The Italian critic Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883) identified Italianness with backwardness in order to oppose it to European modernity and promote a process of Europeanization of Italy. Two targets stood out in his attack on Italian backwardness: Chivalry and the Academies. A century and a half later we are able to acknowledge the continuity rather than the break between Italian early modernity and European modernity, revisiting a biased paradigm that no longer works and reassessing the historical importance of Chivalry and the Academies as cultural mediators. Divided into three sections...