The first Romané groups appeared on the Italian peninsula when Humanism was already in full swing. It is therefore natural that humanists were the first intellectuals to expound speculations to their regard. In this paper I try to provide a general overview of the Italian authors who, especially between 1450 and 1550, contributed to such speculations and how they constructed them (sometimes in a different way from what occurred elsewhere). Interpretations on the Cingani that might seem fanciful today can be precisely explained if analysed by taking into consideration the philological conceptions and antiquarian research methods that those great humanists pursued. The insistent search for their “origin” based on biblical, Talmudic, Latin, Greek or Byzantine sources, was part of the general humanistic methodology, but also of the general hermeneutic importance given to genealogical reconstructions regarding persons and peoples to explain the political relationships of dominance and submission in progress or to be pursued. I will try to show how the analogical reasoning implemented was often philologically manipulated in order to demonstrate the preconceived representations from which it came. The astrological and/or cosmographic anthropologies within which theories on the mythical-historical derivation of the Cingani were conceived become authentic moral philosophies used to explain their innate and intrinsic wickedness and abjection. They clarify and justify the expulsion policies of the peninsula’s states, which began at the end of the fifteenth century, reaching their quantitative peak in the mid-sixteenth century. Given the prestige that humanists enjoyed, their words would contribute to the construction of a centuries-old defamation. Even if figuratively, already at the end of the fifteenth century an Italian poet identified the Cingani as a “ mala razza ” (bad race) and, from this point of view, the article aims to contribute to the history of racist antiziganism/antigypsyism, rather than to the history of the Roma, about whom our authors told us little or nothing. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .
L. Piasere (Fri,) studied this question.