Simbologia e funzione delle feste identitarie in alcune città italiane fra XIII e XV secolo

This contribution offers a comparison between three cities of pre-modern Italy with three different forms of government: the republican Florence, the republican Venice (but with a closer form of oligarchic government respect to Florence) and the duchy of Milan. The point of view is that of rituals and civic feasts. The paper shows how Florence, Venice and Milan rouling classes created civic feasts to legitimate their power, using various communication and symbolic languages which reflected the three city-states political differences. The propaganda strategies are analized in a manifold variety of sources (narrative, iconographic, legislative, descriptive) with the final aim to underline how theatre and spectacle, in XIII-XVI centuries, were a crucial point of political negotiation between governments and governed