The "Gothic Queen": the myth of Siena in the 19th and 20th

Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Siena was the subject of a renewed interest on the part of nationalist intellectuals who were influenced by the Florentine journals circulating at the time. Beginning with Corradini, Siena began to mythologize their civic virtues as an example on which to forge their national equivalents, first by the nationalist movement and later, in expanded form, in the Fascist era. However, in the background remained the challenges posed by modernization and the proper response to them, including even its repudiation. As a "daughter of the road", so termed by E. Sestan because of the city's location on the Via Francigena, Siena was at the time one of the stops on the Grand Tour of Italy and styled herself a sort of time capsule, zealously enclosed in her glorious past. It was in this period, following the late 16th-century refeudalization indicated by the myth of R. Romeo's Italia mille anni, that the city took on the task of rewriting the history of the "Gothic Queen"in order to convey her from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento in an unaltered form. To accomplish this, they even enlisted the House of Savoy who, donating their heraldic banners to those of the contrade of the Palio (the heritage of the medieval guilds), sought to connect a non-existent national past with a still unwritten present. Moreover, the attention being given to Sienese history was not unknown to Sismondi who was seeking an explanation of the system of tenant farming. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021.