CICOGNA, EMANUELE ANTONIO. - Prince of the scholars and bibliophiles of his time, b. in Venice in 1789, he studied at the College of Nobles run by the Somaschi in Udine. Passionate about scholarship and bibliophily, he devoted his whole life to studying the history of Venice, its political figures and writers, and to collecting manuscripts, incunabula, books, and pamphlets by or about Venetian authors and matters. The fruit of his long labor were the Cicogna library, today at the Correr Museum by his bequest, rich in more than 40 thousand printed volumes and 5 thousand manuscript codices, and a fine handful of publications, among which the six thick volumes of the Iscrizioni veneziane, published in Venice from 1824, and the volume of the Saggio di bibliografia veneziana, published in Venice in 1847 and continued in a second volume by G. Soranzo, published there in 1885, stand out. He died at almost eighty years of age in 1868, honored with distinctions by the three governments he had faithfully served, the Austrian, the French and finally the Italian, inconsolable only over all that had been lost in those years for his Venice.
Bibl. A. Sagredo, E. A. C., in Arch. st. ital., 3rd series, 7 (1868), pp. 208-21 (ibid., pp. 216-17, the bibl. of his writings); for the Iscrizioni veneziane, v. the same, in Arch. st. ital., 2nd series, 14 (1861), pp. 77-105; for the Bibliografia veneziana, and other writings: I. Neumann-Rizzi, Di alcuni scritti pubblicati da E. C. veneziano dall'anno 1808 al 1850, Venezia 1850.
Luigi Berra