Conclusion

The most striking feature of the classical tradition in Italy is its continuity. In part, this is fostered by the extensive survival of the physical record of Roman civilization, which has inspired countless poets, architects, and tourists. The persistence of Latin-based culture, ensconced in the rites and liturgy of the Roman church, and in traditional disciplines like law and medicine, exercised a conservative restraint on Italian culture. Upon this foundation, the new ideals of the Renaissance added further layers of classically inspired culture in the arts, letters, and education. By the sixteenth century, Italy’s classicizing trends were setting the pace for much of Europe. With the Counter-Reformation, Rome again asserted a cultural hegemony that dominated those lands not lost to Protestantism, while the ecstatic creations of the Baroque could occasionally cross borders drawn by religion.

In the eighteenth century, the quest by Italians to understand the Roman world led to the rise of anthropology (the insights of Vico) and archaeology (the unearthing of Pompeii), but elsewhere in Europe the study of the ancient Greek world inspired a new vision of noble sublimity. The Romantic generation in Italy shared in this movement, in which a rarefied ideal of Hellenic antiquity was seldom clouded by an actual inspection of Greece’s inscriptions and monuments, much less by a confrontation of its political plight. The Risorgimento gave renewed impetus to the Roman past, and by 1871 the new nation of Italy perforce made Rome its capital. Whereas the crisis of World War I undermined European faith in the classical tradition, in Italy it aided the rise of Mussolini’s Fascist party, which soon played the trump card of the ‘‘Roman’’ destiny of the Italian people. Outside Italy, scholars who regarded the Fascist vision as tainted analyzed the great cost at which Augustus and the empire had triumphed. After World War II, Italian writers and filmmakers increasingly turned to Greek myth, perhaps in reaction against the ‘‘Roman’’ ideal. But soon the ancient monuments of the Italian peninsula and its capital proved powerful enough to fuel a postwar boom in tourism and cinema centered around the grandeur that was Rome. Bread and circuses, indeed.

A Companion to the Classical Tradition Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd