Senato sine fine

This paper opens by examining the demise of the Roman Senate between Justinian’s reconquest and the early seventh century, when the assembly gradually lost its role within the res publica until it disappeared altogether. The article then turns to later continuist interpretations of the Senate’s history, developed mainly in Italy between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. This tradition imagined the Senate’s survival into the Middle Ages as a means of legitimising papal authority or a secular civic heritage. Under Fascism, these ideas acquired new political resonances: Pietro Fedele and Arrigo Solmi wove the Senate’s supposed continuity into a narrative of uninterrupted Roman identity, while the recovery of the Curia Iulia provided symbolic staging. In this light, the Senate appears less as a vanished institution than as a lasting emblem of national identity and historical destiny