MAFFEI, ANDREA. - Poet and translator, b. at Molina in Val di Ledro (Trentino) on 19 April 1798, d. at Milan on 27 November 1885. He perfected his knowledge of the German language at Munich, whither he had been taken by a paternal uncle, Abbé Giuseppe, author of a Storia della letteratura italiana.
Through his numerous translations of the major foreign poets, from Gessner to Schiller, from Goethe to Milton and Byron, he contributed to their dissemination in nineteenth-century Italian culture, endeavouring to render them in expression as though, “by chance, they had been born Italian, [and] would have expressed their thoughts.” In collaboration with Monti he translated passages from Pirker’s Tunisiade and Klopstock’s Messiade. His lyric poems possess a Romantic restraint of feeling, inseparable from a sense of gentle melancholy. He was the husband of Countess Clara Carrara Spinelli, in whose Milanese salon the most distinguished artists and men of letters of the age gathered.