Cesare Cantù

Who was Cesare Cantù?

Cesare Cantù was an Italian historian.

Cantù was born at Brivio, in Lombardy, and began his career as a teacher.

His first literary essay was a romantic poem entitled Algiso, o la Lega Lombarda, and in the following year he produced a Storia della città e della diocesi di Como in two volumes. The death of his father then left him in charge of a large family, and he worked very hard both as a teacher and a writer to provide for them. His prodigious literary activity led to his falling under the suspicions of the Austrian police, and he was mixed up in a political trial and arrested in 1833.

While in prison writing materials were denied him, but he managed to write on rags with a tooth-pick and candle smoke, and thus composed the novel Margherita Pusterla. On his release a year later, as he was interdicted from teaching, literature became his only resource. In 1836 the Turinese publisher, Giuseppe Pomba, commissioned him to write a universal history, which his vast reading enabled him to do. In six years the work was completed in seventy-two volumes, and immediately achieved a general popularity; the publisher made a fortune out of it, and Cantù's royalties amounted, it is said, to 300,000 lire.