BERTOLA DE' GIORGI, AURELIO. - Polymath and poet, b. at Rimini on 4 Aug. 1753, d. there on 30 June 1798. An Olivetan monk, then a soldier in Hungary; he returned to the Order and was sent as a lecturer to Monteoliveto in Siena, where he wrote in 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, discarded the habit, and became a simple abbot. He was the first to spread knowledge of German literature in Italy (Idea della poesia alemana, Naples 1779, and Idea della bella letteratura alemana, Lucca 1784). In '84 he was called to lecture on universal history at the University of Pavia: here in '87 he published the treatise Della filosofia della storia, which is the first Italian book to bear this title. In 1787, journeying through Switzerland, he visited Gessner at Zurich, whose Idylls he had translated and whose Elogia he wrote (Pavia 1789). He traveled along the banks of the Rhine, which he described in the Lettere renane (Rimini 1795), defined by Carducci as «the first romantic and tourist-style journey». In '97 he was part of the central administration of Emilia, and was a compiler of the Giornale patriottico. Called to be part of the Committee of Public Instruction, he drew up a Piano di pubblico istruzione. The Rime e prose, published at Genoa in 1797, were placed on the Index by decree of 23 June 1817.
A polymath teacher, B. was above all a poet: a most prolific poet and, here and there, graceful. The 6 volumes of the Ancona 1815 edition of his «approved» Poesie contain fables, epigrams, odes, idylls, jeux d'esprit, octaves, sestinas, tercets, sonnets and poems translated from German. The best is in certain gentle little fables, indulgent toward the age of beauty spots and cicisbei, and in some idylls and jeux d'esprit, or canzonette, in which the «sensibility» — halfway between Arcadian and pre-Romantic — of B. pours forth musically; he was the prototype of the sentimental gallant abbot, a follower of Rousseau, of the second half of the eighteenth century, just as the prototype of the basely Epicurean gallant abbot of the first half had been Frugoni.
Bibliography7 works
B., edited by A. Baldini, Florence 1947; W. Binni, Preromanticismo italiano, Naples 1948, ch. VII.
Giulio Natali