D'OVIDIO, FRANCESCO. — Scholar, b. at Campos in 1850, d. at Naples on 24 Nov. 1925. President of the Accademia dei Lincei, senator, and for half a century (from 1876) professor of Roman philology at the University of Naples. In his studies of glottology and literary criticism he brought meticulous methodological rigor and refined intuition.
In collaboration with Meyer-Lübke he published a Historical Grammar of the Italian Language and its Dialects (1910). Notable among his essays on Dante are: On the De vulgari eloquentia, in Arch. Glott. Ital., 2 (1876), pp. 59-100; Studies on the Divine Comedy (1901); New Dantean Studies (1926); A New Volume of Dantean Studies (1926); The Final Dantean Volume (1931-32). Yet the preferred object of his investigations was Manzoni, to whom he felt spiritually close: Corrections to The Betrothed (1895); Manzonian Studies (1928); New Manzonian Studies (1928). He lived with probity and reverence for religion and truth: “I speak solely to instill what seems to me the true and the good.”