Piccoli, Rafaello (1887-1933), Italianist and Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge

• Raffaello Piccoli

University Serena Professor of Italian (1929-1933), and formerly Professor of English at Naples. A stylish scholar, translator and poet, who died aged 46 from tuberculosis.
Made a Fellow in 1929.

‘Piccoli had it in him to be one of the dominant men of intellectual Europe – perhaps to bring English thought and feeling into that living touch with Europe (not Paris) we have so long needed’ (College Magazine vol. 70 (1933) pp.65-67).

‘By temperament he was a Neapolitan and he liked to explain his bold almost mask-like features – out of which the prominent mobile eyes piercingly, kindly, ironically, pensively, but always livingly, glanced – as proof of the survival of the ancient Numidian Mediterranean race, the race of Hannibal and Augustine’(College Magazine vol. 70 (1933) pp.65-67).

Ronald Hyam