Perfil
National member of the Accademico Nazionale dei Lincei and foreign member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, he graduated in Classical Literature from the University of Bari in June 1961. A free lecturer in Latin Literature in 1967, he was awarded the chair of Classical Philology at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1968, which he held until 1975. From 1976 to Oct. 31, 2010, he was full professor of Latin Literature in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Bari; he is currently Professor Emeritus of the University of Bari and National Academician of the Lincei.
He received degrees ‘honoris causa’ from the Universities of Lisbon and Mar del Plata (Argentina); he is an honorary citizen of Jesi and Venosa. Former president of the Executive Board of Horace’s Bimillenary, president of the Scientific Committee of Ovid’s Bimillenary, and member of the Executive Board of the Center for Ciceronian Studies in Rome, he is a member of the scientific committee of the Institute for Magna Graecia in Taranto, the Properzian Academy of Subasio in Assisi, and the Accademia Ovidiana in Sulmona.
He directed the collections ‘Studi e Testi’ (Adriatica Editrice), ‘Scrinia’ (Edipuglia), ‘Horatiana’ (Edizioni Osanna), ‘Studia Classica et Mediaevalia’ (Bautz Verlag, Nordhausen, Germany). He has been the editor since the founding of the journal ‘Aufidus’, a four-monthly journal on science and didactics of classical culture, co-editor of ‘Rivista di Filologia e d’Istruzione Classica’ and ‘Giornale Italiano di Filologia’.
He won the first prize at the Certamen Capitolinum of the City of Rome in 1995, in 2007 the award as ‘Marchigiano of the year for culture’; in 2023 he received the ‘Cultori di Roma’ award in Campidoglio.
His books and articles have been published, besides in Italy, in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, France, Germany, England, Holland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, the United States, and Switzerland. His book on Catullus’ Carme 61 has been translated into English, his book on Ecology and the Roman World into Spanish and French. He has given cycles of lectures, seminars and conferences in Austria, France, Germany, England, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and in South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile). He has given lectures and seminars in major Argentine universities since 1990 and in the Universities of Lisbon and Coimbra since 1995.
The author of more than 500 books and articles, he has turned much of his activity to Latin authors of the first century B.C. and first century A.D.: of Cicero he edited the critical editions of De officiis, De amicitia, and the Philippicae (for Teubner in Leipzig) and the commentaries of the Pro Milone and Pro Murena, as well as that of his brother Quintus’ Commentariolum petitionis. An editor (for Teubner and the Lorenzo Valla Foundation) and commentator on Propertius, he has written essays and commentaries on Catullus, Virgil, Horace (whose Book IV of the Odes, the Satires, the Epistles and the Ars poetica he commented on), Tibullus, Ovid. He is the author of numerous studies on the Petronian novel and imperial oratory (Panegyric of Pliny; Latin Panegyrics). He also dealt with ecology in the Roman world in the volume La natura violata (Sellerio – Palermo 1990).
