Bernardo Zamagna
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Bernardo Zamagna (November 5, 1735–April 20, 1820) was a priest of the Dominican Order, a theologist and predicator, from an old noble family of Ragusa/Dubrovnik, was a son of Marco de Zamagna (died two months before the birth of Bernardo) and Maria de Caboga, she remarried and Marino de Zamagna, the brother to whom the Navis Aeria is dedicated, was the son of Marco of this later marriage.
He was born in Ragusa (present day Dubrovnik) on November 5, 1735. He studied in institutes of Jesuits. At age eighteen he moved to Rome in order to continue his studies in 1753, and began his novitiate at S Andrea al Quirinale. At the end of two years he took his first vows and when he starting his second biennium found that he had as one of his teacher Raguseans Raimondo Cunich; and Roger Boscovich. After the conclusion of his studies in Rome, he went to live in Siena.
Poet and scientist with a passion for astronomy, at twenty years only he published a poem in Latin: "De aucupio accipitris" (The Hunting of the Sparrowhawk). This work was soon republished in Germany. Later, he translated into Latin the Iliad and Odyssey (1772), this edition was dedicated in a long letter of Latin Hexameters to the grand Duke Pietro Leopold of Tuscany, to whose court Zamagna seems to have been sent by the Senate of Ragusa. (Venice 1777).
He wrote commentaries on Hesiod and Theocritus (Parma 1768), Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius. He refused the chair of Greek at University of Milan, offered by Maria Theresa of Austria. He returned in Ragusa in 1783. He died on April 20, 1820.
