Rovida, Cesare

Abstract

Cesare ROVIDA was born in Milan from a noble family in 1549 ca. His life and work is representative of a still comparatively neglected phenomenon in the 16th c. intellectual history of Milano and of the close University, Pavia and North of Italy. It seems that Rovida and his fellow scholars gathered into seminar, reading and commenting upon ancient Greek texts in their original language. Books owned by Rovida and by his teacher Ottaviano Ferrari, fully annotated as they are with marginalia in Greek and in Latin, shed light into the distinctive way of working of this circle of fellows scholars. Most attention was paid to the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle’s corpus, which they commented upon in their turn, either in Latin or in Greek, focusing on textual criticism and on close exegesis of the Greek text. In Rovida’s house, scholars formed the so called “Academia Rovidiana”