Cesare Questa (1934-2016) was an Italian classicist particularly known for his studies of the metres of the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence. His researches over many years were summed up in his major work published in Urbino in 2007.
Questa was born in
Milan
Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...
, the son of Angelo Questa, an orchestra conductor, and Ada Filippini, a mezzosoprano singer.
[Fedeli (2016).]
He initially studied in Rome, at the Facoltà di Lettere della Sapienza, under the teacher Ettore Paratore. His earliest work was a thesis on the historian
Tacitus
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus ( , ; – ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historiography, Roman historians by modern scholars.
The surviving portions of his t ...
. He moved to Urbino in 1963, where he mostly devoted his time to the study of Plautus. In 1970 he founded l’Istituto di Civiltà Antiche, which housed among other things a large collection of reproductions of manuscripts of Plautus and Terence. In 1996 he created the Centro Internazionale di Studi Plautini, which holds international conferences on Plautine studies.
In 1990 Cesare Questa was made a member of the
Accademia dei Lincei
The Accademia dei Lincei (; literally the "Academy of the Lynx-Eyed", but anglicised as the Lincean Academy) is one of the oldest and most prestigious European scientific institutions, located at the Palazzo Corsini on the Via della Lungara in Rom ...
, or Lincean Academy, which is the national academy of science and literature of Italy.
He died in
Urbino
Urbino ( ; ; Romagnol: ''Urbìn'') is a walled city in the Marche region of Italy, south-west of Pesaro, a World Heritage Site notable for a remarkable historical legacy of independent Renaissance culture, especially under the patronage of ...
, where at the time of his death he was Emeritus Professor of Latin at the
University of Urbino
The University of Urbino "Carlo Bo" ( it, Università degli Studi di Urbino "Carlo Bo", ''UniUrb'') is an Italian university located in Urbino, a walled hill-town in the region of Marche, located in the north-eastern part of central Italy. The ...
.
Works by Cesare Questa
For a full list of the works of Cesare Questa, see
''IdRef: Questa, Cesare (1934-....)''[Idref = Identifiants et référentiels pour l'enseignement supérieur et la recherche.]
*''Studi sulle fonti degli Annales di Tacito''. Roma: Edizioni Dell'ateneo. (1960).
*''Introduzione alla metrica di Plauto''. Bologna: Patròn. (1967).
*''Per la storia del testo di Plauto nell'Umanesimo''. Roma : Edizioni Dell'ateneo (1968).
*''Numeri Innumeri'' (1984).
*''Parerga Plautina'' (1985).
*''Semiramide redenta: archetipi, fonti classiche, censure antropologiche nel melodramma'' (1989).
*''Titi Macci Plauti Cantica'' (1995).
*''L’Aquila a Due Teste'' (1998).
*''La Metrica di Plauto e Terenzio'' (2007). Urbino: Quattro Venti.
''Il nuovo volto di Plauto'' (Lecture in Italian). (2010).
"Paratore, Ettore"in ''Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani'', Volume 81, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana (2014).
Further reading
*Bartera, Salvador (2016
Obituary of Cesare Questa Published on the website of Timothy J. Moore, Washington University in St Louis.
*Brown, P.G.McC. (2009)
Review of C. Questa "La metrica di Plauto e di Terenzio" ''The Classical Review'' vol 59, issue 2.
*de Melo, Wolfgang D.C. (2007)
''Bryn Mawr Classical Review''.
*Fedeli, Paolo (2016)
"In ricordo di Cesare Questa" Obituary.
*Van't Dack E. (1961)
"Cesare Questa, Studi sulle fonti degli Annales di Tacito (review)" ''L'Antiquité Classique'', Année 1961 30-2 pp. 622–623. (In French).
*Virgilio, Gianluca (2016)
"Ricordo del mio professore Cesare Questa" Zibaldoni (literary review). (In Italian).
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Questa, Cesare
1934 births
2016 deaths
Scholars of Latin literature
Italian classical philologists
Members of the Lincean Academy