Angelo De Gubernatis

Born in Turin in 1840, Angelo De Gubernatis studied in Turin and Berlin before becoming one of Italy’s early professors of Sanskrit. He taught in Florence and later in Rome, and built a reputation as a remarkably wide-ranging scholar interested in philology, mythology, folklore, and the literatures of both Europe and India.

He was not only an academic but also a prolific public intellectual. Over the course of his career he founded and edited journals, wrote poetry and criticism, and published studies that helped introduce broader audiences to comparative mythology and Oriental studies. His writing life was notably productive, and he was nominated many times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

De Gubernatis died in Rome in 1913. Today he is remembered as a restless, curious figure whose work moved easily between scholarship and literature, and whose interests connected Italian culture with a wider international world of ideas.