Studying the Orient in Rome. The birth of the Scuola Orientale

A milestone in the journey towards self-definition which Italy’s Asian studies scholars embarked upon in the second half of the 19th century, the establishment of the Scuola Orientale (1903- 1904) within the University of Rome’s Facoltà di Filosofia e Lettere [Faculty of Arts and Humanities] was a crucial stage in the development of this field in Italy. Relying on documents held in Sapienza’s Archivio storico, this paper aims to retrace the events that led to the Scuola Orientale’s foundation, situating them not only in the context of the blossoming of Oriental studies in Rome and the University of Rome, but also against the backdrop of their progressive emergence in Italy between the late 19th century and the early 20th century. After analysing the issues that the Scuola Orientale’s board was faced with at its first meetings, the essay moves on to describe the main pathways the school took by giving an account of the work of its leading scholars up to the 1910s, when the retirement of Ignazio Guidi and Celestino Schiaparelli marked the end not only of a chapter in the school’s history, characterised by a generation of scholars that supported its creation and were instrumental in its establishment, but also of a whole intellectual season in Rome’s Oriental studies.