WI:Cola di Rienzi held on to power and united Italy?

Short answer : no.

Long answer : He wasn't even able to really hold power in Rome to begin with, trying to create a podestate as it was the custom in italian city-states, and his success as revolt leader made him really quickly have desillusion of grandeurs (such as claiming to be the illegitimate son of Henri VII).

Not only mentally unstable, he didn't had access to a real military power, nobles being still a strong opponent faction with their clientele, to efficiently fight his opponents let alone a military power able to take on HRE.

He's the protoype of italian populist, as with Savonarole, whom ambitions and objectives were too much out of touch with reality, and eventually rejected by the people that put him in power.
 
What if Cola di Rienzi was able to hold on to power and unite Italy. Could Tribune Rienzi rule over an Italian confederation of states? Could he create a new Roman Empire?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola_di_Rienzi

It is pretty darn unlikely.
Uniting Italy in that age was a hell of a challenge, the place was on average incredibly fractitious. Actually, holding to power in any single Italian city was a hell of a challenge. He could probably manage Central Italy with difficulty, but beyond that, it's bound to extremely hard.
 
Short answer : no.

Long answer : He wasn't even able to really hold power in Rome to begin with, trying to create a podestate as it was the custom in italian city-states, and his success as revolt leader made him really quickly have desillusion of grandeurs (such as claiming to be the illegitimate son of Henri VII).

Not only mentally unstable, he didn't had access to a real military power, nobles being still a strong opponent faction with their clientele, to efficiently fight his opponents let alone a military power able to take on HRE.

He's the protoype of italian populist, as with Savonarole, whom ambitions and objectives were too much out of touch with reality, and eventually rejected by the people that put him in power.

I would compare him to Masaniello more than Savonarola, but for the little I know about it, I concur with the above.
 
Hitler was fond of the opera Rienzi by Wagner. (Which Wagner himself had virtually disowned by the time of his death.) And seems to have missed Wagner's point, as usual.

That is pretty much the only real connection between the pair--Hitler loved a fictional work based loosely on the historical figure.

(And another reason, albeit a comparatively minor one, to hate Hitler--in an effort to preserve the opera, he gathered every extant complete copy of the score. Which resulted in their being destroyed by Allied bombing. So now, every performance is based on existing abridged scores. Which would probably be the case anyway--unabridged it was roughly five to six hours long, and Wagner thought the damn thing was an overblown mess--but it would still be nice to have the complete scores around...)
 
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