EMILIANI-GIUDICI, PAOLO. — Man of letters, born at Mussomeli (Caltanissetta) on 3 June 1812, died at Ore (Hastings) on 14 August 1872. A Dominican, he taught philosophy in the Palermo convent of the Order, which he later left, settling in Tuscany to escape the Bourbon police. Professor of eloquence at the University of Pisa, he resigned after being accused of Protestant tendencies; he then taught aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. He was a deputy in Parliament. He was largely responsible for the establishment of the Florentine chair of Dante studies (1859), to which G. B. Giuliani was appointed.
He wrote Storia politica dei municipi italiani (Florence 1851), Storia del teatro d'Italia, con un'appendice di sacre rappresentazioni (Milan 1860), and translated the Storia d'Inghilterra of T. B. Macaulay (Florence 1852–53). His major work, however, remains Storia delle lettere in Italia (Florence 1844), reprinted under the title Storia della letteratura italiana (ibid. 1855), which brings to an original conclusion the historiographical problematic of the early nineteenth century in a lucid, though not always valid, synthesis of Italy’s literary development. According to the author’s anticlerical view, this development was determined in its phases of splendor and decline by the respective ascendancy of Ghibelline and Guelph ideas, engaged in perpetual antagonism. Despite its limitations—due to its fluctuation between an interest in expressive values and one in content-based values, to an architectonic passion unsupported by an adequate analytical foundation, and to a fundamental deafness to the genuine poetic and psychological values of individual writers—the Storia constitutes one of the most noteworthy early attempts at a systematic configuration of the course of Italian literature.