Raffaello Piccoli

Born in 1886, Raffaello Piccoli was an Italian literary scholar, poet, and translator whose career linked Naples and Cambridge. He taught in Naples before moving to the University of Cambridge, where he was appointed Professor of Italian in 1929 and became a Fellow of Magdalene College.

Piccoli is especially remembered for his writing on Dante and for helping introduce modern Italian thought to English-speaking readers. His books include work on Dante, studies of Benedetto Croce, and Italian Humanities, based on his inaugural lecture at Cambridge. Contemporary and later accounts describe him as a stylish and wide-ranging scholar with interests that reached beyond literary criticism into philosophy and intellectual life.

He died in 1933, still young, after a career that was brief but influential. Even within that short span, he left a strong mark on the study of Italian literature in Britain and on the conversation between Italian and English culture.