GUASTELLA, Diocese of. - City and diocese in the province of Reggio Emilia. It has an area of 319 sq km with 70,000 inhabitants, all Catholic, 29 parishes served by 73 diocesan priests and 8 regulars, a seminary, 2 male religious communities and 33 female ones (1949).
Tuscan, and therefore secretary of the Accademia della Crusca. In '52 he married Nunzia Becherini, by whom he had four children. G.'s work (6 vols., Prato 1894-1902; VII, Florence 1912) embraces themes of historical erudition, textual criticism, philology and lexicography, and reveals a writer "chaste and elegant" and even more a man of singular piety.
His studies on Savonarola (in Opere, I, pp. 109-183) and on Tasso (ibid., V, pp. 803-923), his biographies of illustrious men — among which the essay on F. Ozanam (ibid., II, pp. 127-72) is to be remembered — the reports and eulogies read at the Società della Colombaia and at the Accademia della Crusca, his writings on art and his research into documents on the Florentine cathedral, Brunelleschi's dome and Giotto's campanile, those on Arnolfo, on Fra Angelico, on his contemporaries: L. Mussini, G. Dupré, L. Bartolini, give us a measure of his method of research and of the acuteness of his historical investigations.
For a long time he devoted himself to editions of texts, publishing Le lettere spirituali e famigliari di s. Caterina de' Ricci (Prato 1851), Le lettere di A. Macinghi-Strozzi (Florence 1877), Le lettere di Ser Lapo Mazzei (ibid. 1880); and he greatly enjoyed the art of translation: he rendered into Italian the Storia di s. Francesco di Assisi by Emilio Chavin de Malan, the Vita di F. Ozanam and the Lettere ad alcuni giovani by Fr. Henri Lacordaire, and, at the request of Fr. Lodovico da Casoria, Lo stimolo del divino amore attributed to St. Bonaventure. In '66 he published the version of the Imitation of Christ "which remains one of the most singular documents of the Tuscan language" (I. Del Lungo). He also composed brief monographs on St. Margaret of Cortona, St. Rose of Viterbo, and, on the occasion of the canonization (1867), the Vita di s. Leonardo da Porto Maurizio. He wrote more than 40,000 letters, which are preserved in the twelve volumes of the Sbozzalettere; a selection of these forms part of the Carteggio (Opere, VII). His life was inspired by the Franciscan ideal — and he was a tertiary from the age of twenty — finding the secret of his spiritual program in "standing continually in the presence of God and doing everything for his glory and with the ready surrender in all things to the will of God and not taking too much thought for the things of the world." On his assiduous search for religious truth Tommaso wrote: "G. rediscovers religion in history and history in religion."
On G.'s life and his reputation for holiness, the informative process was introduced in 1937, and subsequently the processes on his writings and on non-cult (1940) were begun. On 3 April 1938 his body was transferred from the Misericordia of Florence to the church of S. Domenico in Prato.