Michele Rosi

Michele Rosi (29 September 1864 – 23 January 1934) was an Italian historian and teacher, initially at school level and later, between 1897 and 1933, at the Sapienza University in Rome. His earlier publications covered the late medieval and early modern periods: he became better known for his contributions on the nineteenth century history of Italian unification. There was no place for hagiography in Rosi's historical approach. His insistence on methodical source-based research, and on excluding from serious historical scholarship the mythologising of contemporary romanticists and politicians, led to him being characterised as a prominent representative of the first generation of Risorgimento revisionist historians. In Mussolini's Italy, the revisionists' approach did not go unchallenged. which according to admirers served only to intensify his innate spiritual resilience. Both a junior school in Camaiore and at the "Liceo classico Niccolò Machiavelli" (secondary school) which he attended in Lucca,

On 30 June 1888 he graduated with a first degree in Italian Literature from the "Scuola Normale Superiore" (university) in Pisa, where he was taught by both the polymath literature scholar Alessandro d'Ancona and the historian Amedeo Crivellucci. A couple of months after graduating he obtained a complementary diploma in History, which under the system then in place doubled as a secondary schools-level teaching qualification ("“diploma di magistero”"). Mordini's son Leonardo allowed Rosi unrestricted access to the family papers. Rosi was thereby supported in pursuit of his ambition, as he later expressed it, finally to write "a series of pages on the history of the Risorgimento". Keen to contextualise the information he was able to distil from the Mordini archive, Rosi also sought out some of the few remaining survivors of Risorgimento incidents and events, such as Luigi Guglielmo Cambray-Digny (1820-1906) and Giovanni Cadolini (1830-1917), in pursuit of documents and personal testimonies. Otherwise he contacted descendants of key Risorgimento protagonists. Several of these were well disposed to his researches and keen to help, notably the children and remoter heirs of Carlo Cairoli, as well as surviving members of Angelo Bargoni's family. Rosi followed up his study based on the Mordini papers two years later with "I Cairoli" ("The Cariolis", 1908), which was again based on a major archival research project. "I Cairoli" was republished in 1929, with amendments and additions. Rosi was successful in attracting contributions from some of the most widely respected scholars of the age, such as Benedetto Croce and Pasquale Villari, as well as from other well-known writers such as Ferdinando Martini. There were also contributions from known Risorgimento scholars such as Giuseppe Gallavresi, and from a younger generation of historians, including Ersilio Michel and Alberto Maria Ghisalberti. The contributors were united only by a shared passion for and fascination with the Risorgimento. Some had unlikely backgrounds: Gaetano Badii, who would produce dozens of entries for the "Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale", was an accountant by training and profession, even if in retrospect he is better remembered by scholars for his contributions as an historian. Rosi directed the entire enterprise closely, personally supervising most of the entries, especially those that might be construed as historiographically contentious or otherwise problematic. The long careful introduction that he added provided him with the chance to set out, more unambiguously than before, his own assessment that the origins of the Risorgimento were to be found in the writings and activities of eighteenth century Italian reformist thinkers such as Pagano and Beccaria. The project was halted by the outbreak of the First World War, which from an Italian perspective meant the early summer of 1915. It was only some years later, during the 1920s, after a protracted and at times acrimonious series of diatribes and other communications had been exchanged between Rosi and the Vallardi publishing house, that a decision was taken to go ahead and publish the "Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale" in four volumes. It was a major undertaking, undertaken between 1930 and 1937: the final volume appeared only after Rosi's death.

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