His insistence on methodical source-based research, and on excluding from serious historical scholarship the mythologising of contemporary romanticists and politicians, led to him being characterised as a prominent representative of the first generation of Risorgimento revisionist historians.
[5] At the beginning of October 1888 he enrolled as a newly qualified teacher at the "ginnasio" at Recanati, away to the east, on the far side of the Apennine Mountains, where he stayed for barely more than a year.
His superb teaching skills had been noted and would always count in his favour, but the historical interpretations and conclusions at which he arrived - especially with regard to a subject as close to the hearts of patriotic Italians as the Risorgimento - could divide opinions.
[3][7] Between January 1915 and September 1920, then again during the three academic years from 1923 till 1926 and thereafter permanently he became an associate of the Accademia dei Lincei after which he was able to dedicate himself full time to university-level research and teaching.
The appointments commission recorded some harsh criticisms against Rosi, citing his "poor judgement of documents and facts" and also commented adversely on his "historiographical reconstruction" and authorship.
A particularly fervent critic, and a man of powerful influence, was the Hegelian philosopher turned fascist politician (and for eighteen months between 1922 and 1924 Italian Minister for Education) Giovanni Gentile, who as early as June 1918, when addressing the faculty council, asserted that Rosi "lacked basic knowledge" and that his written work was "like a chronicle", before concluding that he was not persuaded that Rosi was as good a teacher as [some] people said.
In his diary he was severely critical of the government's decision to lead Italy into the First World War and the abrupt (unexplained at the time) change in alliances that directly preceded it.
Deeply attached to his Catholic faith, Rosi was critical of the 1929 "Lateran treaty" because of the way in which, by institutionalising the partial return of temporal power to the Holy See, he saw it as a step back from the separation between church and state which had been a major achievement of the Risorgimento.
In 1931 the government made it mandatory for university teachers to swear an oath of loyalty to the party: Rosi complied in what he evidently saw as a meaningless gesture which would make no difference to him: he had never been politically engaged in the first place.
[1] Rosi himself tended to hold back from pronouncing too many verdicts on history, but the passage of time nevertheless clarified his own inclination to root Italian unification firmly in the eighteenth century, rather than as some sort of newly discovered nineteenth century manifestation of realpolitik, rampant nationalism and the self-perpetuating imposition across the western half of the continent of Anglo-French style nation states.
He had originally sought out Mordini in order to try and obtain the great man's backing over the threatened nationalisation of the Royal College of Lucca, following a ministerial decision of Education Minister Guido Baccelli in 1899.
[10] Keen to contextualise the information he was able to distil from the Mordini archive, Rosi also sought out some of the few remaining survivors of Risorgimento incidents and events, such as Luigi Guglielmo Cambray-Digny (1820-1906) and Giovanni Cadolini (1830-1917), in pursuit of documents and personal testimonies.
Several of these were well disposed to his researches and keen to help, notably the children and remoter heirs of Carlo Cairoli, as well as surviving members of Angelo Bargoni's family.
[1][11] Rosi was successful in attracting contributions from some of the most widely respected scholars of the age, such as Benedetto Croce and Pasquale Villari, as well as from other well-known writers such as Ferdinando Martini.
There were also contributions from known Risorgimento scholars such as Giuseppe Gallavresi, and from a younger generation of historians, including Ersilio Michel and Alberto Maria Ghisalberti.
Some had unlikely backgrounds: Gaetano Badii, who would produce dozens of entries for the "Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale", was an accountant by training and profession, even if in retrospect he is better remembered by scholars for his contributions as an historian.
The long careful introduction that he added provided him with the chance to set out, more unambiguously than before, his own assessment that the origins of the Risorgimento were to be found in the writings and activities of eighteenth century Italian reformist thinkers such as Pagano and Beccaria.