BETTINELLI, Saverio. – Jesuit, man of letters, born in Mantua on 18 July 1718, died there on 13 September 1808. He entered the Society in 1736 and taught literature in the colleges of Venice, Parma, and Verona; he made several journeys, one of which took him to visit Voltaire on behalf of the Polish court at Nancy. After the suppression of the Society in 1773, he returned to Mantua, though he took refuge in Verona during the French occupation of 1796.
He wrote poetry, dramas, and learned dissertations of some merit; yet his name remains sadly linked to the ten *Lettere di Virgilio ai legislatori della nuova Arcadia* (Venice 1757), in which, while aiming to dissuade writers from slavish imitation of classical authors, he fell into the opposite extreme. He confused imitators with the authors they imitated, demolishing and condemning the latter without mercy, Dante especially, whom he accused of being “arid in invention, malicious in purpose, and uncultured in style.” He granted barely a thousand lines as good, declaring the rest worthless (cf. *Lettere* 1–3). Such hasty, caustic judgments provoked a strong and sometimes exaggerated reaction, beginning with C. Gozzi down to nearly our own day, and their effects were felt not only by the author but also by the Jesuits, who were accused, among other things, of anti-Dantism. It is true that in criticizing Dante, B. merely gave more heated and insolent expression to ideas common among many of his contemporaries (cf. Federico, op. cit., pp. 122–50), and that B. himself called the *Lettere virgiliane* “a capuchin’s frock, a folly, a joke undertaken as a duty” (cf. Marchesan, op. cit., p. 182). Yet the fact remains that the work is a deplorable error, a judgment maintained substantially even in his later *Lettere inglesi* (Venice 1766) and in the *Dissertazione accademica sopra Dante* (Alfieri, op. cit., pp. 257–96). This has obscured the lasting literary and patriotic value of other works by B., such as *Il Risorgimento d’Italia negli studi, nelle arti e nei costumi dopo il Mille* (2 vols., Venice 1775) and *Discorsi delle lettere e delle arti mantovane* (Mantua 1774).