CORTENOVIS, MARCELLO. - Barnabite missionary and naturalist, b. in Bergamo in 1732. Brother of Gherardo (v.) and of four other Barnabites, he set out for the kingdom of Ava and Pegu (Burma) in 1771, arriving in September of the following year, 1772; he was designated bishop and vicar apostolic of that mission, but was not consecrated because of the onset of death.
To the apostolic care of souls for 26 years (at Monlà, at Rangoon, at Nabock in the direction of the seminary for natives, and finally again at Rangoon in the governance of the church of the Assumption and of the orphanage, where he also gathered pious women under a rule similar to that of the Angeliche) he joined the study of natural history, of which he had already given some sample while he was professor of letters and sciences in the seminary of Bologna and aggregated to the Agrarian Academy of Udine (1768), in the Giornale d'Italia published by Grisellini at Venice (1770). Among his manuscripts are two Zibaldoni contenenti memorie storiche, geografiche, botaniche e zoologiche della Birmania, plundered by Fr. Gallo and Fr. Gobio for the Storia del cristianesimo nell'impero barmano. Worth remembering is a journey of his into the Chinese province of Yun-nan, for the purpose of establishing relations with those French missionaries and teaching them the shortest route from China to Ava. A letter of Fr. Sangermano, who received his last breath, reported by Premoli (III, p. 409) establishes the precise date of death (erroneous in Boffito and in Levati), as 5 June 1798.