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 Order’s Palermo convent, which he later left, settling in Tuscany to escape Bourbon police surveillance. Professor of rhetoric at the University of Pisa, he resigned after being accused of Protestant tendencies; thereafter he taught aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. He served as a deputy in Parliament. To him is largely due the establishment of the Florentine Dante chair (1859), to which G. B. Giuliani was appointed.
He wrote *Storia politica dei municipi italiani* (Florence 1851), *Storia del teatro d’Italia*, with an appendix on sacred representations (Milan 1860), and translated T. B. Macaulay’s *History of England* (Florence 1852–53). His major work, however, remains *Storia delle belle lettere in Italia* (Florence 1844), reissued under the title *Storia della letteratura italiana* (ibid. 1855), which horizontally concludes the historiographical problems of the early nineteenth century in a lucid synthesis—though not always valid—of Italy’s literary struggles. According to the anticlerical outlook of the author, these struggles moved through phases of splendor and decline as the Ghibelline and Guelf ideas alternately prevailed in perennial antagonism. Despite its limitations—fluctuating between concern for expressive values and for content, relying on architectural passion without adequate analytical grounding, and fundamentally deaf to the genuine poetic and psychological values of individual writers—the *Storia* constitutes one of the most notable attempts predestined to a systematic confrontation of literary history.
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EMMA OF GURK — EMAUS
The identification of Emmaus with the village of el-Qubejbeh, 11 km northwest of Jerusalem, rests on the Gospel narrative (Lk 24:13–35). Ancient tradition (Eusebius of Caesarea, St Jerome, Sozomen) up to the Crusader period knew only Emmaus-Nicopolis and did not find it improbable that the two evangelical pilgrims covered, going and returning in a single afternoon, 320 stades, i.e. 60 km.
The Crusaders initially recognized the Castellum Emmaus at Qoloniijeh, 30 stades from Jerusalem, in the place now called Abū Gōs, where the church built in 1745 by the Hospitallers over the so-called “Emmaus fountain” is preserved. In 1772 the pilgrim Theodoricus indicated the Castellum Emmaus as *quod moderni Fontenod vocant*. But later (documentation begins in 1828), all pilgrims point to and visit the evangelical Emmaus at a village 11 km northwest of Jerusalem, called el-Qubejbeh by the Arabs.
The imposing ruins at ‘Amwas, where skilled archaeologists have identified a three-apsed church dating to the 3rd century, with transformations in the 6th and 12th centuries, have yielded no positive evidence relating to the evangelical event; some experts even recognize there a Roman monument adapted in the 4th century or a church. At el-Qubejbeh, recent excavations have shown habitation already in the Macedonian period; in 1901 the Franciscan Fathers rebuilt the Crusader church on Byzantine remains, incorporating in the northern aisle walls of a house said by pilgrims to be that of Cleophas. The site, though consistent with the 60-stade distance and the circumstances of the Gospel narrative, lacks a toponymic tradition, although it is significant that the Crusaders designated it as Castellum Emmaus, and archaeological consensus is lacking regarding the antiquity of the house said to be Cleophas’s and of the church’s original construction.