Italy in the Writings of Slobodan Jovanović

Abstract

Slobodan Jovanović made frequent stays in Italy since his earliest childhood, which contributed to his thorough and comprehensive understanding of Italian history, politics, science, culture and arts. His father, Vladimir Jovanović, maintained close contact with Mazzini, whose liberal nationalism he embraced and followed. Some of their closest family members resided in Rome during the First World War, because Vladimir Jovanović’s sonin-law, Mihailo Ristić, served as Serbia’s minister to Italy (1914–17). For about half a century Slobodan Jovanović was an interpreter of Italian political history, of its influence on Serbian and Yugoslav history, and of the work of Italian statesmen and theorists, notably Machiavelli. In the 1930s he taught a doctoral course on Italian public law and corporate system. After the Second World War he lived in exile in London. Some of the works he published there showed that some solutions in the constitution of socialist Yugoslavia, presented as an original invention, had already existed in interwar Italian corporate law.