ZAMAGNA, BERNARDO. - Humanist, born into a noble family on 9 November 1735 in Ragusa, Dalmatia, and died there on 20 May 1820.
Educated at the College founded in 1658 by the Jesuit from Ragusa Marino Gondola and directed by the Jesuits of the Roman province, Z. entered the Society of Jesus in Rome on 29 November 1753, and under the guidance of his fellow citizen Fr. Raimondo Cunich made rapid progress in Latin and Greek, soon enhanced by teaching these two languages at the Collegio Romano, in Livorno, and at the Tolomei in Siena.
On 15 August 1772 he took his solemn vows; on 21 July 1773, following the suppression of the Society by Clement XIV, he became a priest of the secular clergy. During the four lustrums he spent in the religious life, Z. already enjoyed a reputation as having “a most Latin pen,” as his contemporaries put it, earned through his poetic works: the *Echo*, the *Navis aëria*, and the *Elegiarum monobiblos* in praise of the Mother of God, composed as a student and published with the elegant types of the Komarek press, the first in 1764, the other two in 1768. The theologian Filippo Bonamici, approving their publication, praised their *verborum nitorem*, the maturity of their thought, the variety and aptness of their meter, and their Christian piety. The *Echo* and the *Navis aëria* (on a sailing ship or airship) were inspired by the great advances in the physical sciences in the eighteenth century, and Z., celebrating them in poems of exquisite Latinity, increased the ranks of his fellow versifiers, such as Ambrogli, Noceti, and Mazzolari.
In the years following the suppression of the Order (1773), he confirmed his renown: in 1777 he translated the *Odyssey* into Latin verse; in 1785 the works of Hesiod, a translation judged by some critics of his time as too free. Next came the *Idylls* of Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion of Phlossa, rendered in Virgilian hexameters. The fecundity of Z.’s genius was not exhausted by translating the poets of Elis: to form a just estimate of it, one must consider the great abundance of poems, elegies, epistles in the manner of Horace, epigrams, funeral orations, such as those on the death of Empress Maria Theresa and of Fr. Boscovich; an immense accumulation of literary work in the field of Greek and Latin classicism, which makes Z. one of the most distinguished versifiers in the Latin language who flourished in Italy after the Renaissance.