What is the Podestà?

Early in 1926, Premier Mussolini revived the long dormant office of podestà for the municipalities of Italy. Thenceforth the term has been frequently before the public. What is this office? And what is the significance of reviving a long forgotten term as its title? Divorced from the specialized significance that it had in Italy, the term was used in many places and times, ranging from the fringe of Roman antiquity down to the present day. The word itself, of course, is nothing but the Italian form of the good classical Latin potestas, with its simple meaning of “power.” We may be inclined to believe that the use of such an abstract term to signify the officer who held the “power” in city administration is a late development; yet there is an isolated example in Juvenal (lst-2nd cent, A.D.) where such a usage occurs. Juvenal is discoursing on the vanities of human desires, and is pointing specifically to the downfall of Sejanus, when he asks, “Would you rather choose to wear the bordered robe of the man now being dragged through the streets, or to be a magistrate at (the little towns of) Fidenae or Gabii, rendering judgment on weights and measures?” Some three centuries later, Possidius, in his life of St. Augustine, uses the term in connection with the Donatist controversy.