Giorgio Colli

Italy state institutions 1917–1979 ○ Natural causes

Italian scholar of ancient philosophy who began the first manuscript-based critical edition of Nietzsche with his pupil Mazzino Montinari

Born in Turin in 1917, he took a law degree at Turin with a thesis on Plato's political thought and taught Mazzino Montinari at a Lucca high school in the 1940s. For thirty years he taught the history of ancient philosophy at Pisa, and he translated Aristotle's Organon and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason into Italian. Preparing a Nietzsche translation with Montinari from the late 1950s, he found the existing editions untrustworthy and launched a new critical edition. When Einaudi, regarding Nietzsche as a “Nazi”, withdrew, the new house Adelphi took it on; the edition also appeared with Gallimard and de Gruyter and became the standard for Nietzsche scholarship. He died in 1979 while writing La sapienza greca, which traced the origin of philosophy to the cults of Dionysus and Apollo.