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Unlike our own constitutions, the institutional fabric of the Roman Republic can hardly be grasped in legal terms, nor be understood outside of its place within the social order. This raises the question of how to actually understand the Republican order, its components and their eventual interplay, and the ways by which they formed a functioning whole. These problems relate to the crucial prerequisites (the legacy of the regal period; the patriciate; the foundation of the Republic; the magistrates; the so-called struggle of the orders) as well as the popular assemblies and the basic conditions which pervaded the functioning of the Republican order and the modes in which it was enacted – in the end under the control of the leading senators. It will follow that the political bodies were so deeply both entangled and conditioned by the populus’ peculiarities that – in a sense – the citizenry as a whole did not possess its order but rather incorporated it through its hierarchical structure, its internal ties, its institutions as well as the prevailing intellectual, mental and ritualistic orientations and dispositions. The order thus eludes even the most sophisticated conceptual classification or systematic reconstruction. It was done by those who lived it. And to take effect it was dependent on a productive relation between liberty and responsibility.

How do politics and civil society develop a symbolic language which corresponds to the nineteenth-century experience of modernity and societal change? Taking post-risorgmental Italy as an example, this article examines local and transnational languages of sacralised politics, identifying symbolic forms which relate back to established traditions of local religious praxis while at the same time integrating international models of political ritual. The political cult of the dead as well as the staging of local identity within the new and still largely unfamiliar nation state offer historiens a rich field of research. Of particular interest are the ways in which Italian democrates and republicans confront political developments in the United States. Taking account of tensions between local, national and transnational symbolic language, the article demonstrates how context, usage and reception offer insights also into the political content of rituals. In Italy, since the 1860s, we notice in particular new municipal and civic frameworks for the sacralisation of politics, contributing to a new and different staging of nationality which at the same time relaxes estabished tensions between state and nation.