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'Crisis', ‘decline’ and 'fall' of the Serenissima: remembering Venice as... 549

as they are purchased; even those that are instantly consumed, are
then re-read; books, after all, have a very long shelf life .
21
A second banal but important point is that the studies on the
history of Venice written after 1797 have a strongly teleological
stance: their authors wanted to explain the collapse of the longest-
lived republic in history. Indeed, Hallam, as we have seen, felt
obliged to discuss the fall of Venice even though it fell several hun-
dred years outside his chronological span. Yet, when writing about
Venetian history, authors in the quarter century or so after 1797,
made use not only of, say, mediæval chroniclers, and of the more-
or-less official early modern historiographers (Sabellico and
Navagero, Bembo and Foscarini, Paruta and Morosini, often citing
the Lovisa volumes of Degl’istorici delle cose veneziane [1718-22]) ,
22
but also of more recent studies from the last half century, perhaps
most notably the work of Giacomo Filiasi on the early history of
Venice , and Vettor Sandi (1703-1784), author of a ponderous six-
23
volume Storia civile that took the history of the Republic’s institu-
tions and laws up to 1700, supplemented with an additional three
volumes that continued to 1767 . After the fall of the Serenissima,
24
historians also continued to employ non-Venetian works such as
Amelot de La Houssaie’s Histoire du gouvernement de Venise , and
25
the twelve-volume Histoire de la République de Venise by the some-
time Jesuit and then Benedictine, Marc Antoine Laugier .
26
Despite the teleological frenzy unleashed by Bonaparte’s attack and
the rapid régime changes that followed until the Congress of Vienna,
there are strong lines of continuity between those writing before and
after 1797. Indeed, many historians’ lives straddled the loss of inde-
pendence and several régime changes. Giambattista Gallicciolli, linguist,

21 W. St Clair, The reading nation in the Romantic period, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2004, pp. 3-6.
22 Degl’istorici delle cose veneziane i quali hanno scritto per pubblico decreto, 10 vols,
Domenico Lovisa, Venice, 1718-22.
23 G. Filiasi, Saggio sopra i Veneti primi, 2 vols, Pietro Savioni, Venice, 1781.
24 V. Sandi, Principj di storia civile della Repubblica di Venezia dalla sua fondazione
sino all’anno di n.s. 1700, 6 vols, Sebastian Coletti, Venice, 1755-6; V. Sandi Principj di
storia civile della repubblica di Venezia […] dall’anno di N.S. sino all’anno 1767, 3 vols,
Sebastien Coletti, Venice, 1769-72.
25 A.N.A. de La Houssaye, Histoire du gouvernement de Venise, 2 vols, Frédéric Lé-
onard, Paris, 1677 / Gijsbert Van Zijll, Utrecht, 1677. There were numerous editions of
the Histoire produced during the final quarter of the seventeenth century and the early
years of the eighteenth century.
26 M.A. Laugier, Histoire de la République de Venise, 12 vols, N.B. Duchesne, Paris,
1759-68. Laugier’s work was translated into Italian as Istoria della Repubblica di Vene-
zia dalla sua fondazione fino al presente […] tradotta dal francese, 6 vols, Carlo Palese
& Gasparo Storti, Venice, 1st edn 1767-9, 2nd edn 1778.

Mediterranea – ricerche storiche – Anno XIX – Dicembre 2022
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)