Ettore De Ruggiero: an Italian at the School of Theodor Mommsen. Classical education and study of Roman law. Personal orientations in the Italian nineteenth century

The volume publishes the first results of a broader research aimed at reconstructing the relationship between classical education and studies of Roman law in nineteenth-century Italy, through investigations dedicated to individual scholars. It is in this perspective that, thanks to mostly unpublished documents, a biographical and scientific profile of Ettore De Ruggiero, historian, epigrapher and jurist, defined by Santo Mazzarino as "a Mommsenian from Naples", is outlined. Starting from the formative years, in which a fundamental role was played by the long stay in Berlin, attention was focused in particular on the participation in the famous Mommsen Seminar in which the future lines of research and the original and complex method of investigation of the young scholar were outlined. The academic events that, from teaching at the University of Naples and, since its establishment, at the Archaeological School of Pompeii, will bring De Ruggiero to Rome, are then followed. Enrolled in the Faculty of Letters, but a jurist himself in the complex preparation and development of his studies, he had a constant dialogue with his colleagues who were historians of law, in particular with Vittorio Scialoja, participating as a member in the activities of the Institute of Roman Law and publishing essays on legal epigraphy in the Bulletin. The need to contextualize personal events was an opportunity for a broader reflection on the importance that cultural policies after the Unification of Italy had in the development of classical studies. Policies that, starting from a state of profound backwardness, were able, over the course of a few decades, to recover a leading role for Italian studies, especially in classical studies and, in particular, in historical-legal studies. This is an aspect that, also due to the intertwining in De Ruggiero's biographical profile, in addition to that of V. Scialoja already mentioned, of equally important names such as F. De Sanctis, G. Fiorelli, G. Minervini, R. Bonghi, P. Villari, L. Settembrini, constitutes one of the central themes of the volume.