BARTOLI, ADOLFO

BARTOLI, ADOLFO. – Critic and scholar, born in Fivizzano (Massa) in 1833, died in Genoa in 1894. Together with Vieneseux, he collaborated on the Archivio storico italiano; from 1860 to 1868 he was a teacher in secondary schools, and from 1869 at the Scuola superiore di commercio in Venice. In 1874 he was called to the Florentine Institute of Advanced Studies to teach Italian literature. At first a student of philosophy, history, and politics, B. then devoted himself to establishing the direction of literary criticism, “bringing it back from the De Sanctisian aesthetic conception to the historical tradition,” supplemented by the more rigorously scientific method.

In addition to publishing the Lettere del Beato Colombini (Lucca 1850), the Vite di uomini illustri di Vesp. da Bisticci (Florence 1859), and the Viaggi di Marco Polo (ibid. 1863), B. wrote a large-scale Storia della letteratura italiana, which he carried through to the seventh volume and no further than Petrarch. It is still read with pleasure today for its clear and lively style, its abundance of information, and the spirit that B. brings to the narrative; yet the criterion he employed in his judgments is found to be simplistic, consisting in the “exaltation of pagan humanism against Christian asceticism” (B. Croce).

BARTOLI, ADOLFO. – Physicist and chemist, born in Florence on 19 March 1851 and died in Pavia on 18 July 1896; he is to be remembered for his work in electrochemistry, especially on the electrical conductivity of solutions, and for other noteworthy studies on light and heat. In his papers on the constitution of electrodes (1882), he maintained that in a conducting liquid the dissolved substance is dissociated into parts which, carried by the electric current, migrate to the electrodes and are thereby separated. This is Arrhenius’s hypothesis, which took its name from the Swedish scientist who reintroduced it in 1884. Electrolysis suggested to B. a new method for synthesizing organic substances, using carbon electrodes; on this subject he worked for many years in collaboration with his colleague and friend Giorgio Papasogli. B. won the chair of mathematical physics at the University of Palermo (1886), but taught at Sassari, Florence, and Catania, where he directed the Observatory. In 1893 he succeeded Giovanni Cantoni in the chair of physics at the University of Pavia.