Cola di rienzo biography sampler
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Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the politics of the New Age
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The Anonimo romano set out to write a vivid and convincing history of his times. To reach his audience he therefore wrote in the vernacular Italian of Rome called Romanesco and so created a masterpiece of fourteenth-century Italian literature. The Anonimo romano's autograph survived as a unique manuscript for over years, and bygd the early sixteenth century the Cronica was widely read and existed in several copies. The earliest surviving ones date from shortly after Niccolî Machiavelli used a copy in writing his History of Florence of For the author of The Prince, Rienzo was a good example of the constant tension between Virtù and the wheel of Fortuna, a tension that pits the resources of the individual against the accumulated weight of circumstances and structures. In book I, Chapter 6, of his History, Machiavelli records how Cola "restored" Rome "to its ancient form" and inspired the an
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Cola di Rienzo and Garibaldi: The History of the Italian Nationalists Who Failed and Succeeded in Unifying Italy
Cola di Rienzo was a man whose life and actions have reverberated down the centuries, as his charismatic, yet unsuccessful dictatorship has spawned legends and comparisons with movements of later ages. His attempt to bring the greatness of Roman antiquity into the reality of the 14th century, the city’s lowest point, is inspiring on its face. In , Iris Origo saw how Cola was being used by her present era and noted that "within the last century kejsare, Communist and Fascist in vända have paid tribute to Cola di Rienzo as a kindred spirit or precursor. But historical parallels are deceptive. To measure a man of one century against a man of another is to see neither of them in the light of his own time"
The different Italian states on the peninsula experienced Napoleonic rule in the early s, followed by a brief restoration that led to widespread political uphe
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Cola di Rienzo Murdered
Cola di Rienzo (or Rienzi) was so massively fat that when his corpse was hung up by the feet after his violent death, it was described as looking like a giant buffalo or a cow in the slaughterhouse. His ambitions were as huge as his frame. The son of a Roman innkeeper, he dreamed of restoring the city of his birth to the grandeur of its great days and bringing a new pax Romana to the world. Summoning the people to the Capitoline Hill in , he proclaimed himself dictator and to enthusiastic applause announced measures to curb the noble families which dominated the city. The nobles, led by the Colonnas and the Orsinis, were having none of it and Pope Clement VI issued a bull from Avignon denouncing Cola as a pagan, a heretic and a criminal. Driven out of Rome by the end of the year, he became a hermit for a time before going to Prague to offer his visionary services to the Emperor Charles IV. After protracted correspondence, the bewildered emperor sent hi