Juan Bautista Conti

Count Giambattista or Juan Bautista Conti, (Lendinara, 1741 - id., 1820), poet, translator and hispanophile Venetian Illuminism or Neoclassicism. Biography

After a doctorate in law in Padua, he traveled extensively, particularly in Spain, learning the language and educating himself in Spanish literature. For his works and writings he was called to take part in the Real Academia de la Lengua. He arrived in Madrid in 1769 accompanying his uncle Antonio Conti, married to Isabel Bernascone, who served in the regiment of corps guards; returned to Italy on the occasion of the death of his father and returned to Madrid along with his brother Silvio, who worked in the Spanish navy; During the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV, the playwright Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731-1815), with the other Neapolitan Hispanofilos, was present intermittently during the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV, at the Fonda di San Sebastiano, where he made a great friendship with Nicolás Fernández de Moratín (they lived in the same building), whose tastes led to Neoclassicism. The daughter of his uncle, Sabina Conti and Bernascone, was the first love of Leandro Fernandez de Moratín, but this one rejected and married later with Giambattista.

He translated the best Spanish poets into Italian, for example the first Eclogue of Garcilaso de la Vega, in a bilingual edition supported by the Toledo poet Casimiro Gómez Ortega (1741-1818), whom he had met in Italy, by the ambassador of Venice Francesco Pésaro and Floridablanca, who gave him the plan of the work, made the Collection of Castilian poetry translated in Tuscan verse, and illustrated by Count Juan Bautista Conti (Madrid, Imprenta Real, 1782-1790 ), four volumes in fourth, where his p for the authors of the Renaissance is realized; the work was to include, in addition to these volumes devoted to the lyric, a second part intended for fragments of epic, didactic and comic, and a third intended for dramatic, but only printed the first part to be withdrawn the official subsidy , although it had a second extended edition in Padua, 1819. Each author is accompanied by biography and the texts are annotated. He also composed a heartfelt elegy in Italian to the death of Count Floridablanca. He then settled definitively in 1785 in his hometown of Lendinara, where he died. Works Sources

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