Hugo Grotius and Alberico Gentili: Visions from the Nineteenth-Century Italian International Law Perspective

Abstract The paper deals with the construction of a “Gentilian moment” in the second half of the nineteenth century. With this wording I mean here the surprising movement that began in the 1870s by virtue of a plurality of factors that are examined in this article. This development placed Alberico Gentili, after a long period of relative neglect, at the centre of the scene of an international law that was undergoing a process of transformation and consolidation. One of the consequences of this was that never before the last decades of the 19th century had the names and works of Gentili and Grotius been so closely intertwined. Up until this phase theirs had been above all a relationship between a trailblazer and someone held to be the undisputed founder of a discipline. Until the 1870s Gentili had thus been seen in Italy as a distinguished figure but not yet as a canonical author, let alone as the co-founder with Grotius of modern international law.