The Historian Francesco Guicciardini between Political Action and Historical Events

This article uses many different author's sources (from Diplomatic Letters to Historical Writing) in order to analyze Francesco Guicciardini's ways and instruments to describe of the Sack of Rome (1527). One of the main political events of his Age was envisaged by Guicciardini the Politician as a main actor, while referred to as a central event by Guicciardini the Historian in his later ‘Storia d’Italia’. The codification of a humanist tradition of this writing (e.g. the Latin translations by Celio Secondo Curione) and of an overwhelming ambiguous writing by an eyewitness homonym, contribute to both transform the relationship between the man and the event, and to preserve the humanist idea (Guicciardini would not have agreed with) that a good historian should have witnessed the facts he writes about.