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Giovanni Andrea Scartazzini, known to have translated into German and commented the Divine Comedy and the life of Dante Alighieri.

Biography

Son of the notary Bartolomeo di Picenoni and Clara, he was born in Bondo, Switzerland, in the canton of Graubünden, on December 30 1837. His childhood was marked by an early passion for two books: the Bible, essential book in every Chistian family and the Divine Comedy, which has received as a gift from his godfather.He studied at the Institute of evangelical missions at Basel where he has joined the liberal theological trends, completing his theological studies at Berne.

Activities

He served as Minister in several Swiss' cities, including Soglio at the Valley of Bergell. He had to give up this ministry due to his highly controversial nature and his criticism about the Reformed Church of his time, which was frontally attacked in his writings, just as he did against the criticals of his work as literary scholar on Dante and Divine Comedy.

He reached the international fame due to his literary activity, which culminated in 1869 with the publication of a study about the life, the epoch and the work of Dante Alighieri, and the subsequent publication in four volumes of Dante's Divine Comedy translated and commented by himself, in German, which first volume was released in 1874 and the last in 1890. This work, reviewed by Giuseppe Vandelli edition's from Milan in 1893, still remains a fundamental text.

His fighting soul in the persistent defense of his convictions was, of course, enhanced by the cultural contexts in which he lived. These contexts were so far apart. At one side Scartazzini lived under the Swiss Protestant theology, liberal, and on the other hand, under the environment of the Italian classic literature. Despite the strong influence of both contexts on his life, he has never yielded to the temptation to draw a bridge between them.

In 1871-1874 he taught Italian at the cantonal school of Chur. He was also the director of the "New International Journal of Florence". In 1884, as a result of the conflicts raised by his fighting spirit, he had permanently left Bergell and was settled in Fahrwangen in the canton of Aargau, Switzerland, which would be his last pastoral office, where he died on the age of 73 on February 10, 1901.

In Acilia, a district close to Rome, Scartazzini is honored by naming a street, while in Bondo, the municipality has placed a headstone at his own home.

In one of his sermons he expressed a thought that is valid in every time and in every nation: “The people that cares about what it takes to its peace laid the firmer and safer foundations for his own good ... May our people and our homeland recognize on time what should be taken to its peace.”

Weddings

On December 21, 1862 in Bergamo he married his first wife, Anna Maria Caterina Baebler (1841-1883 c.), daughter of Anna Maddalena Hoesli (1807-1870) and Ulrich Baebler (1798-1878), director of the weaving belonged to his father-in-law Gaspare Hoesli (1773-1857) from St. Bartholomew in Brescia.

His second wife was Maria Sophia Lehnen from Twann.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Giovanni Andrea Scartazzini", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0