BERTOLA DE' GIORGI, AURELIO. — Polygraph and poet, born in Rimini on 4 August 1753, died there on 30 June 1798. An Olivetan monk, he later served in the military in Hungary; he re-entered the Order and was sent as a lecturer to Monteoliveto in Siena, where he wrote, in the Youngian style, the Notti clementine (Arezzo 1775) on the death of Clement XIV.
He taught history at the Naval Academy in Naples; ten years later, he went to Vienna, laid aside his habit, and became a simple abbot. He was the first to disseminate knowledge of German literature in Italy (Idea della poesia alemana, Naples 1779, and Idea della bella letteratura alemana, Lucca 1784). In 1784 he was called to lecture on universal history at the University of Pavia: here, in 1787, he published the treatise Della filosofia della storia, the first Italian book to bear this title. In 1787, travelling through Switzerland, he visited Gessner in Zurich, whose Idilli he had translated and about whom he wrote the Elogia (Pavia 1789). He travelled along the banks of the Rhine, which he described in the Lettere renane (Rimini 1795), defined by Carducci as «the first Romantic journey and voyage as a tourist». In 1797 he became a member of the central administration of Emilia and served as compiler of the Giornale patriottico. Called to join the Committee of Public Education, he drew up a Piano di pubblico istruzione. The Rime e prose, published in Genoa in 1797, were placed on the Index by decree of 23 June 1817.
An accomplished polygraph, B. was above all a poet: a highly prolific poet and, here and there, a graceful one. The six volumes of the 1815 Ancona edition of his «approved» Poesie contain fables, epigrams, odes, idylls, jests, ottave, sestinas, tercets, sonnets, and poems translated from German. The best of them is found in certain charming little fables, indulgent toward the century of beauty spots and cicisbei, and in several idylls and jests, or canzonette, in which the B.’s «sensibility», halfway between the Arcadian and the pre-Romantic, pours forth musically. He was the prototype of the gallant, sentimental abbot, a follower of Rousseau, of the second half of the eighteenth century, just as the prototype of the low-mindedly Epicurean gallant abbot of the first half had been Frugoni.
B., edited by A. Baldini, Florence 1947; W. Binni, Preromanticismo italiano, Naples 1948, chap. VII. Giulio Natali