The role played by Lombard intellectuals in the early production of Charlemagne’s court is well known: the grammarian Peter of Pisa, the theologian Paulinus of Aquileia and the historian Paul the Deacon found favour with the Frankish king thanks to their literary talents. These men were the paragons of a Lombard palace culture and education rooted in the study of the Roman and late antique poets and in the mastery of the arts of speech. The analysis of the poems produced by Lombard scholars attending the Carolingian court and the examination of school miscellanies produced in late eighth- and ninth-century Italy highlight the distinctiveness of a culture in which epideictic literature and Ciceronian rhetoric featured prominently. This unveils the survival of an advanced education, the origins of which can be traced back to late antiquity and, more importantly, such a study brings out continuities in the literary culture of early medieval Italy. Here, a rhetorically elaborated and politically engaged production – written and oral – continued to be favoured in the centres and among the elites more closely connected to the court, thus showing that no cultural break was brought about by Charlemagne’s conquest of the Lombard kingdom.

That the kingdom of Italy was ‘Carolingian’ was obvious to everyone in the ninth century. Political integration was achieved. By the 810s, one generation after the conquest, the ruling counts were Franks, Alemans, Bavarians. With Louis II, Italy had a king physically present from 840, and from 850 an emperor totally devoted to the kingdom. Legislation, justice, ecclesiastical reforms were going in the same direction on both sides of the Alps. By contrast, the area of culture illustrates the limits of integration. Of the 7,650 manuscripts attributed to the ninth century and summarily catalogued by Bernhard Bischoff, not even one in ten was copied in the peninsula. Was the need for books less urgent here than in the north? The type of intellectual production was also different. The genres considered as ‘typically’ Carolingian – the exegetical commentaries, the mirrors of princes, the theological and doctrinal treatises – these are decidedly not the work of Italy, or of Italians. Not only was Italy not producing much, but it was not very receptive to what was going on elsewhere. It seems to be because the culture of the kingdom of Italy had a strong secular stamp, which distinguished it from that of the others.