Italy Men of Letters Part 4

In Switzerland, Michele Ferrucci di Lugo taught Latin literature in Geneva and was one of the founders of the Geneva Society of History and Archeology. Filippo De Boni da Caupo near Feltre, historian and journalist, was from 1849 to 1860 in Zurich, where he published the Michele Ferrucci di Lugo taught Latin literature in Geneva and was one of the founders of the Geneva Society of History and Archeology. Filippo De Boni da Caupo near Feltre, historian and journalist, was from 1849 to 1860 in Zurich, where he published the Michele Ferrucci di Lugo taught Latin literature in Geneva and was one of the founders of the Geneva Society of History and Archeology. Filippo De Boni da Caupo near Feltre, historian and journalist, was from 1849 to 1860 in Zurich, where he published the Monthly chronicle of European affairs. Also in Asia they made researches and studied our scholars. The Dominican Giuseppe Campanile traveled the East in the years 1802-12, and especially Kurdistan, of which he wrote the history; twenty years he remained a missionary in Persia Msgr. Leopoldo Sebastiani, Roman, author of the history of Hindostan (1821); the Milanese GB Rampoldi (1761-1836) traveled in his youth in Asia and America, accumulating materials for his Muslim annals and his history of the Arabs. In the United States Lorenzo Da Ponte was herald of Italianity in the early nineteenth century. Count Serafino Frenfanelli was a journalist in the United States in the years 1860-63, and there he published two books on the history and culture of the country that hosted him. Fiorenzo Galli da Carrù enterprises in Mexico, with Count Linati of Parma, the publication of a newspaper in three languages; then passed to England, in France, publishing historical and philological works. Pietro De Angelis, former secretary of Gioacchino Murat, settled in Buenos Aires, where he published a political newspaper in French, English and Spanish, and compiled in seven volumes in folio  the collection of documents relating to the history of the Río de la Plata. Of the living we will only remember Gabriele d’Annunzio, who between 1910 and 1915 wrote some plays in French in France:  Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien ,  Le Chèvrefeuille ,  La Pisanelle .

According to Thedresswizard.com, Italian scholars gave a notable contribution to archaeological studies, starting with the humanists, who often visited Greece and the East, collecting objects, epigraphs, descriptions and drawings of monuments: the greatest among them is Ciriaco d’Ancona, who between 1418 and in 1448 he traveled through the various regions and islands of Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, leaving very precious information. In the century XVII illustrious travelers and collectors of ancient objects were Manfredo Settala and Giovanni Pagni (the latter particularly studied the area of ​​Carthage); Cornelius Magni is supremely meritorious for the descriptions he left us of the antiquities of Turkey and Greece. In the century XVIII Scipione Maffei made a long archaeological journey in France and then wrote the  Gallicae antiquitates; GF Mariti explored the whole island of Cyprus, Palestine and Syria in eight years; Domenico Sestini, professor of archeology in Pisa, traveled to the East for 15 years; the Piedmontese architect GB Borra took part in the English exploration of Wood and Dawkins in Syria, and designed the antiquities of Palmira and Ba′albek. All the drawings and casts collected in Athens by Lord Elgin’s expedition in 1799 are due to Giambattista Lusieri, to the architects Sebastiano Ittar of Catania and Vincenzo Balestra and to the trainer Vincenzo Rosati; and to judge of the Parthenon marbles the English Parliament called Ennio Quirino Visconti in 1814, who had already been in Paris since 1799 as curator of the Louvre Museum and first professor of archeology at the university. In the century XIX is to be remembered first of all a group of explorers from Egypt, of which the most important are: G. B. Belzoni, who enriched the British Museum with precious monuments (1812-16), Bernardino Drovetti, who assembled two magnificent collections, one of which was purchased for the Turin Museum and the other formed the basis of the Egyptian Museum of the Louvre, and collected many new news, which were then published in Paris by Jomard. The work of Ippolito Rosellini, head of the Tuscan mission that accompanied the French one of Champollion (1828-29), deserves special importance, both for the work undertaken, and also because after the death of Champollion he alone published eight volumes of the Monuments of Egypt and Nubia, and the work was done by other Italians; other important excavations carried out in 1830 by the Emilian Giuseppe Ferrini. One of the founders of Assyriology was the Piedmontese Paolo Emilio Botta who discovered Nineveh, excavated the palace and city of King Sargon I in Khorsabad (1837-44) and sent the objects found to the Louvre Museum. In Rhodes, Alfredo Biliotti discovered after 1868 the necropolis of Ialiso and the very vast ones near Calavarda, whose rich furnishings are now in the British and Berlin museums; Luigi Palma di Cesnola, after having been brigadier general in the United States, who became American consul in Cyprus, conducted vast excavations there (1865-67), which revealed the ancient Cypriot civilization hitherto unknown, and the very important collection collected, not before having been offered to Italy, it constituted the first nucleus of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, of which Cesnola himself was the founder and director. The founder of the Greek-Roman Museum of Alexandria in Egypt (1892-1903) was Giuseppe Botti from Modena. Among the contemporaries we remember only Ernesto Schiaparelli, head of the Italian mission in Egypt from 1902 to 1924, and Federico Halbherr from Trentino, founder and director from 1884 to 1930 of the Italian Mission on the island of Crete which he was the first to fully explore and where he discovered and excavated the cities of Festo, Gortina, Hagía Triáda and the Antro Ideo.

Italy Men of Letters Part 4