Cola Di Rienzo - Legacy

Legacy

Cola di Rienzo was the hero of one of the finest of Petrarch's odes, Spirito gentil,

Having advocated both the abolition of the Pope's temporal power and the Unification of Italy, Cola re-emerged in the 19th century, transformed into a romantic figure among politically liberal nationalists and adopted as a precursor of the 19th century Risorgimento, which struggled for and eventually achieved both aims. In this process he was reimagined as a "the romantic stereotype of the inspired dreamer who foresees the national future" as Adrian Lyttleton expressed it, illustrating his point with Federico Faruffini's Cola di Rienzo Contemplating the Ruins of Rome (1855) of which he remarks, "The language of martyrdom could be freed from its religious context and used against the Church."

Cola di Rienzo's life and fate have formed the subject of a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, a tragedy by Julius Mosen and also of some verses by George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron. He is also the subject of a play by Friedrich Engels.

Richard Wagner's first success Rienzi (Dresden, 1842), based on Bulwer-Lytton's novel, took Cola for a central figure, and at the same time, unaware of the Dresden production, Giuseppe Verdi, an ardent and anti-clerical patriot of the Risorgimento, contemplated a Cola di Rienzo.

In 1873 - immediately after the new Kingdom of Italy effected the Capture of Rome from papal forces - the Prati rione was laid out, with the new quarter's main street being "Via Cola di Rienzo" and a conspicuous square, Piazza Cola di Rienzo. Pointedly, the name was bestowed precisely on the street connecting the Tiber with the Vatican - at the time the headquarters of a Catholic church still far from reconciled to the loss of its temporal power. To further drive home the point, the Piazza di Risorgimento was located at the Via Cola di Rienzo's eastern end, directly touching upon the Church's headquarters.

In 1877 a statue of the tribune by Girolamo Masini, was erected at the foot of Rome's Capitoline Hill. In Rome, in Rione of Ripa, near the Bocca della Verità still exists a brick decorated house of the Middle Ages, distinguished by the appellation of "The House of Pilate", but also traditionally known as Cola di Rienzo's house (in fact it belonged to the patrician Crescenzi family).

His letters, edited by A. Gabrielli, are published in vol. vi. of the Fonti per la storia d’Italia (Rome, 1890).