Carlo Ossola is the new president of the Treccani Encyclopaedia Institute

The 78-year-old philologist and literary critic Carlo Ossola, professor emeritus at the Collège de France and holder of the chair of 'Modern Literature of Neo-Latin Europe', has been appointed as the new president of the Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani for the five-year period 2024-2029. Ossola is set to succeed jurist and tax lawyer Franco Gallo, former finance minister in the Ciampi government and president emeritus of the Constitutional Court, who served as president of Treccani from 2014 to the present.

The Council of Ministers, on the proposal of President Giorgia Meloni, at its meeting on Monday 10 June, decided to start the procedure for the appointment of Ossola, a member of the Scientific Council of the Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, as president of the national encyclopaedic institute founded in 1925 by entrepreneur Giovanni Treccani and philosopher Giovanni Gentile. The proposed nomination will now be submitted to the relevant parliamentary commissions for their opinion and once ratified will have to be promulgated by the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, with a special decree. The Treccani Institute, recognised as a private law body of national interest and a cultural institution (Law 123/2 April 1980), is independent of the State and other bodies; only the appointment of its president, due to its national importance, is devolved to the President of the Republic.

Born in Turin on 11 March 1946, Carlo Ossola is an intellectual of great international prestige in the academic world: he was professor of Italian Literature at the Universities of Geneva (1976-82), Padua (1982-88) and Turin (1988-1999). He is a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Accademia dell'Arcadia, the Accademia delle Scienze in Turin, the Accademia Olimpica in Vicenza, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He was chairman of the National Committee for the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death in 2021, appointed by the Ministry of Culture, and is co-director of the magazines 'Lettere Italiane' and 'Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa'. Author of essays in which the acumen of the philologist is combined with the skills of the comparatist and the historian of ideas, Ossola has dealt in particular with Renaissance culture and the civilisation of courts in Europe. In his studies on contemporary authors, a prominent place belongs to Giuseppe Ungaretti. For twenty years Ossola directed the Giorgio Cini Foundation's Alta Cultura courses, publishing, with Vittore Branca, volumes of wide-ranging cultural significance. For the Italian Encyclopaedia Institute, in addition to directing the "Classici Ricciardi" series, for which he edited the volume "Libri d'Italia. 1861-2011' (2011), he directed the series 'Classici Treccani. I grandi autori della letteratura italiana', for which he edited the volumes 'Dante Alighieri, Commedia' (2011) and 'Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi' (2012). Carlo Ossola's recent books include "Il continente interiore" (Marsilio, 2010); "Introduzione alla Divina Commedia" (Marsilio, 2012); "Erasmo nel notturno d'Europa" (Vita e Pensiero, 2015); "Italo Calvino. L'invisibile e il suo dove" (Vita e Pensiero, 2016); "Europa ritrovata. Geographies and myths of the old continent" (Vita e Pensiero, 2017); "In the nursery of comets. Figure di un'Europa a venire" (Marsilio, 2018); "Trattato delle piccole virtù. Breviario di civiltà" (Marsilio, 2019); "Dopo la gloria. I secoli del credere in Occidente" (Treccani, 2019); "Per domani ancora. Vie di uscita dal confino" (Olschki, 2020); "Introduzione alla Divina Commedia" (Marsilio, 2021); "Personaggi della Divina Commedia" (Marsilio, 2021). In 2021, he also edited the bilingual edition of the Divine Comedy for the series La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade published by Gallimard and the commentary on the Divine Comedy.