Author: Fortis, Alberto
Biography:
FORTIS, Alberto (1741-1803: Biographie universelle)
He was born Giovanni Battista Fortis in Padua, Italy, and took the name Alberto when he entered an Augustinian order. But monastic life did not suit him so he left to undertake a succession of travels as a naturalist, publishing accounts of his observations in the 1770s. Something of a polymath, he developed an extensive correspondence with other learned men in Europe. He was elected a member of various scientific institutions (1795, FRSL) and became permanent secretary of the institute in Rome. He contributed many papers to learned journals and translated the French Journal de physique into Italian. In 1801 he was appointed librarian at an important library in Bologna (most probably the Archiginnasio) but held that position for only two years. He died in Bologna on 21 Oct. 1803. His major work on Dalmatia (1774), composed as letters to the Earl of Bute, the Bishop of Londonderry, and others, was translated from Italian into French, German, and English (1778). The dual-language De cataclysmi/ Poetical Sketch was first published from manuscript in two editions in London in 1786 by an anonymous editor who appears to have believed that the Abbé was dead: he refers in his preface to "an untimely death" which prevented the work from being completed. (Biographie universelle 2 [1834] 1722-3; "Alberto Fortis," Wikipedia 5 Oct. 2021) HJ