“The Most Flavourful Language in the World”: Persian at the Heart of Oriental Studies in Rome

At the end of the sixteenth century, while Europe was laboriously becoming aware of the presence of other languages alongside Arabic within the Islamic world, Rome represented an avant-garde centre for studies on the Persian language and literature. Within the frame of the Typographia Medicea enterprise (1584-1614), Giovanni Battista Raimondi and his collaborators have collected manuscripts and studied, with pioneering competence, various aspects of the Persian cultural world, also providing one of the most beautiful descriptions of this language. Although the study of Persian then continued in Italy, and in Rome, in a fragmentary way, often carried out by specialists of contiguous languages, those first fruits have left a significant mark and legacy, tracing a path that in Rome proceeds to the first courses of Persian at ‘La Sapienza’ University, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in particular through the figures of the Sanskritist Giacomo Lignana (1827-1891) first and the Turcologist Ettore Rossi (1894-1955) later. The affirmation of the study and teaching of Persian as an autonomous discipline must finally be associated with the figure of Alessandro Bausani (1921-1988), who – free of all political conditioning and animated by a strong universalist spirit – makes it an essential constituent not only of Arabic and Islamic studies, but also of investigations into other historical-literary worlds (in the Indian subcontinent as well as in South-East Asia), tracing a model of transversality and a vastness of horizons that stays as a fundamental point of reference for the whole tradition of the Scuola Orientale of Rome.