The renewed interest shown by jurists in the thinking of Francesco Scaduto, restorer and builder of ecclesiastical law in post-unification Italy, and Pasquale S. Mancini, founder of the Italian school of private international law and a leading figure in nineteenth-century ecclesiastical legislation, seems to be more than mere coincidence. The most intriguing clue is the timing of this “rediscovery”, which for both began at the turn of the last century, at a time when the legal world was already seeking to address two major and ambivalent issues: the progressive integration of legal systems that were losing their claim to exclusivity while trying to maintain their identity; the protection of fundamental rights, which is both a connecting element and a possible source of interference in the inter-systemic dimension.

It is therefore not surprising to see in this recent rediscovery a similar, twofold urgency: the search for approaches that are not conditioned by intrinsically statist/exclusivist conceptions and are inclined towards the idea of a system that is essentially “open” to the contribution of “foreign”/'other' values, such as confessional ones; the attempt to translate into postmodern language the statements of principle of the time on the delineation of margins and methods of protection of the basic (and identity-related) individual instances involved in the light of equally basic requirements of the civil order.

The volume draws inspiration from this dual tendency to proceed with the recovery of ancient interpretations, approaches and solutions, and to examine their influence on subsequent legal analyses, on the basis of the hypothesis that the former, once “filtered” and recontextualised, may once again appear potentially applicable to contexts that have changed enormously in the meantime, with regard to the salient issue of the integration of civil law by canon law, and the related issue of safeguarding the freedom of believers.