Roberto Cessi e la nuova venezianistica del secondo dopoguerra

The historian of Venice Roberto Cessi had reached the age of 60 at the end of the Second World War. He enjoyed high prestige, because he was recognized as the most notable Italian scholar of Venice, from its medieval origins to the fall of the Republic. In cultural policy, he had maintained a consistent attitude of non-compromise with the fascist regime. Despite these favorable preconditions, the 1950s and 1960s witnessed his progressive isolation from the most recent historiographical trends and from the historians of the new generations (excluding a few of his favorite students at the University of Padua), with whom he failed to open a real dialogue. The historians of the Crocian tradition tended to relegate him to the margins of contemporary Italian historiography. Instead, he was greatly estimated by Delio Cantimori, who appreciated him as the authoritative representative of two positive aspects of the Italian historiographical tradition, because of his positivist scholarship and his supposed membership of the so called “economic-juridical school”. However, these good relations ceased when Cessi, who was well known for his exacting reviews published in the historical review «Archivio Veneto», harshly attacked the important work on the Veneto in the eighteenth century written by Marino Berengo, one of the best young historians who had studied with Cantimori. At the end of the 1950s Cessi, who had planned a great history of Venice in collaboration with Fernand Braudel, broke off relations with the French historian and his Italian followers. Unlike his friend and colleague Gino Luzzatto, he expressed his deep distrust at the time of the birth of a new cultural institution in Venice, the Giorgio Cini Foundation, and he harshly criticized its first historical publications (with the exception of The Doge Nicolò Contarini by Gaetano Cozzi). In the 1960s Roberto Cessi, who was a secular-oriented historian, had a hard fight with the Catholic historian Gabriele De Rosa, whom he accused of providing an apologetic interpretation of Venetian Catholicism of the nineteenth century.