Ritorno al passato. I Manin: dal contado fiorentino alle glorie della Serenissima

Emigration can offer great opportunities to those aspiring to raise their social status, and not only in economic terms. This was the experience of Manino di Buccio and his descendants. Leaving behind the Florentine countryside, in the first half of the fourteenth century, the Manins set down roots in the Patriarchate of Aquileia. Here they laid the foundations for a position of power that some centuries later would permit their descendant Lodovico Manin to become the last Doge of the Republic of Venice. Active in three different territories, and relying on the fact that it was impossible for information to circulate, the family constructed its own mythological past. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century members of the family hid or denied certain details concerning the origins of the family, and encouraged writers to invent a glorious past for it. So it was that the Manins reached the summit of power, convincing everyone of their noble Roman, Fiesolean and Florentine origins. The impossibility of verifying certain fictional constructions often resulted in their being uncritically accepted until very recently.