittorio Emanuele II’s April 26, 1860 visit to Siena, organized by the “Committee for the unification of Italy” led by Prof. Bartolomeo Aquarone from the Department of Jurisprudence, was greeted with great enthusiasm.38 The following year the city government decided to shift the date of the July 2 Palio in honour of the Madonna di Provenzano, protector of the city, to June 2, a national holiday marking unification and the Albertine Statute. They also decided to abolish the medieval tradition of the August 15 procession of candles and censers, again in honour of the Madonna. Then, the “long Palio” without jockeys was eliminated, along with the “palio alla tonda” around a race course.39 Behind these prohibitions was the ruling classes’ desire to replace religious rituals with a secular liturgy tied to the nation, in an attempt to “force” an element of modernity.

  • 40 Giacomo Zanibelli (ed.), Il liceo classico di siena, vol. 2, L’archivio storico. Inventario analiti (...)

12There was also an attempt to replace the historical procession with a sort of martial Risorgimento-themed parade. Finally, the image of Mary was removed from the Palio banner and replaced with Siena’s municipal black-and-white “balzana” banner. City residents did not appreciate the change, and in 1863 everything was restored to “normality,” with the exception of the “long Palio,” which was objectively too dangerous, and the procession of candles and censers, which was reintroduced during the Fascist period by Podestà (government-appointed mayor) Fabio Bargagli Petrucci. The most radical element of Siena’s governing class, then, met with firm opposition from the more reactionary and Catholic faction, which was in turn unable to stem the tide of the Risorgimento. It was the more moderate faction that managed to unite religion, monarchy and city autonomy around the contradas and the Palio, fusing small hometown and great homeland. The myth of the “Gothic queen”, then, was solid but sufficiently elastic to bond together moderate liberals, progressives and Catholics, seeking to exclude the extremes of the legitimist right and the revolutionary left. Playing an important role in this, even more so than the university, was the city’s lyceum, established in the old Tolomei religious boarding school, where the meanings of small town and great homeland found common terrain.40 During this period Siena’s contradas (districts or neighborhoods) and their Palio continued to be an important driver, generating a bond between the city’s ruling class and its “little people”, and at the same time reaffirmed Siena as part of the backbone of post-unification Italy.

  • 41 Antonio Zazzeroni, L’araldica delle contrade di Siena, Florence, Scala, 1980; Sergio Ghezzi, “Gli s (...)

13In fact, the tradition was the central element that allowed the city’s ruling coterie or consorteria to maintain its predominance, safeguarding the age-old arrangement of the municipality. The contradas came to be perceived as serving needs of order and stability within the Medieval city walls, in a conservative key. In fact, contrada leadership was in the hands of the city’s grand aristocratic families, i.e. the consorteria, which for centuries had managed day-to-day life amid rituals and traditions. This was the basis of the genesis of the Gothic myth, which had arisen after the loss of independence in defence of the re-feudalization of Sienese territory. The Savoia royal family, which often visited Siena for the Palio, thus donated many of its coats of arms to add to the heraldry represented on the seventeen contradas’ flags.41 It was a sort of symbolic marriage of small hometown and great homeland, in which faithfulness and loyalty were once again offered in exchange for autonomy.

  • 42 Aurora Savelli, “Rievocare l’antica grandezza. Il corteo storico del palio di Siena tra Otto e Nove (...)

14The same emphasis was present in the reshaping and enhancement of the historical parade of costumed participants, an expression of the city’s history that took place before the running of the Palio, costumes for which the city’s ruling class initially intended to model not so much on Siena’s Medieval or modern age, but rather on Piedmontese martial tradition.42 The rhythm of the drums played by the contradas, which they had made their own, calling it the passo della Diana, in fact recalled the drum march of the Savoyard army. The Savoia family, for their part, saw in the Sienese aristocracy a model of subordination to the new reigning dynasty to replicate in the rest of the peninsula, not necessarily perceiving the underlying counterweight of implicit cultural autonomy. However, when moderate/centralist aggregation no longer seemed sufficiently capable of withstanding pressure from the left, the Gothic myth of Siena was appropriated by the nationalists.

From the crisis at the turn of the century to the Great War

A delicate balance between tradition and modernization

  • 43 Antonio Cardini, Al suono della lumaca…, op. cit.
  • 44 Stefano Maggi, Dalla città allo stato nazionale. Ferrovia e modernizzazione a Siena tra Risorgiment (...)

15The 1901-1903 strikes by sharecroppers in Val di Chiana and railway workers in the city were a breaking point.43 Local socialism had given rise to an intense cultural campaign in its publications, seeking to undermine the myth of Gothic Siena and the contradas, which it identified as tools in the hands of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, countering with an unlimited faith in social progress and the class struggle and even requesting the abolition of the Palio.44 The contradas responded by mobilizing to defend themselves from these repeated attacks. In 1893, in the church of San Cristoforo, the priors of the seventeen contradas met to plan a concerted resistance, which entailed the creation of a new representative body, called the Magistrato delle contrade, a furtherance of the Comitato dei priori, which had existed since 1873. For having hosted these meetings in its territory, the contrada of the Civetta was given the honorary title of Priora. Thus the Gothic myth, despite the arrival of the railway in town, was instrumentally used by the city’s ruling class to reinforce the concept of limbo, leveraging imagery perpetuated by foreign visitors to preserve its frameworks.

  • 45 Henry James, Italian hours, London, Heinemann, 1909.
  • 46 Arthur Symons, Cities of Italy, London, J.M. Dent & Co, 1907.
  • 47 Ibid.

16Henry James, describing his visit to the city, recalled that it was “void of any human presence that could figure to me the current year”, to the point that, in the moonlight, he “had half an hour’s infinite vision of Medieval Italy”, since “Siena had maintained the appearances” of the past.45 Siena had been perfectly content to “remain itself”, while other Italian cities, like Florence, Rome and Venice, were being “spoiled” by the “modern spirit”. Florence, although maintaining a reverence for tradition, was subject to the superficiality of the English to whom it had opened its boarding houses, capable of mixing different styles and eras, the Renaissance with the “banality of the modern world.” In Siena, however, every wall “still held the splendour and dignity of the past,” its history everlastingly etched in its stones and its Gothic buildings, so that its Medieval traits were not just physical places, but were in the “character of its people”.46 Religion, too, was “part of its tradition, like the palio”.47

  • 48 Michel Crouzert, Stendhal e il mito dell’Italia, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1991.

17Siena also hosted an English-speaking community of people like Robert Langton Douglas who had chosen it as a second home. But even this community exalted its Medieval purism, sometimes failing to cite the Baroque structure of some of its monuments. In fact, the English community in the city was intellectual, aristocratic and religious, fleeing the modernity of the continent, far removed from the concept of business and the businessman. In Siena, thanks to the ruling class, they had found a bucolic, rural world, uncontaminated by modernization, as pure as the “picturesque” evoked by its landscapes, a reflection of the natural and primitive spirit of its inhabitants, and their full-blooded passion for the Palio was further proof. It was a sort of re-emergence of Stendhal’s “myth of Italy”.48

  • 49 Maurizio Boldrini, Nicola Natili (eds.), Lo sport a Siena. Un secolo di storia, vent’anni di gloria(...)
  • 50 Federico Valacchi, I muscoli della città. Dall’Associazione ginnastica senese alla Mens sana, Siena (...)
  • 51 Duccio Balestracci, Medioevo e Risorgimento. L’invenzione dell’identità italiana nell’Ottocento, Bo (...)

18Moreover, modern sport had not come to Siena via the members of that foreign community, as had been the case in other Italian cities frequented by Anglo-Saxon businessmen, but via young students from the local university.49 Basketball, first introduced in Italy by Professor Ida Nomi Pesciolini of Siena’s Associazione ginnastica Mens Sana in corpore sano via the city’s foreign community was perceived not as a modern sport, but as a female-oriented gymnastic archetype of grace and harmony, once again in the footsteps of tradition.50 In England, according to the Oxford dictionary, basketball was considered a gymnastic discipline for young girls. Thus a sort of ideal bridge between the Middle Ages and the Risorgimento was being created, a point of connection for the structuring of an Italian national identity.51

Aesthetic nationalism: art and nation

  • 52 Carlotta Sorba, Il melodramma della nazione. Politica e sentimenti nell’Italia del Risorgimento, Ro (...)

19Unlike the climate of the old regime, in which classicism had achieved central cultural importance, during the Risorgimento there was a positive revisitation of the Middle Ages as the basis of the idea of the Italian nation. Across the continent, the idea of the Middle Ages had waxed and waned, passing from a negative perception as an interlude between classical antiquity and the Enlightenment reflowering of the modern age, to a re-evaluation in the wake of Romanticism as a solid foundation for national myths. For Italy, however, the Medieval must have been a sort of redemption, due to the absence of a unifying history in the modern age that would link it with the Risorgimento. The role of the Middle Ages, then, as a cultural topos, took on different values, even within the Risorgimento and post-unification cultural tradition, as the use of the theatre and relative thematic settings testify.52

  • 53 Duccio Balestracci, Medioevo e Risorgimento..., op. cit.; Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Maurizio Degl'Innoce (...)
  • 54 Attilio Brilli, Siena, una regina gotica…, op. cit, p. 51.

20In Siena, on the contrary, the Gothic myth inherited from foreigners at the end of the 19th century had become a conscious basis from which to deal with the challenges of the new century, preserving the city’s age-old tradition in the face of changes that seem imposed by modernization. In the wake of the celebratory myth of the heroes of the Risorgimento, painting in Siena had taken cues from themes pertaining to the city’s municipal past, linking the Middle Ages and the Risorgimento in part through a stylistic continuity, as in, for example, Pietro Aldi’s painting Le ultime ore della libertà senese.53 In terms of the nationalization of the middle classes, Siena’s aristocratic class implemented a peculiar cultural operation at the beginning of the century, attempting to unite the middle classes and the nobility in defense of the order that was being challenged by the red wave. In fact, Siena made a key contribution to the birth of Italian nationalism in its aesthetic-literary-magazines phase. Not coincidentally, French nationalist Maurice Barrès saw in Siena an element of profound emotional stimulation springing from its art, in particular in the work of the painter Il Sodoma.54

  • 55 Enrico Corradini, “La virtù nazionale”, Il Regno, II-6, 5th February 1905, republished in Lucia Str (...)
  • 56 Carlotta Sorba, Teatri. L’Italia del melodramma nell’età del Risorgimento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001
  • 57 Special issue “Siena e i Rozzi nel Risorgimento” of Accademia dei Rozzi, XVIII-34, 2011.
  • 58 Enrico Corradini, “La virtù nazionale”, art. cited.
  • 59 William Heywood, Our Lady of August and the Palio of Siena, Siena, Enrico Torrini Publisher, 1899.

21In 1905, Enrico Corradini, recalling a stay in the city on March 18, 1895 for the performance of his theatre piece Dopo la morte, staged at Siena’s Teatro dei Rozzi, wrote that he found himself “one evening… in a Tuscan town all in stone and wrought iron… that has somehow come through dissonant and violent centuries like the refined and strong work of a single artist”.55 His visit to the city was, not coincidentally, linked to a theatrical event; the theatre played an important role in sociability in Siena, as in the rest of Italy.56 Teatro dei Rozzi was also tied to the homonymous Academy, an important and vital fulcrum of the city’s cultural sphere around which part of the upper- and middle-class citizenry revolved, and was thus a natural auditorium for Corradini’s writings and discourses.57 Siena had made an impression on him because it had “in every valley a fountain of spring water for the humble needs of its people, and on every hill a church for its faith… like a helmsman standing in the prow… and before us, this view of the countryside below the city, of vineyards, olive groves and woods...like an observatory for the contemplation of nature”.58 Some of the distinctive traits of what had contributed to forging the myth of Siena over the centuries emerged here again. Foremost among them was nature uncontaminated by modernity, in which the bucolic world of the old regime seemed to have resisted the march of time. And along with this, civic values, the expression of the municipality, jealously preserved within the Medieval ring wall, which was no longer a physical defense for the city, but rather an identitary feature. And finally, the role of religion as a binding force and ethical-political guide for the community, anchored in traditions of the past. William Heywood also identified Siena as an archetype of Italian values, which remained just as they were in the Middle Ages, uncontaminated by the experience of the modern state.59 At the beginning of the new century, an apparent generational division led part of the city’s ruling class to look to the rising sensitivity towards conservation of the city’s cultural and artistic heritage as a means of fostering its municipal identity in a political and economic key as a response to Maximalist socialism, and also as a means of overcoming the reform-oriented liberalism embodied by Giolitti, which was considered inadequate.

  • 60 Consider La Vedetta Senese, VIII-67, 21st March 1904.
  • 61 Archivio Bargagli Petrucci, Letter of Pier Luigi Occhini to Fabio Bargagli Petrucci, Arezzo, 10th D (...)
  • 62 Marco Falorni, Arte cultura e politica a Siena nel primo Novecento. Fabio Bargagli Petrucci (1875-1 (...)
  • 63 Giuliano Catoni, Il fiero podestà. Fabio Bargagli Petrucci e il patrimonio di Siena, Siena, Protago (...)

22On April 17, 1904, at Siena’s City Hall, in the presence of King Vittorio Emanuele III and Minister of Public Education Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, the exhibition Arte antica senese was inaugurated, with the support of Fabio Bargagli Petrucci and Count Fabio Chigi. All of the city’s highest offices had participated in the exhibition organization, from Mayor Alessandro Lisini, to the prefect Gandin, to the president of the executive committee Enrico Crocini, as well as the Società senese degli amici dei monumenti, led by Bargagli Petrucci.60 This latter group had been formed for the purpose of “convincing Sienese and non-Sienese that all of Siena is a museum”.61 The previous year, 1903, Bargagli Petrucci had sought to involve Count Fabio Chigi in financing Corradini’s new magazine Il Regno. Writing in the columns of Corradini’s magazine, Bargagli Petrucci devoted ample space to the exhibition, part of which was even taken to London and shown at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, thanks to Sir Robert Langton Douglas.62 Corradini had given Bargagli Petrucci the meaningful title of proconsul of the magazine Il Regno, with the task of sensitizing the Sienese citizenry to nationalist culture.63

  • 64 Bruna Talluri, “La svolta del Novecento e il giornalismo senese”, Bullettino senese di storia patri (...)
  • 65 Livio Livi, “Sperperi proletari, restrizioni borghesi”, La riforma sociale, 28, 1921, p. 168-175; G (...)
  • 66 Federigo Tozzi, Con gli occhi chiusi, Milan, Treves, 1919; id., Le tre croci, Milan, Treves, 1920; (...)
  • 67 Domenico Giuliotti, Federigo Tozzi, “La nostra fede”, La Torre, 1, 6th November 1913; Luigi Giorgi, (...)

23However, for the neo-proconsul, art could not and should not be a mere defense of the past and negation of modernity. Indeed, Bargagli Petrucci thought that the cultural sphere should aim to use tradition as an instrument to steer a route through the challenges of modernization, safeguarding the identity that was the fruit of the idea of the “Gothic queen.” He thus distanced himself from mere reactionism in defense of the ancien régime, which was expressed by the rival periodical La Lizza, published in Siena at the beginning of the new century, with explicit reference to “Sienese-ness” and the relative defense of its interests.64 Bargali Petrucci, on the contrary, contributed to another local paper, Il Solco, which focused on matters more of economics than of culture, defending the sharecropping system as a milieu of moderation.65 Siena was a rural town marked by significant social rifts – anything but a bucolic limbo. In fact, the novels of Federigo Tozzi, which described Siena as immersed in a timeless non-place where “the countryside was of an unending vastness…in that almost taciturn but sweet silence... it gathered everything into it”, almost as if wanting to preserve its identity, actually depicted the brutal, harsh nature of a rural world that was far from idyllic.66 Tozzi and Domenico Giuliotti were the founders of the periodical La Torre, and in the first issue the writer asserted his Catholic faith and reactionary nature against Futurism’s progress and upheaval.67

The basis of the neo-liberty

  • 68 Ibid.
  • 69 Gianni Mazzoni (ed.), Federico Icilio Joni. Le memorie di un pittore di quadri antichi, Siena, Prot (...)

24In the background, then, supporting a new and different political vision, there was a profound and deeply-rooted cultural movement, varied, as was nationalism in its nascence, but sharing the same desire to celebrate the myth of the Gothic queen as the essential basis of the city’s identity in the face of the threats and challenges of modernization. Siena became a natural laboratory of nostalgia, in which art and purism wound up becoming points of contact between the Middle Ages and the nation-state, the first piece of an identity with a profound political and ideological value tied to the present, apparently merely artistic, but drawing legitimization from the art of the past.68 Federico Icilio Joni and the “artistic fakes” moved along the same lines.69 Indeed, for Bargagli Petrucci, recognition of the city’s true nature as a museum was not to be considered an ultimate end point, but rather an essential step towards creating a new cultural model of national heritage, as exemplified by his desire to establish in town an artistic and fine arts school.

  • 70 Duccio Balestracci, Medioevo e Risorgimento..., op. cit.
  • 71 Ibid.
  • 72 Alessandro Falassi, Giuliano Catoni (eds.), Palio, op. cit.

25In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, construction in the city was heavily influenced by Medieval architectural style to harmonize with the city and its identity, excluding any hint of innovation or modernity, as the Monte dei Paschi bank building designed by Sienese architect Giuseppe Partini demonstrates.70 Neither Purism nor Art Nouveau altered the face of the city, but harmonized with its Gothic style.71 Even the Palio was influenced by the link between the Middle Ages and the Risorgimento, emphasizing a revisitation of the past as the visual basis of the city’s identity through the use of historical costumes, as mentioned above.72 Thus, in a contrived but conscious way, an artificial recuperation and revisitation of the past was used as a bulwark to safeguard the present. The culinary and gastronomic arts moved in the same direction, as with the rollout of the myth of the typical Sienese sweet of Medieval origin, panforte, re-proposed by a venerable family of Sienese pharmacists, the Parenti clan, one of the members of which, Francesco, had taken part in the 1848 battle of Curtatone and Montanara at the age of seventeen.

  • 73 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge Universit (...)
  • 74 Antonio Cardini, Storia di Siena…, op. cit.

26The Palio and the contradas, which had always been custodians of tradition, in the hands of the city’s nobility were an instrument of contact and intermingling of small hometown and great homeland after the Risorgimento. The most conservative aristocratic, upper-middle-class component prevailed and had an almost exclusive monopoly, tying its own fate to a Risorgimento-post-unification Savoy framework, seeing the crown as a guarantee against excessive modernization, in opposition first to the to the Mazzinian-Republican fringe, and then the rising tide of socialism. The Gothic myth thus became a conscious means by which the city safeguarded its identity. But, unlike in the past when it had been a reactionary tool, the new Sienese ruling class viewed tradition as a means to guide a moderate social modernization without undermining the city’s age-old frameworks. In fact, the ruling class used the associationism of the contradas as an alternative to political associationism, in a form of pauperistic paternalism. The Palio as a circus, the highest expression of a revisitation of the principle of panem et circenses – bread and circuses –, served to release social and economic tensions within the old city walls, excluding the countryside and the rural masses. This explains why social issues in the city were always brought up from a left-leaning, reformist point of view, as opposed to the maximalism that reigned in the surrounding countryside. In the contradas, it was expressly prohibited to discuss politics. The Palio was a sort of double semel in anno licet insanire, by which to both convey and anesthetize discontent in the name of a shared identity that tied the nobility and the “little people” together. It was somewhat similar to what the English did with football, to assuage the cleavages of the industrial revolution.73 But in Siena it had been done in the name of tradition, and against industrialization. Siena was a poor city at the time, with significant economic and social problems.74 But while the old ruling class intended simply to maintain the status quo, the Sienese nationalists intended to try to associate order and stability with progress, linking tradition and modernization, forgoing industrialization but not development, in a top-down movement with authoritarian leadership.

  • 75 Edwin Howland Blashfield, Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, “Una regina gotica”, in Attilio Brilli, Si (...)
  • 76 Ibid.
  • 77 Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Alla ricerca del “vino Perfetto”. Il Chianti del barone di Brolio. Il risorgim (...)

27For foreigners, on the other hand, Siena and Italian things had a value of which the Gothic myth was the bearer, an example of anti-modernization and “natural” character that had outlasted the centuries and the process of civilization of which it was an expression. Siena continued to be perceived as “Gothic, not only in her outward appearance but in her spirit, in her ideals and in her art; Gothic in her triple aspect of warrior, saint and sybarite”. The Sienese were deaf to any suggestion of cultural rejuvenation, defending its own idealized Gothic Middle Age. When, just before the defeat of 1555, the city opened its gates to Pinturicchio, il Sodoma and il Rossellino, “it was too late” – the “creative capacity of the mighty impulse was exhausted,” to the point that the city produced no more “great artists” in the sixteenth century.75 Hewlett, recalling the judgment of the Sienese doled out by Dante, who had called them “so vain a people,” interpreted Sienese Gothic as an encapsulation of defeat and haughty pride, given that the people of Siena, “like the Celts,” had gone to war and returned defeated every time.76 This was one of the reasons Baron Bettino Ricasoli, while owning lands near Siena, had always been more connected to Florence.77

  • 78 Saverio Battente, “Fondazione e sviluppo dell’Istituto Siero e Vaccino Produttore Sclavo”, in Stefa (...)

28In the scientific sphere, on the other hand, Siena became fertile ground in the figure of Achille Sclavo and the idea that tradition must be a solid base for progress and change – not political, but social and economic. The scientist from Siena’s university was perhaps the only example of industrial entrepreneurship that flourished in the city in the pharmaceutical and vaccines sector.78 But for Sclavo, in keeping with his principles as a health professional, the economic aspect was secondary and subsidiary to the health and social aspects. The company’s activity was also linked from the outset to the Palio and bound together with tradition, as it donated parade horses that had been used for experiments to the historical parade, including the celebrated pair Eurialo and Niso, with clearly classicizing names. Moreover, although Sclavo was not Sienese, his heirs became important leaders of the Nicchio and Oca contradas, clear evidence of the osmosis between the Sclavo family heritage and the city’s tradition and identity.

29On the eve of the first World War, the city seemed ready to fuse small town and great homeland based on its cultural identity, playing a visible and original role. The social, economic and political tensions triggered in the early post-war period ended up emphasizing the importance of culture as a guarantee of the stability of the city’s identity.

Change and continuity during the Fascist decades

Traditional elite and Fascist party officials

  • 79 Antonio Cardini, Storia di Siena…, op. cit.; Saverio Battente, “La grande guerra a Siena e la sua c (...)
  • 80 Saverio Battente, “Dalla periferia al centro: la classe dirigente a Siena tra nazionalismo e fascis (...)
  • 81 Saverio Battente, “The ‘Gothic Queen’: the Myth of Siena in the 19th and 20th Centuries”, in Santa (...)

30The “red biennial” had once again shaken the city’s age-old political frameworks.79 But this time, nationalism alone did not seem capable of containing the maximalist wave in the countryside, opening a path for Sienese agricultural landowners to make recourse to Fascist squadrismo.80 However, unlike in the case of the Savoys, the Sienese consorteria had no intention of embracing the Fascist movement, fearing its extremism. Nationalist culture in Siena was thus the basis through which to attempt on the part of some of the city’s old ruling class to ideologically capture Mussolini’s movement in the name of an in defense of the small hometown. Once again, the myth of the Gothic queen was the instrument that would guarantee a high degree of autonomy.81

  • 82 Giuliano Catoni, Il fiero podestà…, op. cit.
  • 83 Saverio Battente, “L’associazionismo di contrada a Siena tra secolo lungo e secolo breve”, Rassegna (...)

31Immediately after the March on Rome, Podestà Fabio Bargagli Petrucci, in keeping with the tradition that had begun at the turn of the century, continued to build Siena’s Gothic identity, amid the general cultural ferment of early aesthetic nationalism.82 The contradas and the Palio again played an existential role: this time, the exclusive social nature served the city’s consorteria as a means to control attempts by squadrist bosses to penetrate into the fabric of the city. In fact, despite the Fascistization of all types of groups and associations, the contradas managed to remain exempt in a sense, without being broken up or prohibited, in the name of their historically apolitical nature. Recreational groups that were offshoots of the contradas suffered a different fate, however, and were sucked into the web of the Fascist Dopolavoro leisure and recreation organization.83

  • 84 Stefano Cavazza, “Il Palio e le tradizioni popolari senesi durante il fascismo”, in Alessandro Orla (...)
  • 85 Aurora Savelli, Siena. Il popolo e le contrade, Florence, Olschki, 2009; D. Medina Lasansky, The Re (...)

32In all of this, the Sienese ruling class found a relatively centrist support in Mussolini himself, who wanted to control the more extreme elements of the regime. In fact, in that period Siena’s governing establishment had pushed for the creation of a true piccola patria construction process, through a sort of contrada-building fused with the sacred liturgy of the nation introduced by the regime.84 The process was driven from above, with institutions playing active roles. The Municipality took over the task of organizing the Palio, intended as a celebration of the contradas. The contradas became a tool in the hands of the city’s governing class, reinforcing a municipal identity and at the same time serving as a means to glorify national greatness through a rereading of the country’s history. The difference between Siena’s Palio and other folk festivals revisited by Fascism lay specifically in the presence of the contradas.85 Their folklore was not a matter of a purposefully resuscitated artificial element, but rather a vital anthropological and identitary element that had endured over the centuries with the contradas as its custodians. The erudite educated class began to publish writings on the contrada and the Palio with the aim of legitimizing the city’s identity, with the Sienese aristocracy financing these scholarly studies. At the same time, in keeping with the sensibility created by early nationalism towards Siena’s artistic and cultural heritage revolving in particular around the magazine Il Regno, there was a widespread increase in attention to the rediscovery and appreciation of the assets of the seventeen contradas. Each contrada chose a church in its territory as its official site for worship and liturgy, connected to a given patron saint and protector.

  • 86 Gerald Parsons, The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena: A Study in Civil Religion, London, Routledge, (...)

33The cult of Saint Catherine of Siena fit within this context; the Saint was not only the patron of the Oca and Drago contradas, she had also been canonized by Pius II, the Sienese humanist Pope Enea Silvio Piccolomini, in 1461. So for centuries her ties to the city worked in concert with her vocation as a guardian of the sacredness of the church in the name of a tradition espoused by an old-regime world that included the myth of the Gothic queen.86 During the Risorgimento period, the more reactionary component of the Sienese ruling class had used the myth of the saint as a sort of Sanfedista shield against any sort of unification and modernization. It was not coincidental that in 1866, Pope Pius IX named her a Patron of Rome, which was not yet the capital of Italy. On the contrary, despite Catherine’s roots in the city, the major patron saint of Siena was Sant’Ansano. In fact, as long as the rift between the Holy See and the Italian government existed, she was a bit too troublesome to be a public representative of the city, and was relegated to the religious sphere. The lack of emphasis of her Sienese ties was intentional on the part of the consorteria, and the reason lay in their expressed loyalty to the Savoia royal family, in conflict with anti-unification clericalism.

  • 87 Alan Dundes, Alessandro Falassi, La terra in Piazza. An interpretation of the Palio of Siena, Berke (...)
  • 88 Giuliano Catoni, Paolo Leoncini (eds), Alla Grande Guerra in automobile: diario e fotografie 1915-1 (...)

34The contradas, on the other hand, emphasized their close ties with the old arts and crafts guilds and Medieval military companies. Each contrada created a museum to hold artworks and memorabilia from throughout its history. During the Fascist period, each contrada wrote its own hymn which, combined with one composed by maestro Pietro Formichi at the end of the 19th century for the Palio march, encapsulated the identity of the small town, to be juxtaposed with national identity.87 A sacred liturgy linked to a secular, profane world was intentionally and artificially created to bind the citizenry together through seventeen distinct identities summed up in the motto “rivals in the field, sisters in life”. Leadership of the contradas remained firmly in the hands of the city’s main aristocratic families. One aristocrat in particular had a central role in developing a renewed Gothic myth for the city as a basis for autonomy from the Fascist regime and from modernization: Count Guido Chigi Saracini, patron of the arts and founder of the Chigiana Musical Academy. The palazzo in which the Academy was located was renovated in neo-Gothic style. In any case, music was an important means of ensuring the city’s cultural development and growth.88 Count Chigi’s academy was in fact part of a larger project conceived by Bargagli Petrucci in which culture and tourism would meld with the city’s rural sharecropping roots, rejecting any hint of industrial elements, as a guarantee of stability and order and in defense of its age-old social framework.

  • 89 Saverio Battente, “La Federazione delle federazioni tra centro e periferia: il Coni tra Roma e Sien (...)
  • 90 “La pallonata senese”, La Vedetta Senese, 18th August 1904; La Domenica del Corriere, 35, 29th Augu (...)

35Alongside the contradas, the contrada associations regained momentum; established in the late 19th century for philanthropical purposes to paternalistically tamp down advancing socialist ideas, they were now incorporated into Fascism’s control over leisure activities, bringing tradition and progress together. In the provinces, sport served the regime’s aim to contrast ties with the city’s old contrada- and Palio-focused consorteria. Although sport did manage to grow in importance during the Fascist decades, it was never able to replace the Gothic queen’s sense of identity, and in fact was eventually swallowed up by it.89 Following the unenthusiastic response to the re-enactment of the Medieval game of pallonata senese in 1908, to which the citizenry preferred football, Fascism attempted to promote the local provincial-level team at the national level in order to infiltrate the fabric of the city, given that it had failed to penetrate via the contradas.90 But although modern, sport remained linked with, rather than being an antagonist of, the world of the contradas.

  • 91 Saverio Battente, “Dalla periferia al centro…”, art. cited.
  • 92 “Saluto”, Il Selvaggio, 1, 13th July 1924; Bernardina Sani, “Mino Maccari”, in Baccio Baccetti (ed. (...)
  • 93 Mino Maccari, “Squadrismo”, Il Selvaggio, 1, 13th July 1924; id., “I selvaggi del fascismo: gli squ (...)

36Unlike in the post-unification period, in the Fascist years Bargagli Petrucci, as Podestà, lent great importance to the historical parade that preceded the Palio, making it harken back to the city’s Medieval glories. Just as during the long century the myth of the Gothic queen had been employed by the city’s ruling class to maintain its hegemony, after the Great War and with the advent of Fascism, the small-town identity forged by the development of a cultural legacy was used by the old Sienese consorteria. While having supported Fascism as a necessary anti-socialist tool, the coterie had no intention of giving up its hegemony, which continued to favor the new ruling class that had arisen based on generational, ideological and cultural criteria, although it was of Fascist extraction.91 In the first issue of the magazine Il Selvaggio, the editors declared themselves hostile to socialism, liberalism and democratic clericalism, identifying squadrismo as the new force capable of regenerating Italian virtues.92 Fascism, according to Mino Maccari, would forge a new national identity to replace that of the liberal Italy espoused by the book Cuore.93

  • 94 Saverio Battente, “Piccola e grande patria nel processo di costruzione dello Stato nazione: il caso (...)

37Thus, squadrismo, with its action-oriented organization, sought to drive a wedge into the city and take control of it. Most of the early squadristi were not Sienese, but came from surrounding towns, or from further away, and had come to the city to study at the university. The few Sienese involved had a more radical than conservative vision.94 Unlike with nationalism, association was merely instrumental, and was not based on cultural, political or ideological affiliation between the Sienese aristocracy and early Fascism. In fact, the Sienese consorteria sought to block interference on the part of local squadrista leaders who saw their rapid ascent in the province as a springboard, and put pressure on Mussolini to assert his unquestioned primacy. They again found that the proper expedient was the myth of the small hometown. In fact, Fascism, although it had managed to slip its black shirt onto the city, was never able to penetrate into its social, anthropological and cultural fabric, thanks to resistance on the part of the contradas. The regime tried unsuccessfully to take away, for example, the “Imperial” title bestowed on the Giraffa contrada for their victory in the Palio of the Empire. But contrada associations and groups did feel the effects of Fascism more, as when the Torre contrada’s Società l’Elefante was dedicated to Italo Balbo. The contradas’ social groups in fact had more of a lower-middle-class connotation, while the contradas themselves were held firmly in the hands of the aristocracy.

The nationalization of the Palio

  • 95 Duccio Balestracci, Il Palio di Siena…, op. cit.
  • 96 Aurora Savelli, “Hitler a Firenze (9 maggio 1938): alcune note sulla partecipazione senese”, in Pao (...)

38The Sienese nobility – not out of any antifascist spirit, but due to a jealous grip on its own autonomy – intended to resist any outside interference. The Palio was proclaimed a “national festival,” making it the only folkloristic festival that could boast the designation.95 Mussolini’s decision on this, widely supported by the Sienese governing class, was dictated by the desire to prevent the rise of provincial squadrista leaders in town. In that sense, Siena was in a particularly delicate and perilous situation due to the presence of Monte dei Paschi bank, control of which through the local city Deputation could have provided important resources had it been taken to the national level. Significantly, however, Mussolini, unlike the Savoia royals, never came to Siena for the Palio. Many contradas could boast of illustrious officials of the regime among their protectors: Il Duce himself for Drago, Italo Balbo for Torre, as mentioned above, Edda Ciano for Onda. But at the same time, although without casting doubt on their loyalty to the now-Fascist state, their ties with the monarchy were stronger than ever. There were, obviously, local Fascists in the contradas, but they never challenged the myth of the Gothic queen and all it entailed. In May of 1938, the contradas sent their costumed re-enactors to Florence to render homage to Hitler, who was passing through with Mussolini; it was exemplary of an identitary ostentation that used culture as protection from excessive interference, steadfast in its conservativism.96

39There were some cases of hostility toward the regime among the popolino – the “little people” – of the contradas, but the aristocracy was able to maintain a balance between autonomy and loyalty to the regime, avoiding ideological agitation that might have undermined the city’s sense of culture. Count Chigi summed it up well in his appeal to the tradition of apoliticality of the contradas, which meant loyalty to the regime but autonomy on one hand, and Fascism’s protection from socialist excesses should the need arise. Siena’s consorteria was divided, however, between proponents of the growth of the city’s bank, led by Alfredo Bruchi, with control maintained locally, and those who, like Bargagli Petrucci, preferred a provincial dimension with a more rural focus. The former won out, thanks to support from Mussolini, putting an end to Bargagli Petrucci’s time in office, but not his cultural project as the basis for the city’s identity in the face of the challenges of modernization. Fascism tried the cultural route as well, introducing modern artistic movements to the town in hopes of a modernist revisitation of Palio tradition – Futurism creeping up on the contradas, a sort of oxymoron. But once again, the contradas maintained their impermeability. It was the tenacity of a model that had charmed Richard Wagner during his stay in Siena in 1880, the uncontaminated originality of the city offering cues for the staging of his Persifal.

  • 97 La Balzana, 1, 1946.

40With the collapse of the Fascist regime and the end of the Second World War, the myth of the Gothic queen was once again brought into play to protect the city from excessive external cultural and political interference on the part of the new mass political parties. The Church, which took up Siena’s conservationist cause, did not have the numbers to compete, via the Christian Democrats, with the Socialist and Communist parties, but thanks to support from the contradas, it gained control of the city’s funding pot through the Deputation of the bank, leaving leadership of the municipal government to the leftist parties. However, the left itself realized that in order to govern Siena, it had to begin by respecting its traditions. The first issue of the city’s periodical La Balzana in fact reiterated the importance of defending the city’s tradition based on the long history of the contradas.97 This was a reversal of the late-19th-century socialist position favoring the suppression of what it considered an obscurantist celebration, as writings in the columns of La Martinella testified, putting a damper on maximalism in the province.

  • 98 Saverio Battente, “‘La regina gotica’: viaggio e soggiorno a Siena. Dalla Francigena al Grand tour (...)

41Thus a process of cultural legacy-building resumed, with which Siena not only entered the Republic, but opened up to a globalizing world at what seemed the beginning of a golden age, without losing its distinctive nature, strong in its long-standing traditions. After their confirmation as an identitary tool for the safeguarding of the city, the contradas and the Palio also indirectly provided a vehicle for economic development linked to tourism, continuing along the path laid out with the nationalists under Bargagli Petrucci.98 The ruling class was no longer the aristocratic elite, which had fallen on harder times with the end of the sharecropping system, but the nascent middle class that had grown out of the tertiarization resulting from the end of that same system. This new governing class in any case was substantially in continuity with the old consorteria, and had already taken over control of the contradas, co-opting the local working-class leadership as well. Thus culture continued to be a constantly-renewed binding force in the city, blending modernity and tradition.

Conclusion

42The myth of the Gothic queen was the result of a conscious process of municipal identity building carried forth by Siena’s ruling class, which focused on a revisitation of the Medieval “Golden Age” of the Republic of Siena as a means to preserve its autonomy since the time of the Renaissance-era crisis that culminated in the loss of independence even as the city was entering the modern age. By choice, Siena remained in the temporal-spatial limbo of its jealously-guarded identity until the great revolutions of the long century. The process of the myth’s construction had been structured as a two-pronged cultural program by the Sienese consorteria: on the one hand, exploiting Europe’s Grand Tour sensibility towards Italian culture, offering many illustrious foreign visitors the artificial image of a revisited Middle Ages held up as an emblem of purity uncontaminated by modernity; and on the other, using the contradas and their anthropology – a living expression of the Medieval era – as a means to control Sienese society from within, leaving it anchored to a rural old-regime model revisited in a bucolic key through exaltation of the sharecropping system.

43Far from unravelling in the face of new challenges brought by modernization during the 19th century, this identitary cultural construction was able to adapt to the changing context and remain an effective instrument, in the hands of the city’s ruling class, of modernization springing from tradition. In other words, the small hometown of Siena managed to graft itself onto the Italian nation-state, preserving its nature and even influencing Italian identity as a whole, to some degree. The contradas and the Palio were held up as public subjects of the municipality while maintaining a private nature, thus uniting the great Siena with the great Italy. This process traversed the Risorgimento, the liberal age, the Fascist period and finally the Republican era, and Sienese-ness maintained an equal and autonomous centrality throughout the various ideological phases of Italian history.

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Notes

1 Saverio Battente, “Nation and state building in Italy: historiographical interpretations. Unification to fascism”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 5-3, 2000, p. 310-321; id., “Nation and state building in Italy: historiographical interpretations. From Fascism to Republic”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 6-1, 2001, p. 94-105.

2 Rosario Romeo, Italia mille anni, Milan, Mondadori, 1981; Giovanni Spadolini (ed.), Nazione e nazionalità in Italia, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1994; Ernesto Galli Della Loggia, L’identità italiana, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2010.

3 Marco Fincardi, Maurizio Ridolfi (eds.), “Le trasformazioni della festa Secolarizzazione, politicizzazione e sociabilità nel XIX secolo (Francia, Italia, Spagna)”, special issue of Memoria e Ricerca. Rivista di storia contemporanea, 5, 1995; Stefano Cavazza, Reinhard Johler (eds.), Identità e culture regionali”, special issue of Memoria e Ricerca. Rivista di storia contemporanea, 6, 1995; Marco Fincardi, Simonetta Soldani (eds.),Soggiorni culturali e di piacere. Viaggiatori stranieri nell’Italia dell’Ottocento”, special issue of Memoria e Ricerca. Rivista di storia contemporanea, 46, 2014.

4 Ilaria Porciani, La festa della nazione, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1987; Stefano Cavazza, Piccole patrie. Feste popolari tra regione e nazione il fascismo, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003; Maurizio Ridolfi, Le feste nazionali, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2012.

5 Raffaele Romanelli, Il comando impossibile. Stato e società nell’Italia liberale, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1989; Jürgen Kocka (ed.), Borghesie europee dell’Ottocento, Venice, Marsilio, 1989; Pierangelo Schiera, Marco Meriggi (eds.), Dalla città alla nazione. Borghesie in Italia e in Germania, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1991; Silvio Lanaro, Nazione e lavoro. Saggio sulla cultura borghese in Italia, Venice, Marsilio, 1979; Simone Neri Serneri, Classe partito nazione. Alle origini della democrazia italiana, Manduria, Lacaita, 1995.

6 Antonio Cardini, Il grande centro. I liberali in una nazione senza stato: il problema storico dell’arretratezza politica in Italia, Manduria, Lacaita, 1996; Alberto Mario Banti, Storia della borghesia italiana. L’età liberale, Rome, Donzelli, 1996; Raffaele Romanelli (ed.), Storia dello stato italiano dall’Unità ad oggi, Rome, Donzelli, 1996; Emilio Gentile, La grande Italia, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2011.

7 Mario Insenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria, 3 vol., Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1996-2010.

8 Antonio Cardini, Storia di Siena dal Risorgimento al Miracolo economico, Florence, Nerbini, 2009.

9 Consider the series “Storia delle città italiane” published by Laterza (Rome-Bari) or the series “Storia delle città” published by Edizioni biblioteca dell’immagine (Pordenone).

10 Mauro Barzanti, Giuliano Catoni, Mario De Gregorio (eds.), Storia di Siena, 3 vol., Siena, Alsaba, 1995-1997.

11 Ibid.

12 Mario Ascheri, Storia di Siena, Pordenone, Ebi, 2013; id., Il rinascimento a Siena, Siena, Cantagalli, 1990; Giuseppe Chironi, “Nascita della Signoria e resistenze oligarchiche a Siena, l’opposizione di Niccolò Borghesi a Pandolfo Petrucci (1498-1500)”, in La Toscana al tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico, Pisa, Pacini, 1996, p. 1173-1196; David Hicks, “The sienese oligarchy and the rise of Pandolfo Petrucci, 1487-97”, ivi, p. 1051-1072.

13 Peter Burke, Il Rinascimento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001; Alberto Tenenti, L’età moderna, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1997; Eugenio Garin, L’uomo del Rinascimento, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2000.

14 Attilio Brilli, Siena, una regina gotica. L’occhio del viaggiatore 1870-1935, Città di Castello, Banco Popolare dell’Etruria e del Lazio, 1997, p. 10.

15 Id., Viaggiatori stranieri in terra di Siena, Milan, De Luca, 1986.

16 Id., Siena, una regina gotica…, op. cit.; Giuliano Catoni, “Siena nell’Ottocento. Un limbo come valore”, in Carlo Sisi, Ettore Spalletti (eds.), La cultura artistica a Siena nell’Ottocento, Milan, Silvana Ed., 1994, p. 9-53.

17 Ernesto Sestan, “Siena avanti Monteaperti”, Bullettino senese di storia patria, LXVII, 1961, p. 28-74; Renato Stopani, La via Francigena in Toscana. Storia di una strada medioevale, Florence, Salimbeni, 1984; id., (ed.), La via Francigena nel senese. Storia e territorio, Florence, Salimbeni, 1985; Franco Venturi, L’Italia fuori d’Italia, Turin, Einaudi, 1973; Fernand Braudel, L’Italia fuori d’Italia.Due secoli e tre Italie, Turin, Einaudi, 1974.

18 Mario Barzanti, Giuliano Catoni, Mario De Gregorio (eds.), Storia di Siena…, op. cit.

19 Charles de Brosses, Lettres familières écrites d’Italie à quelques amis, en 1739 et 1740, Paris, Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1858.

20 Jean Pierre Grosley, Observations sur l’Italie et les italiens, donnés en 1764, sous le nom de deux gentilhommes suédois, London, 1770.

21 James Boswell, Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France 1765-1766, London, Heinemann, 1955.

22 Giuliano Catoni, Il Monte dei Paschi di Siena nei due secoli della Deputazione amministratrice (1786-1986), Siena, Monte dei Paschi, 1986; id., “Dimenticar la francese”, in Prodromo alla nuova enciclopedia italiana, Siena, Monte dei Paschi, 1989, p. 9-17.

23 GabrieleTuri, Viva Maria. La reazione alle riforme leopoldine (1790-1799), Florence, Olschki, 1969.

24 Giuliano Catoni, “Siena nell’Ottocento. Un limbo come valore”, art. cited.

25 Giuliano Catoni, “Sviluppo e università nella Siena dei lumi”, Studi senesi, XCI, 1979, p 92-116.

26 Ibid.

27 Id., Il Monte de paschi di Siena…, op. cit.

28 Id., “Dimenticar la francese…”, art. cited.

29 Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on antiquities, arts, and letters during an excursion in Italy in the years 1802 and 1803, London, Cadell and Davies, 1813.

30 Maurice Aymard, “La fragilità di un’economia avanzata: l’Italia e le trasformazioni dell’economia”, in Ruggiero Romano (ed.), Storia dell’economia italiana, vol. 2, L’età moderna. Verso la crisi, Turin, Einaudi, 1991, p. 5-137.

31 Franco Venturi, “Nota introduttiva a Sallustio Bandini”, in id. (ed.), Illuministi italiani, vol. 3, Riformatori lombardi, piemontesi e toscani, Milan-Naples, Ricciardi, 1958, p. 881-894; Mario Mirri, “Per una ricerca sui rapporti fra ‘economisti’ e riformatori toscani. L’abate Niccoli a Parigi”, Annali dell’Istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, II, 1960, p. 55-120.

32 Ferdinando Adorno, Accademie ed istituzioni culturali in Toscana, Florence, Olschki, 1988.

33 Antonio Cardini, Al suono della lumaca. I mezzadri nel primo Novecento, Manduria, Lacaita, 2004; Letizia Pagliai, Francesca Sofia (eds.), Sismondi e il suo tempo, Florence, Polistampa, 2011.

34 Giuliano Catoni, Un treno per Siena, Siena, Accademia degli Intronati, 1981.

35 Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Maurizio Degl’Innocenti, La città nostra, Siena, Protagon, 2011.

36 Giuliano Catoni, I goliardi senesi e il risorgimento dalla guerra del Quarantotto al monumento del Novantatré, Siena, Università degli Studi di Siena, 1993; L’Università degli studi di Siena, 750 anni di storia, Siena, Monte dei Paschi, 1991; Donatella Cherubini, Stampa periodica ed università nel Risorgimento. Giornali e giornalisti a Siena, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2014.

37 Achille Mirizio, I buoni senesi, Brescia, Morcelliana, 1993.

38 Antonio Cardini, Storia di Siena…, op. cit.

39 Duccio Balestracci, Il Palio di Siena. Una festa italiana, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2019.

40 Giacomo Zanibelli (ed.), Il liceo classico di siena, vol. 2, L’archivio storico. Inventario analitico, Siena, Nuova Immagine, 2012.

41 Antonio Zazzeroni, L’araldica delle contrade di Siena, Florence, Scala, 1980; Sergio Ghezzi, “Gli stemmi e i colori delle contrade”, in www.il palio.org. On line: https://www.ilpalio.org/araldica-tor.htm

42 Aurora Savelli, “Rievocare l’antica grandezza. Il corteo storico del palio di Siena tra Otto e Novecento”, in Gilles Bertrand, Ilaria Taddei (eds), Le Destin des rituels. Faire corps dans l’espace urbain, Italie-France-Allemagne, Rome, École française de Rome, 2008, p. 381-404.

43 Antonio Cardini, Al suono della lumaca…, op. cit.

44 Stefano Maggi, Dalla città allo stato nazionale. Ferrovia e modernizzazione a Siena tra Risorgimento e fascismo, Milan, Giuffrè, 1994; Giuliano Catoni, “La faziosa armonia”, in Alessandro Falassi, Giuliano Catoni (eds.), Palio, Milan, Electa, 1982, p. 240-241.

45 Henry James, Italian hours, London, Heinemann, 1909.

46 Arthur Symons, Cities of Italy, London, J.M. Dent & Co, 1907.

47 Ibid.

48 Michel Crouzert, Stendhal e il mito dell’Italia, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1991.

49 Maurizio Boldrini, Nicola Natili (eds.), Lo sport a Siena. Un secolo di storia, vent’anni di gloria, Siena, Protagon, 2008.

50 Federico Valacchi, I muscoli della città. Dall’Associazione ginnastica senese alla Mens sana, Siena, Cantagalli, 1991.

51 Duccio Balestracci, Medioevo e Risorgimento. L’invenzione dell’identità italiana nell’Ottocento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2015.

52 Carlotta Sorba, Il melodramma della nazione. Politica e sentimenti nell’Italia del Risorgimento, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2015.

53 Duccio Balestracci, Medioevo e Risorgimento..., op. cit.; Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Maurizio Degl'Innocenti, La città nostra, op. cit.; Saverio Battente, “Fare la nazione tra piccola e grande patria. Il caso senese: la realizzazione della statua dedicata a Garibaldi e la Sala Risorgimentale a Siena tra istanze di progresso e conservazione”, Bullettino senese di storia patria, CXVIII, 2011, p. 246-277.

54 Attilio Brilli, Siena, una regina gotica…, op. cit, p. 51.

55 Enrico Corradini, “La virtù nazionale”, Il Regno, II-6, 5th February 1905, republished in Lucia Strappini (ed.), Enrico Corradini. Scritti e discorsi 1901-1914, Turin, Einaudi, 1980, p. 88-106, citation p. 96-97.

56 Carlotta Sorba, Teatri. L’Italia del melodramma nell’età del Risorgimento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001.

57 Special issue “Siena e i Rozzi nel Risorgimento” of Accademia dei Rozzi, XVIII-34, 2011.

58 Enrico Corradini, “La virtù nazionale”, art. cited.

59 William Heywood, Our Lady of August and the Palio of Siena, Siena, Enrico Torrini Publisher, 1899.

60 Consider La Vedetta Senese, VIII-67, 21st March 1904.

61 Archivio Bargagli Petrucci, Letter of Pier Luigi Occhini to Fabio Bargagli Petrucci, Arezzo, 10th December 1905; Fabio Bargagli Petrucci, “Arte e burocrazia”, La Biblioteca del Regno, 1904, p. 17; id., “La nuova legislazione artistica. Quel che ne pensa l’Italia”, ivi; Nicola Fargnoli, “Fabio Bargagli Petrucci e il dibattito sulla legislazione di tutela del patrimonio artistico agli inizi del secolo”, Bullettino senese di storia patria, XCV, 1988, p. 333-361.

62 Marco Falorni, Arte cultura e politica a Siena nel primo Novecento. Fabio Bargagli Petrucci (1875-1939), Siena, Il Leccio, 2000.

63 Giuliano Catoni, Il fiero podestà. Fabio Bargagli Petrucci e il patrimonio di Siena, Siena, Protagon, 2010.

64 Bruna Talluri, “La svolta del Novecento e il giornalismo senese”, Bullettino senese di storia patria, XCIV, 1987, p. 176-278.

65 Livio Livi, “Sperperi proletari, restrizioni borghesi”, La riforma sociale, 28, 1921, p. 168-175; Giuliano Catoni, “Il comizio agrario a Siena”, Rassegna economica Siena, 1984, p. 12-18.

66 Federigo Tozzi, Con gli occhi chiusi, Milan, Treves, 1919; id., Le tre croci, Milan, Treves, 1920; id., Il podere, Milan, Treves, 1921.

67 Domenico Giuliotti, Federigo Tozzi, “La nostra fede”, La Torre, 1, 6th November 1913; Luigi Giorgi, La Torre, Siena, Biblioteca degli Intronati, 1981.

68 Ibid.

69 Gianni Mazzoni (ed.), Federico Icilio Joni. Le memorie di un pittore di quadri antichi, Siena, Protagon, 2004 [1932].

70 Duccio Balestracci, Medioevo e Risorgimento..., op. cit.

71 Ibid.

72 Alessandro Falassi, Giuliano Catoni (eds.), Palio, op. cit.

73 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983; Eric J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, New York, Basic Books, 1965.

74 Antonio Cardini, Storia di Siena…, op. cit.

75 Edwin Howland Blashfield, Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, “Una regina gotica”, in Attilio Brilli, Siena, una regina gotica..., op. cit., p. 65.

76 Ibid.

77 Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Alla ricerca del “vino Perfetto”. Il Chianti del barone di Brolio. Il risorgimento vitivinicolo italiano, Florence, Olschki, 2009.

78 Saverio Battente, “Fondazione e sviluppo dell’Istituto Siero e Vaccino Produttore Sclavo”, in Stefano Maggi (ed.), Cittadella della scienza. L’Istituto Sclavo a Siena nei cento anni della sua storia (1904-2004), Milan, Franco Angeli, 2004, p. 39-58.

79 Antonio Cardini, Storia di Siena…, op. cit.; Saverio Battente, “La grande guerra a Siena e la sua classe dirigente”, Bullettino senese di storia patria, CXXVI, 2019, p. 402-418; id., “The 1902 Chianciano Strikes. The Landowners’ Front and the Genesis of Italian Nationalism”, Memoria e Ricerca. Rivista di storia contemporanea, 1, 2020, p. 69-90.

80 Saverio Battente, “Dalla periferia al centro: la classe dirigente a Siena tra nazionalismo e fascismo”, in Paul Corner, Valeria Galimi (eds.), Il fascismo in provincia. Articolazioni e gestione del potere tra centro e periferia, Rome, Viella, 2014, p. 169-181.

81 Saverio Battente, “The ‘Gothic Queen’: the Myth of Siena in the 19th and 20th Centuries”, in Santa Casciani, Heather Richardson Hayton (eds.), A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Siena, Leiden, Brill, 2021, p. 264-287.

82 Giuliano Catoni, Il fiero podestà…, op. cit.

83 Saverio Battente, “L’associazionismo di contrada a Siena tra secolo lungo e secolo breve”, Rassegna storica toscana, 1, 2022, p. 105-129.

84 Stefano Cavazza, “Il Palio e le tradizioni popolari senesi durante il fascismo”, in Alessandro Orlandini (ed.), Fascismo e Antifascismo nel senese, Florence, Regione Toscana, 1994, p. 265-284.

85 Aurora Savelli, Siena. Il popolo e le contrade, Florence, Olschki, 2009; D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected. Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy, University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

86 Gerald Parsons, The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena: A Study in Civil Religion, London, Routledge, 2008; Alessandro Falassi, La Santa dell’Oca. Vita, morte e miracoli di Caterina da Siena, Siena, Betti Editrice, 2014.

87 Alan Dundes, Alessandro Falassi, La terra in Piazza. An interpretation of the Palio of Siena, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975.

88 Giuliano Catoni, Paolo Leoncini (eds), Alla Grande Guerra in automobile: diario e fotografie 1915-1916, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2015.

89 Saverio Battente, “La Federazione delle federazioni tra centro e periferia: il Coni tra Roma e Siena”, Bullettino senese di storia patria, CXXVII, 2020, p. 241-296.

90 “La pallonata senese”, La Vedetta Senese, 18th August 1904; La Domenica del Corriere, 35, 29th August-5th September 1909; F. Pasquini, “La pallonata senese. Cenni storico artistici”, Lo Sport fascista, 1, June 1928.

91 Saverio Battente, “Dalla periferia al centro…”, art. cited.

92 “Saluto”, Il Selvaggio, 1, 13th July 1924; Bernardina Sani, “Mino Maccari”, in Baccio Baccetti (ed.), Cultura e Università a Siena. Epoche, argomenti protagonisti, Siena, La Nuova Immagine, 1993, p. 253-266.

93 Mino Maccari, “Squadrismo”, Il Selvaggio, 1, 13th July 1924; id., “I selvaggi del fascismo: gli squadristi”, Il Selvaggio, 3, 26th July 1924.

94 Saverio Battente, “Piccola e grande patria nel processo di costruzione dello Stato nazione: il caso di Siena”, in Marisa Patulli Trythall (ed.), 150 anni sulla breccia. Roma, una capitale in trasformazione, Rome, Nova Delphi Libri, 2021, p. 219-236; id., “La classe dirigente a Siena dal Risorgimento al fascismo: nazionalismo e ceti medi”, in Mario De Prospo (ed.), Classi dirigenti nell’Italia unita: tra gruppi e territory, Naples, Federico II University Press, 2022, p. 53-67.

95 Duccio Balestracci, Il Palio di Siena…, op. cit.

96 Aurora Savelli, “Hitler a Firenze (9 maggio 1938): alcune note sulla partecipazione senese”, in Paola Maffei, Gian Maria Varanini (eds.), Honos alit artes. Studi per il settantesimo compleanno di Mario Ascheri, vol. 2, Gli universi particolari. Città e territory dal medioevo all’età moderna, Florence, Firenze University Press, 2014, p. 427-436.

97 La Balzana, 1, 1946.

98 Saverio Battente, “‘La regina gotica’: viaggio e soggiorno a Siena. Dalla Francigena al Grand tour fino al turismo di massa”, Diacronie. Studi di storia contemporanea, 37-1, 2019, on line: http://www.studistorici.com/2019/03/29/battente_numero_37/

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Saverio Battente, « The myth of the “Gothic Queen” between tradition and modernization »Revue d’histoire culturelle [En ligne], 6 | 2023, mis en ligne le 01 août 2023, consulté le 19 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rhc/4302 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rhc.4302

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Saverio Battente

Saverio Battente est professeur associé d’histoire contemporaine à l’université de Sienne. Ses travaux de recherche portent sur la construction de la nation et de l’État en Italie, avec un intérêt particulier pour le nationalisme et ses enjeux.

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