The Times
FRIDAY AUGUST 31 2001

Obituary

Professor Giovanni Aquilecchia
An Italian Renaissance man in London

GIANNI AQUILECCHIA was Professor of Italian at Manchester University from 1961 to 1970 and at London University from 1970 to 1989, first at Bedford College and subsequently at the merged Bedford and Royal Holloway Colleges. Educated at the University of Rome, he first came to England in 1950 to work at the Warburg Institute on Giordano Bruno, the unorthodox Italian writer and thinker who was burnt at the stake in 1600. After two years as language assistant at Manchester, Aquilecchia was appointed assistant lecturer in the Italian department at University College London in 1953, rising to lecturer in 1955 and reader in 1958.
In London he joined the remarkable group of Italians working in the university at the time: Roberto Weiss, his head of department, and an expert on Italian humanism; Carlo Dionisotti, the most important figure in the historiography of Italian Renaissance literature in the past 50 years, whom he was to succeed at Bedford College; and Arnaldo Momigliano, one of the greatest ancient historians of the 20th century. A colleague in a neighbouring room at University College often used to hear the sounds of what seemed like bitter quarrels coming from Aquilecchia’s study — but it was only these four Italians having a friendly discussion.
Despite the excellent facilities in Manchester for the study of Italian Renaissance literature, Aquilecchia was happier in London, with the Warburg Institute and the British Library. He had received an excellent training in Rome and his articles bear witness to the width of his knowledge and the precision of his scholarship. Bruno remained a lifelong interest, and Aquilecchia’s many articles on this author, covering more than 40 years of work, were gathered together in the volume Schede bruniane (1993). Two other volumes of Schede (ie, index cards, a typically understated title), published in 1976 and 1994, contain his articles on other authors, ranging over the whole of Italian literature from Dante to the present day.
But it was as a textual critic that Aquilecchia made his most original contribution to Bruno studies and to Italian studies in general. At a time when the techniques of Anglo-American textual bibliography were more or less unknown in Italy, his critical edition of the first of Bruno’s "London" dialogues, La cena de le ceneri (1955), showed the importance of examining all surviving copies of early editions in the case of texts transmitted by print. The lesson is even more explicit in his edition of Pietro Aretino’s Sei giornate (1969).
Only later in life did Aquilecchia generalise his experiences as a textual critic. Meanwhile, these two editions, together with that of Bruno’s De la causa, principia et uno (1973), the second "London" dialogue, were admired in Italy for the outstanding richness and learning of their annotations, while the original elements of his editorial technique were largely ignored.
In the last, fruitful, years of his life Aquilecchia’s editorial activities culminated in the bilingual French-Italian complete edition of Bruno’s works, published in Paris (1993-99), with Italian texts established by Aquilecchia, and in the Edizione Nazionale of the works of Pietro Aretino, for which he was a member of the editorial board, collaborating on the first volume, on Aretino’s poetry (1992). He was also preparing a complete edition of the works of Girolamo Cardano, another unorthodox thinker of the Italian 16th century.
Aquilecchia was a regular attender at learned conferences. His conference papers were remarkable for their range and erudition. From 1996 he was president of the Centro Internazionale di Studi Bruniani — in the fervour of the celebrations occasioned by the 400th anniversary of Bruno’s death, the post took him as far afield as China.
In 1984 he returned to the Italian department of University College, first as honorary research fellow and then, from 1998, as honorary professor. This enabled him to continue teaching after his official retirement in 1989.
His slightly forbidding appearance hid a surprising and delightful sense of the absurd, of which the subject was often himself: a typical example was his claim to be the only university teacher to have gone to sleep during one of his own lectures.
Aquilecchia’s first marriage was dissolved in 1973. He is survived by his second wife, Catherine, and by two sons and a daughter of his first marriage.

Giovanni Aquilecchia, Italianist, was born on November 28, 1923. He died on August 3, 2001, aged 77.