ABSTRACT
More than 40 years after the publication of Communes and Despots, mainstream Italian historiography on the post-communal age and on the Renaissance state still relies on some of the assumptions which Philip Jones’s work had convincingly challenged.1 The most important of these assumptions, which over the years has become very similar to a dogma in its most radical formulations, is in fact a legacy of the Italian Risorgimento, when the era of the free communes came to be seen as Italy’s golden age in contrast with the subsequent decay under foreign rule.2 Roughly speaking, this grand narrative of Italian national specificity based on the urban primacy is still articulated along two main axes, both dating back to the nineteenth century: republicanism (a central theme at least since Sismondi), which has long been favoured by anglophone historiography, particularly – but not exclusively – in the field of intellectual history; and the close link between the cities and their own surrounding territories, which was at the core of Carlo Cattaneo’s reflections in his famous 1858 essay on the city as ‘the ideal principle’ of Italian history.3
