Who needs a Republic? (About the book by D. Di Matteo)
Zaytseva Daria
In a book published in 2022, dedicated to the events of 1799 in the southern Italian region of Terra di Bari, author Giuseppe Di Matteo analyzes the region's socioeconomic, political, and cultural characteristics, reconstructs the events that unfolded there after the French invasion of Naples and the establishment of the Parthenopean Republic. He attempts to answer the question of why some cities in Terra di Bari sided with the Republic, while others opposed republican ideas, leading to counterrevolutionary uprisings. Seeking to understand the reasons for the different attitudes toward republican authority within a single, relatively small region, he examines several cities, attempting to identify their specific characteristics. As a result of his research, Di Matteo comes to the conclusion that a significant role in the population's uneven attitudes towards the Republic was played not only by the diversity of the social and cultural landscape, the characteristics of local authorities, and the level of economic development of each city, but also by random factors - family disputes, internecine strife, and centuries-old conflicts between social groups that had long been at odds with each other and which flared up again with renewed vigor during the days of the Parthenopean Republic.
The study is realized in the State Academic University for the Humanities within the framework of the state task of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (project FZNF–2023–0003 Traditions and values of society: mechanisms of formation and transformation in the context of global history).