TOSI, LUIGI. - Bishop of Pavia, b. at Busto Arsizio on 6 July 1763, d. at Pavia on 13 Dec. 1845. Educated by the Somaschi at Lugano, he was a seminarian at Milan and at Pavia and carried out his priestly activity in the Lombard capital, where he was a canon and parish priest of the basilica of S. Ambrogio.
From 1823 he was bishop of Pavia. He was a man of vast and solid culture and formed bonds of friendship with the leading men of letters of his time, such as Porta, Grossi and Torti; but particular importance attaches to the relations he maintained with Alessandro Manzoni. The conversion of the poet is not to be credited to T. - as has nevertheless been written - for it had come about in Paris through the work of the abbé Dégola: but it is true that T. continued in Milan the task thus begun in France, assuming the spiritual direction of Manzoni, of his wife and of his mother, who had indeed been entrusted by Dégola to his care when, in the summer of 1810, they returned to Italy. It was T. who prepared Enrichetta Blondel for her first Communion, which she received - with her husband and her mother-in-law - on 15 Sept. of that year; it was he above all who directed Alessandro toward that literary activity from which the Inni sacri and the Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica issued. With regard to this second 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, was generous with advice during the composition of the work and personally attended to the printing and the dissemination of the volume (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.
Bibliography2 works
Renzo U. Montini