A period of confusion and dispersion, marked by the abandoned ruins of a glorious past and still in search of new identity; see, for example, the verses of Manzoni's Adelchi:  Sergio Rovagnati defines the continuing negative prejudice against the Lombards as "a sort of "damnatio memoriae"", common to that given often to all the protagonists of the barbarian invasions. The most recent historiographical guidelines, however, have largely reassessed the Lombard era of the history of Italy. The German historian Jörg Jarnut pointed out all the elements that constitute the historical importance of the Lombard kingdom. The historical bipartition of Italy that has, for centuries, directed the North towards Central-Western Europe and the South, instead, to the Mediterranean area dates back to the separation between "Langobardia Major" and "Langobardia Minor", while Lombard law influenced the Italian legal system for a long time, and was not completely abandoned even after the rediscovery of Roman law in the 11th and 12th centuries. Lombard, a Germanic language, made a large contribution to the formation of the Italian language in the sense that it hastened the population's detachment from vulgar Latin, causing it to take on autonomous forms known as Neo-Latin. Regarding the role played by the Lombards within the emerging Europe, Jarnut shows that, after the decline of the kingdom of the Visigoths and during the period of weakness of the kingdom of the Franks in the Merovingian era, Pavia was about to take a guiding role for the West after determining, by tearing a large part of Italy from the dominance of the "Basileus", the final boundary line between the Latin-German West and the Greek-Byzantine East. The rise of the Lombards in Europe was halted, however, by the growing power of the Frankish kingdom under Charlemagne, who inflicted decisive defeats on the last kings of the Lombards. The military defeat, however, did not correspond to a disappearance of the Lombard culture: Claudio Azzara states that "the same Carolingian Italy is configured, in fact, as a Lombard Italy, in the constituent elements of society and culture". The persistent injury historiography on the "Dark Ages" has long cast shadows on the Lombard kingdom, averting the interest of writers from that period. Few literary works have been set in Italy between the 6th and 8th centuries; between them, relevant exceptions are those of Giulio Cesare Croce and Alessandro Manzoni.