In memoriam: Luigi Monga (1941-2004).(Biography)

The scholarly community was shocked and saddened by the news that Luigi Monga, professor of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University, died July 10, after suffering a stroke July 7 (Chronicle of Higher Education [July 18, 2004]). He is survived by his wife Mary, and his daughter Francesca.

Born in Desio (MI), Italy on June 19, 1941, Luigi Monga came to the United States in the 1960s, having taught in England and Chad, and already with a strong background in the classical languages. He earned MA and PhD degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo. There he explored various areas of the Romance Languages and Literatures, in particular in a Renaissance context, before taking up a position in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt, where he taught for 28 years.

Distinguished by the territorial breadth of his research, and the humanistic paradigm and spirit that informed it, Luigi Monga was truly a Renaissance man, and among the most productive and innovative literary scholars of his generation. The most compelling characteristic of Luigi's scholarship was its cosmopolitanism, combined with a deep appreciation of the vital contributions of the languages and literatures of Italy to world literature. Luigi was the Milanese embodiment of the Florentine Dante's "citizen of the world," and this distinctively "Italian" perspective gave his research a particular character and persuasiveness, beginning with his study of the Renaissance pastoral and of Sannazaro's Arcadia as a model for the French tradition in Le genre pastoral au XVI siecle. Sannazar et Belleau (Editions Universitaires, 1974). The same perspective informed In the Very Heart of Man. The Life and Poetry of Carlo Porta (Gainseville, 1986), which bore the memorable dedication: "Ai me gent de Des 'che m'han daa stat, vita e parentella' e ona 'scoeura de lingua' tutta brianzoeura." This volume was ahead of its time in both American and Italian literary critical contexts for its incisive valorization of one of the most distinctive voices of Italian literature, a poet who was at the time virtually unknown outside Italy. Luigi pioneered the study of what has since become known as "the other Italy," that is, the Italian literary canon in dialect, and of "L'Italia fuori l'Italia," well before these lines of inquiry became more generally cultivated.

Luigi Monga's authentically cosmopolitan outlook inspired the scholarly journey that he undertook subsequent to these studies, focused on the literature and history of travel, and which he pursued with all the coherency, continuity and integrity characteristic of the studioso di razza that he was. He came to be generally recognized as the foremost expert on travel literature in North America, a reputation that was consolidated by two monumental collections of essays dedicated to travel literature (or "hodoeporics" as he called the field) that he organized and edited, volumes that in their encyclopedic range and variety had for those of us working in the area a kind of Ramusian aura about them: L'odeporica/ Hodoeporics: On Travel Literature. Annali d'italianistica, vol. 14, 1996, pp. 743; and Hodoeporics Revisited/Ritorno all'odeporica. Annali d'Italianistica, vol. 21, 2003, pp. 612.

These volumes were also the product of Luigi's own travels and of his countless encounters with colleagues in seminars and conferences, in libraries and archives throughout Europe and the Americas. He connected and corresponded with scholars throughout the world and he brought them together into coalescence around the theme of the journey; both the collective journey of history, but with a special focus, at least, in Luigi's case, on the individual journeyer and his testimony. So many of us had ...