BERTOLA DE' GIORGI, AURELLO. - Polymath and poet, born in Rimini on 4 August 1753, died there on 30 June 1798. Olivetan monk, then a soldier in Hungary; he returned to the Order and was sent to Monte Oliveto 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, left the 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: there in 1787 he published the treatise *Della filosofia della storia*, the first Italian book to bear this title. In 1787, while traveling through Switzerland, he visited Gessner in Zurich, whose *Idylls* he had translated and for whom he wrote an *Elogio* (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 touristic journey.”
In 1797 he became part of the central administration of Emilia and compiled the *Giornale patriottico*. Called to serve on the Committee for Public Instruction, he drafted a *Piano di pubblica istruzione*. His *Rime e prose*, published in Genoa in 1797, were placed on the Index by decree of 23 June 1817.
An ingenious polymath, B. was above all a poet: a most prolific and, here and there, graceful one. The 6 volumes of the Ancona 1815 edition of his “approved” *Poesie* contain fables, epigrams, odes, idylls, jests, ottava rima, sestinas, terza rima, sonnets, and poems translated from German. The best is found in certain delicate little fables, indulgent to the age of moles and cicisbees, and in some idylls and jests, or little songs, in which the “sensibility” of B., straddling Arcadia and preromanticism, musically unfolds. He was the prototype of the sentimental “galant abbot,” a follower of Rousseau, of the second half of the 18th century, just as Frugoni had been the prototype of the crudely epicurean “galant abbot” of the first half.