Incendi e altre catastrofi urbane. Padova e Verona nelle fonti annalistiche, epigrafiche e letterarie di età presignorile

Padua and Verona – two cities comparable in size, geographical position and historico-political events – are compared in their urban making and breaking up in the preseignory time, as transmitted by literary, annalistic and epigraphic sources. Considering the two cities mainly from the point of view of fire catastrophes, a different cultural evaluation of fires is observed in the sources: true epoch divides and manifestations of divine will in Padua; just an inevitable consequence of an unceasing civil war, without any further meaning, in Verona. The same difference between the two approaches to the event of fire clearly appears in the way the annalistic sources of Padua and Verona present, from the opposite points of view, the very same events, produced by the direct military confrontation of the two cities along the border of their respective territories during the first ezzelinian age, i.e. the fires of Vicenza in 1236 and of Montagnana in 1242. In turn, this leads to reconsidering the origins and cultural identity of the author of the Chronicon Marchiae Tarvisinae et Lombardiae, which since the 16th century used to be labelled as the work of an anonymous ‘Paduan monk’, but in 1916 was rather attributed to a Veronese or somebody living in Verona between 1289 and 1293.