Il ritorno di un tema : l’origine del Comune. Qualche riflessione su un volume recente

This essay engages with Chris Wickham’s book, Sleepwalking into a New World. The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (2015). In the first part the article highlights Wickham’s thought-provoking reappraisal of the origins of city-communes: in a nutshell, the collapse of state institutions in bestowing a new significance on the emerging communal institutions, the city assembly as autonomous pre-communal form of government, the innovation represented by the consular justice, which marked the beginning of the communal period. In the second part the essay brings forward some original remarks about the relationship between landed aristocracy and the rise of city-communes.