Extrait de l’article

Beyond Italy’s occasional wins or near-misses in the World Cup of soccer,people in general are not accustomed to thinking of Italians as being particularly athletic. Nor, when Michel de Montaigne comes to mind, dopeople associate sport with the diminutive philosophe from Bordeaux secluded on the top floor of his not quite ivory tower. It thus may seem that my subject is un peu tiré par les cheveux : using sport to link unathletic Montaigne with unathletic Italy seems both unnecessary and far-fetched. Butour perceptions here do not coincide with the facts. Italy has a long athletic tradition, which began in the seventh century B.C.E. with the introduction of chariot-racing and which was articulated by the Greek-style sports con-tests recounted in Book Five of Virgil’s Aeneid, one of the founding documents of the concept of Italia. That tradition continues to the present day : out of the thirty-six modern Olympic Summer and Winter Games in which Italy has participated, it has finished among the top ten medal winners twenty-nine times.

Athletic excellence was an equally strong component of Italian culturein the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The actual physical manifestations of sport in this period will be dealt with below, but as a preamble it must be mentioned that between 1450 and 1650 there were over eighty books in Italian or by Italians dealing wholly or partially with some aspect of athletic activity.

Lire la suite (Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme)