Emiliani-Giudici, Paolo

EMILIANI-GIUDICI, PAOLO. - Man of letters, b. at Mussomeli (Caltanissetta) on 3 June 1812, d. at Ore (Hastings) on 14 Aug. 1872. A Dominican, he taught philosophy in the Order's Palermo convent, which he later left, settling in Tuscany to escape the Bourbon police. A professor of eloquence at the University of Pisa, he resigned because he was accused of Protestant leanings; he then taught aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. He was a deputy in Parliament. To him is largely due the establishment of the Florentine chair of Dante studies (1859), to which G. B. Giuliani was called.

He wrote the Storia politica dei municipi italiani (Florence 1851), the Storia del teatro d'Italia, with an appendix of sacre rappresentazioni (Milan 1860), and translated T. B. Macaulay's History of England (Florence 1852-53). His major work, however, remains the Storia delle lettere in Italia (Florence 1844), reprinted under the title Storia della letteratura italiana (ibid. 1855), which originally brings to a close the historiographical questioning of the early nineteenth century, in a lucid synthesis, though not always a valid one, of the Italian literary travail, determined, according to the author's anticlerical vision, in its phases of splendor and decadence, by the respective decline of the Ghibelline and Guelph ideas, in perpetual antagonism. Despite its limitations, due to the fluctuation between an interest in expressive values and one in content values, to an architectural passion unsupported by an adequate analytical basis, to a substantial deafness to the genuine poetic and psychological values of individual writers, the Storia constitutes one of the most remarkable pre-De Sanctis attempts at a systematic configuration of the literary vicissitude.