The contribution intends to retrace the history of Pavia’s famous equestrian statue, known as the “Regisole”, destroyed in 1796. The statue, in gilded bronze, represented a Roman emperor and was transferred from Rome to Ravenna, most likely by Theoderic. At a certain point, probably between the eighth and tenth centuries, the Regisole arrived in Pavia, even if it is difficult to establish…
The aim of this paper is to analyse two ethnographic identities constructed for two barbarian peoples – the Ostrogoths and the Langobards. As I try to argue, the first identity was constructed to show that the Ostrogoths were a civilized people and a better version of the Romans, and moreover, this identity communicated that the Ostrogoths could not be called a barbaric and savage people. The…
The paper aims to illustrate, especially through the results of recent archaeological studies, the articulation and forms of the centres of public power between the Gothic and the Carolingian periods, in the dialectic between the city as a seat of the institutions and their protagonists, and the countryside, which contains the production centres and controls their resources. We will consider th…
The short but significant experiment of the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy left politically ephemeral albeit culturally surprisingly durable traces in the peninsula. Among them, epigraphy takes centre stage when discussing decrees, laws, and public documents, which are a direct expression of the rulers’ will to gain greater visibility and disseminate their voice. However, epigraphy is also cruc…
Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages seeks to expand our understanding of early medieval connectivity by interrogating social and intellectual collaborations, competitions, and communications among persons, places, things, and ideas in the European and Mediterranean West during the second half of the first millennium CE. In so doing, its contributors explore the existence…