Talk:Monza

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[edit] Theodoric the Lombard (etc)

I am about to remove a sentence from the article, and place it here for safety

Selected by the Lombard king Theodoric, for his capital, and its first important associations are with Theodelinda, the Lombard queen.

The problem is that it is not at all clear to me which Theodoric is meant, whether he was a Lombard (none of those referenced by Theoderic are, and whether he really did make Monza his capital. And if so when, why or for how long. The claim seems to go back to the Enc. Brit. 1911 article. It is not repeated in the long it.wikipedia article, and google isn’t helping. (My guess, for what it is worth, is that we are talking one Theodoric the Great, who was an Ostrogoth not a Lombard, made his capital in Ravenna and was King of Italy-ish 493ish–526ish.)

I have done some simple restructuring of the article: more with the intention of clarifying what’s missing/unbalanced than of doing anything permanent. I have also done a little copy-editing and sense-making of parts (by no means all) of the article. The problem is that I am no kind of expert here and so it is quite probable that I increased clarity at the expense of accuracy. In other words, some of it may probably be sheer nonsense. In the almost total absence of citations—also in the much fuller, and better structured Italian Wikipedia article—it is hard for me to check where I have gone wrong.

Anyway, I’ll have another look at it in the morning. (Bugger—it is morning here in UTC!) Ian Spackman 06:38, 13 February 2006 (UTC)