Narrating Venice in nineteenth-century Italy: the notions of municipal and national in Samuele Romanin's patriotic project, the Storia documentata di Venezia (1853–64)

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In his Storia documentata di Venezia, Samuele Romanin aimed at refounding Venetian history through the lens of contemporary Italian bourgeois principles. What he enthusiastically highlighted was the model of patria building and the cultivation of patriotism he observed in republican times: he thought they should have been a powerful base for the construction of new Italy. On one hand, he presented Venice as a fully Italian state – even if he essentially narrated a story rich in counterexamples. On the other hand, the Republic was a unique case: but this uniqueness could be explained in turn by pointing to the fact that Venice was the most Italian of the peninsular states, and it ended up being considered as a synecdoche for Italy. Despite his nineteenth-century methodologies, Romanin largely inherited the traditions of Venetian republican historiography; overall, what he constructed was a modern eulogy of the Serenissima, making its mythology compatible and meaningful in the Risorgimento context.