TOSI, LUIGI

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

From 1823 Bishop of Pavia. He was a man of wide and solid culture; he formed friendships with the leading literary figures of his time, such as Porta, Grossi, and Torti; but of particular importance are the relations he maintained with Alessandro Manzon

i. It was not due to T

as has been written — that the poet was converted, an event which had taken place in Paris through the agency of Abbot Dégola; but it is true that T. continued in Milan the work thus begun in France, assuming the spiritual direction of Manzoni, his wife, and his mother, who had been entrusted to his care by Dégola precisely when they returned to Italy in the summer of 1810. It was T. who prepared Enrichetta Blondel for her first Communion, to which she, together with her husband and mother-in-law, approached on 15 Sept. of that year; it was above all he who directed Alessandro towards that literary activity from which emerged the *Inni sacri* and the *Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica*. With regard to this latter work, the legend is widely circulated (A. De Gubernatis, *Il Manzoni*, Florence 1879, p. 147) that it had been imposed on Manzoni by T. “as a penance”; more simply, the canon suggested the subject to the writer, gave him abundant advice during the drafting of the work, and personally attended to its printing and distribution (Milan 1819). As is clear, 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.