The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Villari, Pasquale

VILLARI, vēl'lạ-rē, Pasquale, Italian historian: b. Naples, 3 Oct. 1827; d. Florence, December 1917. The son of a lawyer, he migrated to Florence after the failure of the independence movement in 1848 and began collecting new materials on Savonarola. He published the fruits of his researches in the Archivio Storico Italiano in 1856, and three years later was nominated professor of the philosophy of history at the University of Pisa, about the time that he published his ‘Life of Savonarola,’ a work that established his reputation as a historian of wide vision and artistic representation. His social political writings, however, exerted the most powerful influence in Italy, especially after the collapse of 1866, when he plainly told his countrymen that the nation itself was directly responsible for that inglorious campaign. His second most important work, the ‘Life of Machiavelli,’ appeared a few years later. In 1867 Villari was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, and appointed to the senate in 1884, and became its vice-president in 1887. In the Rudini Cabinet of 1891 he was Minister of Education, when he introduced valuable reforms in the curriculum of the schools.