introduction 11
to celebrate the glories of the ancient Republic.”29 As did Romanin,
Molmenti took up historiographical arms to defend venice from the anti-
myth of Daru and others. He denounced “gullible, deceived, or mercenary
historians” who “paid scant attention to historical accuracy,” and he wel-
comed the more accurate image of the Republic contained in the “new
historiography” of venice that was then taking hold. Molmenti was a poli-
tician as well as a scholar, and a clear nationalist undertone informs his
work: he saw the end of foreign domination and the unification of Italy as
essential steps in this historiographical paradigm shift. These made pos-
sible a more rigorous, historicist, archival treatment of venice’s past and
liberated it from “the legend of terror and mystery, which had surrounded
the Republic.” As David Laven has argued, Molmenti illustrates how the
Risorgimento “permitted a radical reconceptualization” of venice in the
new national context. In place of venice as the embodiment of Italian
decadence, venice now could be portrayed as effectively resisting foreign
domination, which became an essential part of the new “national tale of
resurgence,” and unification.30
Molmenti’s magnum opus, the Storia di Venezia nella vita privata dalle
origini alla caduta della repubblica (1880), published when he was barely
27 years old, was written in response to an 1877 competition with a prize
of 3000 lire, sponsored by the Istituto veneto, on the theme of the private
life of venice. The book has been described as “one of the most successful
works in the endless panorama of the historiography of venice” and “the
monument of an age.”31 It was also that most rare of historical works that
was immediately well received by both scholars and the general public.
Initially published in a single volume, it was divided into three parts:
“Le origini” of the city’s medieval foundations, “Lo splendore” of the
Renaissance, and “Il decadimento” of the Republic’s final centuries. Simi-
lar to other treatments, Molmenti’s familiar, “organic model of venetian
history” sketches venice’s past along an arc of rise, golden age, and decline;
and he situates the beginning of the end in venice’s expansion into
29 Povolo, “The Creation of venetian Historiography,” p. 505; Pemble, Venice Rediscov-
ered, p. 97.
30 David Laven, “venice 1848–1915: The venetian Sense of the Past and the Creation of
the Italian Nation,” in William Whyte and Oliver Zimmer, eds., Nationalism and the Shap-
ing of Urban Communities in Europe, 1848–1914 (Houndmills, 2011), pp. 66–67.
31 Giandomenico Romanelli, “venezia nella vita privata. L’ideologia della venezianità,”
in Giuseppe Pavanello, ed., L’enigma della modernità. Venezia nell’età di Pompeo Molmenti
(venice, 2006), pp. 19, 24.