MAFFEI, ANDREA. - Poet and translator, born in Molina in Val di Ledro (Trentino) on 19 April 1798, died in Milan on 27 November 1885. He perfected his knowledge of the German language in Munich, taken there by a paternal uncle, Abbot Giuseppe, author of a *Storia della letteratura italiana*.
Through his numerous translations of major foreign poets, from Gessner to Schiller, from Goethe to Milton and Byron, he contributed to their diffusion in 19th-century Italian culture, striving to render them as though «by chance they had been born Italian, they would have expressed their thoughts» in that way. In collaboration with Mondi, he translated passages from Pirker’s *Tunisia* and Klopstock’s *Messiah*. His lyrics possess a Romantic composure of affections, from which a sense of gentle melancholy is not absent. He was the husband of Countess Clara Carrara Spinelli, in whose Milanese salon the most notable artists and men of letters of the time gathered.