In the 19th century, classical historicism looked at Livy and other classical historians, such as Thucydides, to find the roots of modern history writing, and it looked back at the late medieval discovers of the text of Livy, from Petrarch and Lovato Lovati to Lorenzo Valla, as its ideal predecessors. If reading and commenting on Livy was considered a foundation for historical science, the 19th century narrative of his rediscovery was one made of manuscripts, philology, and textual traditions, and one of the triumph of rationality over the authority of sources. In my paper I shall argue that the story of the rediscovery of Livy as a triumph of humanist rationality can be contrasted by a more cultural and anthropological narrative which focuses on rituals, myths, and embodiment. In the same period of the rediscovery of the text of Livy, the discovery in Padua of a Roman imperial inscription mentioning a certain Titus Livius led to the belief that this was the tombstone of Livy. At the same time, the Paduans discovered a body believed to be of the Trojan hero Antenor, the founder of the city according to Livy. Lovato Lovati was so enthusiastic of this discovery that he wrote an epitaph for the spectacular medieval tomb of Antenor still visible in Padua, and wanted to be buried next to the hero. Petrarch wrote a letter addressed to Livy while he was at the monastery of S. Giustina, where the alleged gravestone was kept. In the early 15th century CE, the Paduans believed that they had discovered the body of Livy, and the local chancellor Sicco Polenton promoted the erection of a spectacular tomb for the historian. At the court of Alfonso of Aragon, where a young Lorenzo Valla cemented his scholarly reputation, there was the habit of the so-called ‘hour of the book’: the learned men of the court would gather with the king to read classical texts and comment on them. Lively arguments would originate in these occasions, and we know that the ‘hour of the book’ was essential to promote Valla’s work on the text of Livy. Alfonso’s love for Livy would go as far as to request from the Paduans to send to him a bone from the body of Livy, a request that they were happy to comply with, and that shows the quasi-religious veneration of the King for the historian. This shows that late Medieval Italy did not necessarily see a humanist foundation of future historical science, but rather the construction of the foundation myth of such science, that as all powerful myths was rooted in embodied, spatial practices focused around the tomb and the body of the historian, and ritualised practices such as ‘the hour of the book’.