Norma Bouchard, Paolo Cherchi, Gustavo Costa, Albert N Man文档.doc

Italian Bookshelf Edited by Dino S. Cervigni and Anne Tordi with the collaboration of Norma Bouchard, Paolo Cherchi, Gustavo Costa, Albert N. Mancini, Massimo Maggiari, and John P. Welle. Francesco Bruni, La città divisa. Le parti e il bene comune da Dante a Guicciardini. Collezione di testi e di studi. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Pp. 620. The name of the distinguished Italianist Francesco Bruni appears as author or collaborator of several volumes reviewed in this section of AdI’s twenty-first issue. Among all these, this volume — La città divisa. Le parti e il bene comune da Dante a Guicciardini — is by far the most demanding intellectually and most ambitious in scope. Chronologically, the author ranges from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, as the subtitle indicates; and yet, primarily in the introduction and conclusion, he makes challenging remarks drawn from his specific field of inquiry that he appropriately applies to our contemporary time. The study concerns politics, primarily the development and the (apparent) disappearance of political parties as the Italian peninsula’s states moved from the medieval comune to the signoria. At the same time, Bruni draws very effectively from works of poetry, theology, ethics, philosophy, figurative arts, and virtually all cultural productions of the centuries he examines and beyond. It is precisely this specific, and yet broadly contextualized focus that allows the author to deal not just with history and politics per se, but also to analyze the political development of Italian cities from such a comprehensive view as to qualify this volume as a study, not just of the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance, but rather of Italy’s cultural and intellectual history from a European perspective. The introduction (“Premessa” 9-18) contextualizes the notion expressed by the title, La città divisa, from medieval to Renaissance times; it does so with an overture toward the function of parte and partiti (but also such related n