GUIDI, IGNAZIO and MICHELANGELO. – The first, an Italian Semitist, was born in Rome on 31 July 1844 (his father Michele having been the last finance intendant of the Papal States) and died there on 18 April 1935. He was one of the foremost Orientalists of the past generation. Professor of Hebrew and comparative Semitic languages at the University of Rome from 1876 to 1919, and from 1885 to 1919 also lecturer there on the history and languages of Abyssinia; senator of the Kingdom from 1914; member of numerous Italian and foreign academies.
A typical representative of the renewal of Oriental studies in the 19th century, based on rigorous philological method and meticulous documentary research, besides a few but fundamental works of a general character (Della sede primitiva dei popoli semitici, 1878; L'historiografico chez les Sémites, 1906) and of linguistics (including grammars of Amharic, Coptic, and South Arabic) and brief but acute essays on biblical exegesis (Note ebraiche, 1927, a reworking of earlier writings), he made lasting contributions to the field with the aforementioned grammar and with the edition of texts, and above all with the great Amharic-Italian Dictionary (1901, photomechanical reprint 1935, posthumous supplement 1940).
Guido was co-director and contributor to the two major collections of texts of Eastern Christianity, the Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium and the Patrologia Orientalis; with incomparable zeal, for more than sixty years he gave advice and assistance to countless scholarly enterprises and studies.
His son MICHELANGELO, born in Rome on 19 March 1886 and died there on 15 June 1946, professor of the history and institutions of Islam at the University of Rome, besides felicitous essays in various Oriental literatures, devoted the best of his intellect to Arabic and Islamic studies, with originality and depth of insight inspired by a broad critical and Christian conception of history. His finest work is La religione dell'Islam (in Storia delle Religioni, directed by P. P. Tacchi Venturi, II, 3rd ed., Turin 1949).