One of the fundamental challenges of the study of Italian Renaissance utopias is to determine what works should be included within this category. The prevailing tendency in the scholarship has been to use the term “utopia” in the broadest possible sense and classify as utopias very diverse texts: city panegyrics, architects’ descriptions of ideal cities, texts modeled on More’s Utopia , idealized historical accounts of real cities, and poetic depictions of the golden age.1 However, if we take “utopia” to have such a broad connotation, it becomes problematic to identify common traits among such different texts. Some scholars have followed the opposite approach and developed an interpretation of Italian utopianism on the basis of only better-known works (i.e., Campanella’s City of Sun and Doni’s Wise and Crazy World) directly inspired by More’s Utopia.2 The challenge with casting such a small net is that it (1) omits several texts that have evident utopian traits and (2) judges Italian utopianism based on limited textual evidence.3 More recently, scholars (e.g., Bolzoni and Perissinotto)4 have focused on a handful of works.5 However, the proponents of this selection have failed to explain their criteria for restricting their selection to these particular works.
In this volume, we approach Italian Renaissance utopias from a different perspective. Our starting point is to define the scope of Italian Renaissance utopianism. Initially, it is helpful to define Italian utopias negatively by excluding works which, despite having utopian traits, belong to established literary genres. For this reason, we leave out city panegyrics, poetic depictions of the golden age, as well as idealized historical accounts of real cities. We also exclude the descriptions of ideal cities of Italian Renaissance architects. Although the objective of these works is to devise ideal societies, they focus exclusively on the role architecture plays in creating a perfect society and pay little or no attention to other essential factors (e.g., customs, political institutions, the legal system, and the educational model). However, we do not only define our notion of utopia negatively; in fact, we identify two positive criteria that Italian utopias share:
- They design an ideal city or republic by integrating assessments of its customs, constitution, history, and legal, political, and educational systems.
- They engage directly or indirectly with More’s Utopia and/or the philosophical analysis of the ideal city by Plato and Aristotle.
However, after identifying which texts are utopias, we still need to capture their distinct elements. Some scholars have tried to individuate the essential traits of Italian utopianism by examining the causes of its development (e.g., Fiorato, Firpo, and Widmar) or recurrent topics (e.g., Bolzoni, Perissinotto, and Tenenti).6 Both approaches are valuable in enhancing our understanding of Italian utopias, but they are not very helpful in pinpointing the distinctiveness of these works. The investigation of historical and cultural causes that brought about Italian utopianism touches only tangentially on its specific characteristics. The study of the contents of Italian utopias does not take us too far either, since it does not detect what is peculiar to the Italian tradition. Most of the themes identified by these scholars also occur in other European utopian traditions.
A more promising path is to examine the goal and literary features of Italian utopias, and the way they conceptualize utopia. In all these cases, the one element that stands out is the diversity of Italian utopias. In a nutshell, we can conceive Italian Renaissance utopias to be variations on a theme. Their diversity is evident at both the literary and the conceptual levels. From a literary perspective, the hallmark of Italian utopias is the originality with which they reinvent the conventional literary structure of utopias. Renaissance utopias tend to consist of the description of an ideal place accompanied by brief dialogical exchanges between the utopia’s narrator and his audience. By contrast, some Italian utopias (e.g., Zuccolo’s Belluzzi) are a synthesis of different literary genres; others (e.g., Zuccolo’s Evandria) creatively merge book one and two of More’s Utopia ; some are systematic philosophical treatises (e.g., Patrizi’s The Happy City), whereas others are dynamic and witty dialogues (e.g., Doni’s Wise and Crazy World). The various goals of Italian utopias further demonstrate their independence from the conventions of the genre. Typically, Renaissance utopias entail a political focus, and their primary aim is to depict a perfect society. By contrast, Italian utopias often have other interests beyond examining an ideal commonwealth. For example, the ultimate endeavor of Patrizi’s utopia is to help man attain union with the divine. Doni considers his utopian city as a means of imagining a world that transcends our moral and social categories. In Evandria, Zuccolo uses the depiction of the utopian republic to try reconciling Italy’s Renaissance ideals with those of Republican Rome. However, Italian Renaissance utopias also differ in how they conceptualize utopia. In Patrizi, utopia becomes a device to systematically explore how political theory can grow out of a particular account of human nature. The act of imagining a utopian city is the tool through which Doni calls into question the conceptual and moral foundations of any society. In Zuccolo’s Evandria, the portrayal of an imaginary republic enables him to investigate how to address the challenges of Renaissance Italy.
The goal of this volume is to reveal the richness and layered complexity of Italian utopias by examining as well as translating texts that have not been made available in English so far. Our selection does not intend to be comprehensive; however, it is representative of the sheer diversity of Italian utopias. The analysis, in this volume, of the utopias of Doni, Patrizi, and Zuccolo will, hopefully, contribute to the appreciation of a lesser-known utopian tradition which constitutes an inventive chapter in the history of utopianism.
Bibliography
- Benevolo, Leonardo. 2017. Storia dell’architettura del Rinascimento. Bari: Editori Laterza.
- Bolzoni, Lina. 1993. Le città utopiche del Cinquecento italiano: Giochi di spazio e di saperi. L’asino d’oro 4 (7): 64–81.
- Chordas, Nina. 2010. Forms in Early Modern Utopia: The Ethnography of Perfection. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
- Comparato, Vittor I. 2005. Utopia. Bologna: Il Mulino.
- ———. 2016. Realism and Utopia: A Shifting Disharmony. Governare la Paura. Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 9 (1): 281–301.
- Curcio, Carlo, ed. 1941. Utopisti e riformatori sociali del Cinquecento. Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli Editore.
- ———, ed. 1944. Utopisti Italiani del Cinquecento. Roma: Colombo.
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