SPOTORNO, GIOVANNI BATTISTA. — Barnabite, born at Albisola superiore on 27 October 1788, died at Genoa in 1844.
A Barnabite from 1806, he taught mathematics, jurisprudence, and theology at Macerata and Rome. He refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the French government, which had occupied Rome, and consequently lost his chair and was confined to Chiavari, where he devoted himself to reorganizing the library of that Economic Society. After the fall of the Napoleonic Empire, he resumed teaching at Livorno and Bologna. Returning to Genoa in 1819, he directed the Barnabite College of S. Bartolomeo; he subsequently assumed supervision of the city’s public schools, the prefecture of the civic library, and the teaching of Latin eloquence at the University. S. was also a well-known publicist and directed Il Ligustico, the organ of the classicist school opposed to the Romantic movement, in which he sustained lengthy and heated polemics. He also collaborated with the Archivio storico italiano and, having undertaken to elucidate the glories of his city, annotated Giustiniani’s Genoese Annals, published a substantial series of Eulogies of illustrious Ligurians, wrote four volumes of Literary History of Liguria, a History of Ancient Genoese Painting, and a highly regarded History of the Lombards. But his favorite subject was always Christopher Columbus, whose Genoese birth he documented in a widely influential book. He translated, commented on, and refuted at several points the life of the great navigator written by Washington Irving, and finally published a weighty Colombo-American Diplomatic Code.