TAVELLA, GIOVANNI, called da TOSSIGNANO, blessed. — Bishop of Ferrara, born at Tossignano in 1368, died at Ferrara on 24 July 1446.
Of modest family, he studied law at Bologna (28 July 1408) and entered the Gesuati at S. Eustachio. Sent to Venice to escape his parents’ pressure, he later returned to Bologna in 1426 and, sent as prior to Ferrara, worked to construct the church attached to the monastery, dedicating it to s. Girolamo, patron of his Congregation. When the see of Ferrara became vacant, T. was proposed to Eugenio IV, although he was only a cleric. The Pope accepted, and T. was elected bishop in 1431. He visited the diocese annually, holding synods there and always showing himself solicitous toward the poor and the sick. Following the plague in 1440, he began the hospital of S. Anna, to remedy the neglect of the city’s other hospitals. He attended the Council in 1438 and then that of Florence, after which he had to leave Ferrara as a result of the calumnies of his enemies. For the nuns of SS. Abbondio and Abondanzio of Siena, he wrote in the vernacular a treatise Della perfezione della vita spirituale, later published in Latin, with alterations, at Venice in 1580 under the title: De perfectione religionis; the Regulae... pauperum fessuatorum together with the Life of the founder, the blessed Giovanni Colombini (1504-67; St. Baluzio, Miscellanea, IV, Lucca 1764, pp. 566-82). The biblical passages translated and reworked by him in the Malermi Bible (1471) are also debated, as are those from the works of s. Gregorio (Morali, lib. 19, chaps. 18-35) and s. Bernardo (Sermoni), perhaps translated for Polissena Condulmer, sister of Pope Eugenio IV.
On the occasion of a flooding of the Po, he is said to have miraculously halted the inundation. Because of the fame of the miracles he performed, Clemente VIII (Ferrara 1598), Benedetto XIV (decree of 20 July 1748), Gregorio XVI (decree of 27 January 1832), and Pio IX (17 July 1846) recognized his cult for the dioceses of Ferrara and Imola.