Biography of Giancarlo Pizzi
Giancarlo Pizzi (Oderzo 1931 - Milan 2016) was born in Oderzo to Marino Pizzi and Tina Cristofoletti. His maternal family, from Oderzo, boasts an ancient lineage descending from both the Princes of Porcia and the Amalteo. In 1936 the family moved to Milan for his father's work reasons, but he returned to Oderzo because of wartime events because between 1942 and 1945 bombings had rendered the family home uninhabitable. His education was influenced by his maternal uncles, Eugenio and Ciro Cristofoletti, painters, polemicists, and travelers with extensive relations especially in the literary and artistic fields. He established a deep bond especially with his uncle Ciro, thanks to whom he developed a strong passion for literature, theater and cinema, which he would cultivate and deepen throughout his life, so much so that he not only ideally planned the reconstitution of the famous Bibliotheca Amaltheorum. He graduated from the Milan Polytechnic in 1954 with a degree in engineering, beginning to design even before he graduated from the Caccia Dominioni firm. In 1958, a few years after graduating, he started his own design studio. He also combined design with the restoration of monumental buildings in Milan, the Veneto and Emilia, confirming his artistic flair (examples include the restoration of Villa Litta in Lainate, the Palazzo degli Omenoni in Milan, the 18th-century theater in San Giovanni in Persiceto, Bologna, and Villa Sagramoso Sacchetti near Verona). In Milan he frequented the Circolo anarchico, Peppi Battaglini's bookstore, an intellectual hotbed frequented by prominent figures such as Giovanni Scheiwiller, Carlo Bo, and Leonardo Sciascia. Beginning in 1980 he traveled and stayed often in Tunisia where he began to become so interested in Arab history and culture that he published with his friend Scheiwiller Ibn Ḥaldūn and the Muqaddima: a philosophy of history, 1985 (annotated translation for which he received praise from the distinguished Arabist Francesco Gabrieli). This was followed by Three Thousand Years of History in Tunisia, 1996; Al-Mas'udi and The Meadows of Gold and the Gem Mines: the encyclopedia of a tenth-century Arab humanist, 2001; and The Lives and Translated Verses of Twelve Arab Poets from the Sixth to the Twentieth Century, 2006. He also devoted himself to family history. Two of his researches are now considered indispensable for those who study the events of Venetian humanism and the Venetian-Friuli aristocracy: History of the Amaltei, 1990; History of the Porcias, 2012. In order to remember him as an eclectic person with a vivid intellectual curiosity, a profound admirer of culture in all its forms, an engineer, draftsman, artist and student of history, a fund dedicated to him has been established. Into it have so far come two albums of drawings by his uncle Ciro Cristofoletti, an oil painting by his uncle Eugenio, and the precious nashi manuscript from the second half of the eighteenth century. This is the work of Avicenna (Ibn Sina), the greatest of the Arab philosophers known in Europe since the Middle Ages, Kitab al-Sifa (Book of Healing from Error), and it is his most famous philosophical work which can be defined as a metaphysics exposed by interpreting that of Aristotle in the light of Plotinus' thought. The manuscript, measuring 19x13 cm, copied in Istanbul in 1767, is composed of 305 sheets numbered only on the recto and therefore 610 pages written in a small and perfect nashi alphabet on waxed paper, engraved diagonally as a guide to the commentary by Mustafa al-Hafiz ibn Fadl. The text is framed in gold, the title page decorated in colour, the binding is modern but made according to Arabic models and with two original plates preserved.