Giovanni Battista Bronzini (4 September 1925 in Matera – 17 March 2002 in Bari) was an Italian anthropologist and

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...

of Italian folk traditions. He was a student at the University of Rome, where he learned from Paolo Toschi, a famous

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as th ...

and historian of folk traditions. He then became Professor Emeritus of Cultural Anthropology at the

University of Bari The University of Bari Aldo Moro ( it, Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro) is a state-supported higher education institution founded in 1925 in Bari, Apulia, in Southern Italy. The university is one of the most prestigious universities in ...

and, from 1974, he became director of anthropological studies journal ''Lares'', until his death in 2002. A literary scholar, Bronzini explained magical and superstitious peasant culture of the 1930s and 1940s and the traditions of rural Italy. Through the works of writer Carlo Levi and poet Rocco Scotellaro, he studied and described the culture of his region and the surrounding area. In 2012, the town of Accentura, in the Basilicata region, named the main square after him, in honor of his contributions and studies on the area and its traditions.

Selected publications

*Tradizioni popolari in Lucania (Matera, Montemurro, 1953) *Accettura: il contadino, l'albero, il santo (Galatina, Congedo, 1977) *Mito e realtà della civiltà contadina lucana (Matera, Montemurro, 1977- Vincitore Premio “Basilicata”) *Cultura popolare. Dialettica e contestualità (Bari, Dedalo, 1980), Cultura contadina e idea meridionalistica (Bari, Dedalo, 1982) *Homo laborans. Cultura del territorio e musei demologici (Galatina, Congedo, 1985) *I canti popolari di N. Tommaseo (Lecce, Milella, 1985) *L'Universo contadino e l'immaginario poetico di Rocco Scotellaro (Bari, Dedalo, 1987) *Intellettuali e poesia popolare nella Sicilia dell'Ottocento (Palermo, Sellerio, 1991) * La letteratura popolare italiana dell'Otto-Novecento: profilo storico-geografico (Novara – Firenze, De Agostini – Le Monnier, 1994) * Storia del culto della Madonna dell'Arco attraverso le fonti scritte e figurative dei secoli XVII-XVIII (Firenze, Olschki, 1998)

References

Italian anthropologists 20th-century Italian male writers 20th-century Italian historians 1925 births 2002 deaths People from Matera Italian male non-fiction writers 20th-century anthropologists {{Italy-historian-stub