CESARI, ANTONIO. — Writer, born in Verona in 1760. He was a priest of the local Congregation of the Oratory. He devoted himself intensively to sacred studies, but even more to literary studies.
He published various translations: from Greek, two elegies by Callimachus and the Apologeticus of St. Gregory Nazianzen; from Latin, the Odes and some Satires of Horace, the Comedies of Terence, the first book of St. Ambrose’s On Virgins, and he collaborated, together with the abbot Giuseppe Furlanetto, on the Appendix ad totius latinitatis Lexicon Egidii Forcellini (Padua 1816). His translation of The Imitation of Christ (Verona 1785) truly belongs among the texts of the Italian language (F. Flora). He spent thirty years, until 1807, teaching Italian and Latin, ultimately devoting most of his efforts to the new edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca with the Veronese Additions. In seeking the canon of the perfect writer, he formulated the principles for a revival of elegant writing: his doctrine of “purism” is set forth in the Dissertation on the Present State of the Italian Language and in the dialogue The Graces; and he asserted that the language of the fourteenth century “is sufficient to express all things elegantly.” Witnesses to his enduring love of the ancient language are the edition of the Life of the Holy Fathers, of the Life of Blessed Colombini, and of the Little Flowers, as well as the acute analysis of Dante’s language in The Beauties of Dante’s Comedy. Through his original writings (Pleasant Tales, Lighthearted Poems, Serious Poems), C. broadly confirmed his theory of the absolute value of the golden fourteenth century. His most noteworthy religious works—Historical-Moral Lessons, The Life of Jesus Christ and His Religion, The Acts of the Apostles, A Flower of Ecclesiastical History—give us of C. and his literary activity the image that Giordani defined in the famous epitaph: “Through his writings and his life he gloriously upheld the faith of Christ and the language of Italy.”
C.’s humanistic activity did not prevent him from attending to the obligations of religious life; indeed, he may be regarded as the restorer of the Oratory of Verona after the Napoleonic interruption. He died at Ravenna in 1828, and a tomb was erected for him in the church of S. Romualdo in Classe (the inscription was composed by the abbot Celestino Cavedoni); when the church was closed for worship, the tomb was subsequently transferred to the metropolitan church of the same city.