VENTURI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA. – Priest, scientist, and politician, born in Bibbiano on 11 September 1746, died in Reggio Emilia on 10 September 1822.
Professor of physics and geometry in Reggio and Modena, commissioned by the Este government to design or supervise the execution of public works, in 1796 he was sent to Paris on a diplomatic mission, where he conducted important research and experiments in hydraulics and electricity. Upon returning to Modena, he devoted himself to science, advocating, among other things, the adoption of the decimal metric system and the unification of units of measurement throughout the State, as well as taking part in public affairs by preventing any extreme measures against the «reactionaries» during the dramatic days of the fall of the republican government in the face of the Austro-Russian invasion of 1799. Nevertheless, he was not...
VENTURI, ADOLFO. – Born in Modena on 4 September 1856, died at Santa Margherita Ligure on 10 June 1941.
He is the foremost of the modern historians of Italian art. A self-taught scholar, he began his research at a very young age in the archives and in the Galleria Estense of Modena, of which he was appointed inspector when he was only twenty-two. Having very soon acquired a well-deserved authority in the field of scholarship
arrested for «Jacobinism», he was soon restored to liberty. For more than a decade he was Italy’s minister in Switzerland, where he worked energetically on behalf of Catholic worship; he alternated the exercise of his duties with his cherished studies, in which he achieved European renown. Returning to private life in 1813, he settled in Reggio, where he remained undisturbed even after the ducal restoration; during this final phase of his life he continued to cultivate physics, publishing numerous and highly esteemed works, especially in the fields of hydraulics and the history of science. He has given his name to an instrument—the «tube» of the V.—widely used in hydraulics.