author
Giuseppe Ripamonti
1577–1643
A Milanese priest and historian, he left some of the most vivid firsthand writing on seventeenth-century Milan, including the 1630 plague that later helped shape Alessandro Manzoni’s famous novel. His work made him one of the key literary voices of early Baroque Milan.
1 Audiobook
La peste di Milano del 1630
by Giuseppe Ripamonti
About the author
Born in Brianza in 1573 and active in Milan, Giuseppe Ripamonti was an Italian Catholic priest, scholar, and historian. He taught at the Milan seminary and, with the support of Cardinal Federico Borromeo, became closely tied to the city’s intellectual life and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
Ripamonti wrote in Latin and is best remembered for major historical works on Milan and the Milanese church. Among them are Historia Ecclesiae Mediolanensis and De peste Mediolani quae fuit anno 1630, his account of the plague of 1630. That plague narrative became especially important later because Alessandro Manzoni drew on it while writing The Betrothed.
Sources differ on some biographical details, including whether he was born in 1573 or 1577, but they agree that he died in 1643. He is generally regarded as one of the most important Milanese writers of the first half of the seventeenth century.