TOSI, LUIGI

TOSI, LUIGI. — Bishop of Pavia, born in Busto Arsizio on 6 July 1763, died in Pavia on 13 December 1845. Educated by the Somaschi in Lugano, he was a seminarian in Milan and Pavia and carried out his priestly ministry in the Lombard capital, where he was a canon and parish priest of the basilica of S. Ambrogio.

Bishop of Pavia from 1823. He was a man of broad and solid culture and cultivated friendly relations with the leading men of letters of his time, such as Porta, Grossi, and Torti; but particular importance attaches to the relationship he maintained with Alessandro Manzon

i. It was not T

as has also been written — who brought about the poet’s conversion, which had taken place in Paris through the work of Abbot Dégola; but it is certainly true that T. continued in Milan the task thus begun in France, assuming the spiritual direction of Manzoni, his wife, and his mother, who had in fact been entrusted to his care by Dégola when, in the summer of 1810, they returned to Italy. It was T. who prepared Enrichetta Blondel for her First Communion, which she received — together with her husband and mother-in-law — on 15 September of that year; above all, it was he who directed Alessandro toward that literary activity from which the Inni sacri and the Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica emerged. Concerning this second work, the widely circulated legend (A. De Gubernatis, Il Manzoni, Firenze 1879, p. 147) holds that it was imposed upon Manzoni by T. “as penance”; more simply, the canon suggested the subject to the writer, offered him extensive advice during the drafting of the work, and personally saw to the printing and circulation of the volume (Milano 1819). Clearly, after T.’s transfer to Pavia, his relations with Manzoni became less frequent, but they always remained particularly affectionate until the death of the distinguished prelate.

Renzo U. Montini