Daniello Bartoli

Daniello Bartoli (Italian pronunciation: [daˈnjɛllo ˈbartoli]; 12 February 1608 – 13 January 1685) was an Italian Jesuit writer and historiographer, celebrated by the poet Giacomo Leopardi as the "Dante of Italian prose".

He was born in Ferrara. His father, Tiburzio was a chemist associated with the Este court of Alfonso II d'Este. When the papacy refused to recognize his illegitimate successor the court moved in 1598 under Cesare d'Este, Duke of Modena. During the Cinquecento and due to a host of writers including Ariosto and Tasso Renaissance Ferrara was the literary capital of Italian letters along with Florence, whereas the language of papal Rome was humanist Latin. His identity as a Ferrarese and a Lombard is touted in the pseudonym, Ferrante Longobardi which he used to sustain his independence from the linguistic tyranny of Florence in Il torto ed il diritto del "Non si può" (1655).

Daniello was the youngest of three sons and barely fifteen when embraced a vocation to the Society of Jesus in 1623. Debarred by his superiors because of his manifest literary talents from the missions in the Indies he would later describe, he attained high distinction in science and letters. After a novitiate of two years at Novellara, Bartoli resumed his studies in Piacenza in 1625. In Parma (1626–29) he completed his philosophate and (1629–34) he taught grammar and rhetoric to the boys of the Jesuit collegio. Under Jesuit scientists Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Niccolo Zucchi the young Bartoli, together with his younger contemporary Francesco Maria Grimaldi was involved in noteworthy experiments and discoveries of the planetary heavens. Bartoli along with Zucchi is credited as having been one of the first to see the equatorial belts on the planet Jupiter on May 17, 1630. And in his old age he would return to the world of science. He was ordained a priest in 1634 and continued his studies in Milan and Bologna. In his thirties he was an esteemed preacher delivering the Lenten sermons at the principal Jesuits churches of Italy including Ferrara, Genoa, Florence and Rome. He took his final vows as a professed Jesuit in Pistoia on July 31, 1643. In 1645 his treatise on the man of letters, L'huomo di lettere catapulted him to national celebrity and international fame as a leading contemporary writer of his Baroque age. For the rest of the century Dell'huomo di lettere difeso ed emendato became a staple of the Italian printing industry and was much sought after and translated abroad. During the process of her conversion to Roman Catholicism at the hands of the Jesuits in the 1650s Christina, Queen of Sweden specifically requested a copy of this celebrated work be sent to her in Stockholm. Heading to preach in Palermo he survived a shipwreck off Capri in 1646, but lost the manuscripts of his sermons. Because of his growing fame his superiors put an end to his decade as an itinerant preacher and brought him permanently to the order's headquarters in Rome. In 1648 his was appointed Jesuit historiographer and spent the next four decades writing his great history, as well as moral, spiritual and scientific treatises.

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