UBALDI, PAOLO. — Born in Parma on 30 August 1872, died in Milan on 22 July 1934. Orphaned and taken in at the age of ten by d. Bosco (v. GIOVANNI MOSCO), he became a priest in 1895; from 1909 he taught Greek literature, first in Turin and then in Catania, and from 1924 Greek-Latin Christian literature in Milan (Università Cattolica), and from 1932 patrology at the diocesan Major Seminary of Venegono.
He had in fact devoted himself to two very different fields of work: the classical and the Christian. In the former, he was attracted by the great authors: Homer, Pindar, and above all Aeschylus, of whose work he provided a reliable text and a penetrating exegesis. In the latter he was a true pioneer in Italy. He began with Chrysostom and Palladius, leaving two completed works, one a historical reconstruction, the other a literary and linguistic assessment. Subsequently
he studied the Hellenism of St. Mark; later, the Acts of the martyrs and the apologists of the second century, where his finest work is that on Athenagoras. He founded and directed the Didaskaleion (v.), with the aim of reassessing ancient Christian literature as an autonomous discipline and placing Italy, in this field, on a level with other nations. It is thanks to him that the reading of ancient Christian writers was added to the curricula of secondary schools, and that today the three Universities of Turin, Catania, and Milan (Cattolica) have a chair of ancient Christian literature. In Catania, in 1947, at the initiative of devoted pupils, the Nuovo Didaskaleion, with a broader programme of work, and the Centro di studi sul cristianesimo antico were established.