DIONIGI da PIACENZA. - Capuchin missionary of the Carli family; he donned the habit of the Order at Cesena on 25 April 1652 at the age of fifteen. With Fr. Michelangelo Guattini of Reggio, he arrived in the Congo in 1668 and carried out missionary work in the province of Bamba for a year.
Stricken by illness, he returned to Italy in 1671; that same year saw the publication in Reggio Emilia of his *Viaggio nel regno del Congo*, which also contains the letters of his companion Fr. Michelangelo, who had died on 9 April 1668. The work went through many editions and was included in Italian, French, and English collections of travels; Fr. Samuele Cultrera’s *Un morto che cammina* (Parma 1926 and 1937) presents it in a worldwide exposition. In November 1678 he set out again as vice-prefect of the mission in Georgia, arriving in Tiflis in February 1680. He worked in Gori, from where he began his journey back to Italy in May 1684. In Bassano, in 1687, his work *Il Moro trasportato nell’inclita città di Venezia, ovvero curioso racconto de’ costumi, riti e religione de’ popoli dell’Africa, America, Asia ed Europa* was published; its first book reproduces the *Viaggio nel Congo*; a German edition appeared in Augsburg in 1693. In 1687 he was found in the mission in California; according to an archival note, he would have died in Lorea di Levante in 1694.