Franco Munari

Franco Munari (born February 9, 1920 in Pernumia near Padua , † March 29, 1995 in Berlin ) was an Italian classical philologist .

Life

Franco Munari, the son of a country doctor, had an extraordinary talent for the classical languages ​​and published a verse translation of Virgil's Aeneid as early as 1934, at the age of 14 . At the age of 15 Munari passed the entrance examination to the Scuola Normale Superiore at the University of Florence and studied Classical Philology, Archeology and Ancient History . He was particularly influenced by the philology professor Giorgio Pasquali , with whom Munari received his doctorate in the summer of 1939 - at the age of 19. He then worked for a year as Pasquali's unpaid assistant at the University of Florence.

When Italy entered World War II (1940) Munari interrupted his academic career and took part in the war as an officer in the Alpini . After the armistice between the Allies and Italy, he was captured by the Germans in 1943 and held in an internment camp until October 1945.

It was not until 1946 that Munari resumed teaching at the University of Florence. Until 1950 he worked again as an assistant for Pasquali, with a break from 1948 to 1949 when he was a British Council Scholar at Oxford University . Here he met the philologist Eduard Fraenkel , with whom he had a long friendship. Despite the advocacy of Fraenkel and Pasquali Munari did not succeed in obtaining a professorship for classical philology in Italy. In 1950 he went to Sweden and worked as a lecturer for Italian at the universities of Uppsala and Stockholm . He never broke off contact with his friends and relatives in Italy throughout his life. In Sweden Munari married his wife Maj (1917-2005). In 1955 he was in Florence for the subject of Latin Literature habilitation . With the help of Eduard Fraenkel and Wolfgang Schmid from the University of Bonn , Munari was able to retire there in 1957 and give up his editing in Sweden. His Bonn venia legendi was described as Classical Philology including Late and Middle Latin .

In June 1961 Munari was appointed adjunct professor in Bonn. At the same time, he received a call from the Free University of Berlin to the chair of classical philology, which had become vacant due to the death of Georg Rohde . Munari accepted the offer and began teaching in Berlin in the summer semester of 1962. He taught at this university for more than a quarter of a century and during this time refused various appointments to other universities: 1964 Pavia , Messina and Florence, 1965 Yale and Chapel Hill , 1966 Bochum and 1969 Hamburg . Munari retired on March 31, 1988, the latest possible .

Munari died in the spring of 1995 at the age of 75 after a long illness. He was buried in his family's grave in Gallio near Asiago. The University of Greifswald acquired his library .

literature

• Franco Munari: Small Fonts. Edited by his students on his 60th birthday , Berlin 1980 (with list of publications 1934–1980).
• Widu-Wolfgang Ehlers : Franco Munari † . In: Gnomon , Volume 69 (1997), pp. 90-92 (with additions to the list of publications).

Web links

• Literature by and about Franco Munari in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ehlers (1997) 90.