Reading classical authors in the centers of southern Italy: local humanists and civic identity

Between the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period in many centers of the Kingdom of Naples an erudite and antiquarian debate developed with the purpose of investigating and celebrating the local past. The cultivated elites of these centers found and interpreted (and sometimes misinterpreted) classical materials in order to stress their Roman or pre-Roman origins, and to present themselves as the developers of the moral and social virtues held by their ancestors in antiquity. Very often, their attempt was that of describing and explaining local ancient monuments through the reading of the literary documentation they found in the classical works. This fervent antiquarian interest in the local past was influenced by the circulation of manuscripts and, above all, of new printed editions of Greek and Roman authors, and by the presence, inside the local cultivated milieus, of noteworthy figures of humanists who have very rarely attracted the scholars’ interest. On the basis of a research developed inside the ERC project HistAntArtSI, in the paper have been analyzed the main characteristics of this cultural phenomenon, focusing on some examples drawn from cities of Basilicata and Puglia. Two historical moments in particular have been briefly discussed: the activities of local humanists in the delicate passage from the Aragonese to the Spanish domination between the 15th and the 16th centuries (Pierangelo Piera in Matera, Antonio de Ferraris in Lecce and Gallipoli, Belisario Aquaviva in Nardò, and so on), and the antiquarian flowering of the late 16th century, when several descriptions of cities were written by local humanists and antiquarians, often on request of local public institutions.