Cesare Segre (1928–2014)

Cesare Segre was born to a Jewish family in the Piedmontese town of Verzuolo, Italy. During World War II, he was hidden under a false name in a Catholic school to escape the Nazis. In 1950, he earned a doctoral degree from the University of Turin, where he was a student of Santorre Debenedetti, his uncle, and Benvenuto Terracini. He taught Romance languages at the Universities of Trieste and Pavia, where at the latter he became chair of the department in the 1960s. He was also in demand as a visiting professor at the Universities of Manchester, Rio de Janeiro, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of California at Berkeley. His early researched concerned the history of Italian syntax and prose, and he went on to write pioneering literary criticism and comparative studies of Romance literature. He was the editor of Paragone magazine and served as the editor of the cultural page of the newspaper Corriere della Sera. He was a prolific writer who contributed about 1,000 articles to magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals. He also wrote or edited more than two dozen books and anthologies. In 1999 he published his autobiography, Per curiosità: Una specie di autobiografia (Out of Curiousity). He married Maria Luisa Meneghetti, also a professor of Romance languages.