ABSTRACT
Hans Robert Jauss has demonstrated that the Enlightenment’s disenchantment of the forces of nature went hand in hand with the creation of new myths concerned with the origin of mankind, early forms of social organisation and religion.2 Giambattista Vico and later the Republican writer Vincenzo Cuoco, member of the 1799 Republican government of Naples, revived the ancient myth of the Italian nation’s Etruscan origins. A modern Italian translation of Vico appeared in 1816 and we fi nd the same theme in Ugo Foscolo’s verse and prose, in the works of Manzoni, Mazzoldi and Berchet, as well as in the neo-Guelph idea of the Italians’ moral primacy.3 However, interest in the Etruscans predated the Enlightenment and the revolutionary period. When Napoleon turned the grand duchy of Tuscany into the kingdom of Etruria, this was meant as a reference to Cosimo de’ Medici, the fi rst grand duke of Tuscany, who in 1532 had assumed the title Magnus Etruriae dux.4 Petrarch, Cusanus, Florentine neo-Platonism as well as the cabalistic writings of Pico and Reuchlin discussed Pythagoras’ Etruscan origins, the myth according to which the philosopher transmitted an ancient Etruscan-Italic knowledge, l’antica sapienza italica, which was said to be at the origin of the Greek school of philosophy and science. In this view the Etruscans rather than the Greeks were fons et origo of European thought and civilisation.5 The interest in ancient origins and greatness was not an invention of nineteenth-century nationalism, but widespread in early modern Europe from the fourteenth century. Four centuries later, in the search for the origins of the Italian nation, these ideas were integrated into a new context. Nostalgic invocations of past
greatness compensated for what was perceived to be Italy’s civic decline during centuries of internal divisions and foreign domination.
