Le "due Italie" nella medievistica dell'Otto-Novecento

The more than secular debate on the Southern Question has a close relationship with the trends of Italian medieval studies in the times of their professionalization. The scheme of “two Italies”, respectively featured by the municipal development of the North-Centre and by the “feudal backwardness” of the South, originates above all from the construction of an interpretative canon that considered the “municipal civilization” as the characterizing center of the Italian Middle Ages, reading the Southern history in terms of “lack of development”. This reading has been shared by both international and Italian historiography until recent times. The essay illustrates and discusses the roots and the consolidation of this model in the medieval studies of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, identifying in that the origins of a persistent imbalance in the reconstruction of the medieval Italian history.