Early medieval Italy was the most densely urbanized part of western Eurasia until the eleventh century. This chapter examines the practices of urbanism in the Italian peninsula, considering the social and political implications of living in cities and how they shaped the ways of life and patterns of governance in Latin- and Greek-speaking areas of the Italian peninsula. Special consideration is paid to how the Carolingian conquest and Frankish control of parts of Italy might have challenged the roles played by cities in economic and political life in those areas. Urbanism and investment in cities were tools for Carolingian rulers of Italy and their contemporaries.

Within their projects of religious beliefs and practices’ standardization, Carolingian rulers looked to Rome as an area providing authoritative traditions, norms and objects. Roman saints and their relics perfectly matched the Carolingian politics on sanctity and its exploitation. Yet Roman relics were not the only ones circulating in the empire. For instance, relics of different origins were assignedimportant roles in the social and political integration of Italian local elites within the landscape of Carolingian power. This chapter focusses on north-eastern Italy, underlining how its Carolingian bishops and counts used and promoted saints and relics by the means of hagiographical texts in order to raise consensus for themselves and the authority they represented. First I consider the use of local saints by the bishops of Verona as tools for self-legitimation and for pursuing personal aims. Then I turn to the role of hagiography in the dispute for primacy between Aquileia and Grado, a case of contrasting re-elaborations of previous texts and traditions in order to support claims in the present. Finally, attention is paid to the transfer of a Roman holy body to Cysoing by marquis Eberhard of Friuli, and to the strategies of memorial reshaping connected to it.