Database

Search


Database Contributors: Eleonora Angella, Stefano Miani, Alice Petrocchi, Chiara Trinchese

DOI: 10.35948/DILEF/QuestioniOnore/04

The Sources and Studies section brings together both primary historical sources relating to the Italian context—from the pre-Unification period to the end of Fascism—and a comprehensive modern bibliography on the subject. The aim is to provide a valuable tool for the in-depth study of dueling and the culture of honor in Italy, catering to both specialized scholars and interested general readers.

The sources, which can be accessed via the search interface, are organized by theme and genre. Where available, a link is provided to the digitized version of the resource.Free-text search is available across all fields. The search is not case-sensitive and does not distinguish between accented and non-accented characters. You can use the wildcard character (*) to broaden your results: for example, the string duell* will return not only duello and duelli, but also duellante, duellatore, duellatrice, duellomania, etc."

  • Treatises
  • This section contains texts of various genres, including newspaper articles, scholarly studies, manuals, and treatises, all centered on the themes of dueling, fencing, and the culture of honor. By examining this collection, one can retrace the broad, decades-long debate over the legitimacy of dueling—an issue that sparked significant controversy and prompted extensive legal and moral reflection.

  • News and Social Customs
  • This section contains news reports and articles on social customs dedicated to disputes of honor.

  • Codes
  • This section contains the criminal codes and codes of criminal procedure of unified Italy that were used to prosecute and punish dueling—an offense under our legal system until 1999. Also included in this section are the so-called "chivalric codes" (codici cavallereschi). These manuals, modeled after formal legal texts, regulated the practice of dueling by establishing the rules that every gentleman was expected to follow in matters of honor.

  • Literature
  • This section includes novels, short stories, poetic works, and memoirs that explore, in various ways, the themes of dueling and honor. These literary pages allow us to reconstruct the cultural imagination that fueled both the popularity and the critique of the practice: from the chivalric legacy found in early Risorgimento novels to the works of the first fifteen years of the twentieth century that attest to the decline of the phenomenon.

  • Drama
  • This section features a selection of texts that brought the duel to the contemporary stage. The popularity of the theater, and especially of the melodrama, ensured a wide circulation of performances centered on dueling and matters of honor, thereby leaving a lasting impression on the collective imagination.

  • Cinema
  • This section features a selection of films in which the duel plays a significant role.

  • Dictionaries
  • This section collects resources for lexicographical research dedicated to the study of the lexicon of dueling.


Bibliography brings together contemporary studies dedicated to dueling and the concept of honor. It includes works such as monographs, essays, and exhibition catalogues that analyze the history, evolution, and cultural impact of the duel within Italian and European society. The list is arranged in chronological order.