introduction 5
With only minimal interruption, the chain of official historians contin-
ued until Pietro Garzoni’s ponderous Istoria della Repubblica di Venezia
dal 1683 al 1714 (1705–16), which was the final in a three-century strand of
official histories. Historians continued to be elected after Garzoni, but they
produced “sterile results.” effectively, venice’s multi-century experiment
in official history ends where Garzoni stopped, 1714. In the Republic’s final
years there seems to have been a growing disinterest in political history;
the challenge for Garzoni and his successors, as Gino Benzoni notes, was
“how to glorify venice in an age that was not glorious.” Instead legal and
cultural histories, such as the volume Storia della letteratura veneziana
(1752) by Marco foscarini, which represents perhaps “the most credible
historical monument” of the 18th century, and the publication and trans-
lation into the vernacular of works of earlier official historians, were the
order of the final years of the Republic.10
At the same time that these official histories were being produced,
numerous unofficial narratives of venetian history were also compiled.
examples include Pietro Giustinian’s 1560 Latin survey Rerum Venetarum
ab urbe condita, which was solidly based in archival sources; the Bellunese
Giovanni Nicolò Doglioni’s 1597 Historia venetiana; and Alessandro Maria
vianoli’s Historia veneta (1680–84), which is organized by the reigns of
doges and notable for its pompous prose. finally, the venetian senator
Giacomo Diedo’s four-volume Storia della Republica di Venezia dalla sua
fondazione sino l’anno MDCCXLVII (venice, 1751) is deeply rooted in the
myth of venice and represents the last meaningful attempt at recounting
the Republic’s political history.11
All of these histories, in one way or another, served to construct and
solidify the much-studied myth of venice, which is the label that con-
temporary scholars have adopted to describe venice’s seemingly unique
civic stability and enduring republicanism. Among other characteristics,
the myth depicted venice as a stable oasis in the disorderly Italian pen-
insula, the anti-florence, in a sense. venice’s order and stability were a
result, according to the mythmakers, of its hierarchical society which was
10 Benzoni, “Introduzione,” xliv–xlvii; Gino Benzoni, “La storiografia e l’erudizione
storico-antiquaria. Gli storici municipali,” in Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi,
eds., Storia della cultura veneta, 6 vols (vicenza, 1976–86), vol. 4 (1984): Dalla Controriforma
alla fine della Repubblica. Il Seicento, part 2, pp. 69–75; Gino Benzoni, “Pensiero storico e
storiografia civile,” in Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 5 (1986): Dalla Controriforma alla fine
della Repubblic. Il Settecento, part 2, pp. 72–75, 79, 84.
11 Benzoni, “Introduzione,” pp. li–lvi; Benzoni, “Pensiero storico e storiografia civile,”
pp. 78–79.