He died at the age of 99 Antonio La Penna, historian of Latin literature and philologistdean of Latinists, and one of the the most eminent scholarly figures of the classical world, at the national and international levels.
The academic died on Tuesday April 9 at his home in Florence and the announcement of his death, reports Adnkronos, was made. today from the University of Florence, of which he was professor emeritus and where he taught from 1956 to 2000.
In 1987 he received the prize Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for Literary History and Criticism and, author of more than six hundred publications, in In 2002 he was named a national member of the Lincei Academy.
Born on January 9, 1925 in Bisaccia, in the province of Avellino, Antonio La Penna wrote some of the most widely used textbooks on the history of Latin literature in Italian universities and worked as a professor of Latin literature at Universities of Pisa and Florence And taught Latin philology at the Normal School of Pisa.
There are numerous internationally referenced essays on Latin authors, including Sallust, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid and Phaedrus, and conducted very scholarly studies on the fortunes of the ancient world and the history of philology.
Alessandra Petrucci, rector of the University of Florence, remembering the professor, said: “With pen Italy loses one of its most prestigious and refined intellectualsand the international community of scholars of the ancient world, one of its most illustrious representatives. La Penna was the teacher of generations of students, who learned from him not only notions but more generally a love of culture. and for the work carried out with seriousness and dedication, and who saw in him an exceptional paradigm of civic engagement“.
