Gaetano Polidori
(1764-1853)

Died aged c. 89

Gaetano Fedele Polidori (1763–1853) was an Italian writer, political and scholar living in London. He was the son of Agostino Ansano Polidori (1714–1778), a physician and poet who lived and practised in his native Bientina, near Pisa, Tuscany. Polidori studied law at the University of Pisa. He became secretary to the tragedian Vittorio Alfieri in 1785 and remained with him four years. He came to England from Paris in 1790 after resigning as Alfieri's secretary. He settled in London, working as an Italian teacher and translator. He translated various literary works, notably, John Milton's Paradise Lost and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, besides other writings of Milton and Lucan. He wrote prolifically, producing his own fiction, poetry, criticism, and tragedies.He also set up a private press at his home in London, where amongst other works (mostly his own), he printed the first editions of some poems by his grandchildren, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. He also printed an edition of the poem Osteologia, which his father Agostino Ansano Polidori had written in 1763. He retired to a house in Holmer Green, Buckinghamshire in 1836.

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