BINDI, ENRICO. — Bishop, writer, born at Canapale (Pistoia) on 29 September 1812, died at Pistoia on 3 June 1876. For 24 years, until 1856, he was an accomplished professor of literature at the Forteguerri lycée in Pistoia, then rector until 1859, when he had to withdraw because he was considered to hold antiliberal views. But as early as 1861 he took up the chair of theology at the seminary, of which he was rector at the same time, until in 1857 he was appointed bishop of Pistoia and Prato, and in 1871 archbishop of Siena.
He first demonstrated his literary ability through his commentaries on the Latin classics in the Prato collection: Caesar (1844–45), Horace (1850), Plautus and Terence (1853), adding substantial introductory studies on the authors and on Latin comic theatre, which, collected together, subsequently formed the volume Scritti sulla letteratura latina (Florence 1865); and then through his classical translation of the Confessions of St Augustine, published in Barbera’s Collezione Diamante (ibid. 1864), and later in a separate edition with the addition of the translation of the Life of the Saint written by Possidius (ibid. 1869). Also worthy of note are the prefaces to Davanzati’s Histories (2 vols., ibid. 1852–57) and to Arcangeli’s Poems and Prose (ibid. 1857). Equal dignity and urbanity are found in the Panegyrics and Sacred and Moral Discourses (2 vols., ibid. 1861–62), in the Pastoral Letters and Homilies (Pistoia 1884), and in the brief treatises on philosophy, art, aesthetics, and morals, collected in Studi varii (2 vols., ibid. 1861–62), and republished posthumously under the title Religione e Morale (ibid. 1904).