author
Raffaello Piccoli
1886–1933
An Italian scholar, poet, and translator whose work moved between Naples, Pisa, and Cambridge, he helped bring modern Italian thought to English-speaking readers. He is especially remembered for writing on Benedetto Croce and for a career cut short by his early death in 1933.
1 Audiobook
Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to His Philosophy
by Raffaello Piccoli
About the author
Raffaello Piccoli was an Italian man of letters—scholar, poet, philosopher, and translator—born in Naples in 1886. He taught at the University of Pisa and later became Professor of Italian at the University of Cambridge, building a reputation as an energetic interpreter of Italian literature and ideas for readers outside Italy.
He is closely associated with the philosopher Benedetto Croce, on whom he wrote an accessible introduction for English-language audiences. His work ranged across criticism, teaching, translation, and poetry, and it reflected a strong interest in connecting Italian intellectual life with a wider European conversation.
Piccoli died in Davos in 1933, still relatively young. Even so, he left behind the image of a gifted and stylish scholar whose career linked Italian and British academic worlds at an important moment in early twentieth-century culture.