Romano, Santi

Santi Romano was born in Palermo, Sicily on January 31, 1875. His origins had a notable impact on his legal training, as Palermo was the cradle of a host of renewed legal studies that changed once and for all the way of approaching public law in Italy. His teacher, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, was both a leading statesman and an innovator of the notion and practice of public and administrative law. The young Romano contributed to a seminal collection of volumes, edited by Orlando, devoted to Italian administrative law, Primo trattato completo di diritto amministrativo italiano (First Complete Treatise on Italian Administrative Law), published between 1900 and 1915. The importance Orlando and his many collaborators attached to such a monumental scholarly enterprise should not go unnoticed: in his preface to the first volume, Orlando emphasized his and the other contributors’ conscious, and eventually successful, attempt at constructing an Italian school of public law. This collection of writings, he claimed, was the necessary counterpoint to the growing expansion of the state’s competences in the public realm. While in the past, Italian scholars had been heavily influenced by the French lawyers who had been working and mulling over the Code Napoléon and, subsequently, by the German pandectists, Orlando insisted that the specialization and evolution of the Italian state called for a full-fledged “homegrown” scholarly apparatus. After obtaining his degree at the University of Palermo, Romano wholeheartedly adhered to this ambitious project.