Gaetano Cozzi – historian and writer

Professor pursued academic research despite his disability

Gaetano Cozzi overcame disability to
become an expert on Venetian history

Historian, professor, and writer Gaetano Cozzi, who became an expert on the history of Venice and taught at both Venice and Padua Universities, was born on this day in 1922 in Zero Branco in the province of Treviso in the Veneto.

Although confined to a wheelchair for most of his adult life, Cozzi became famous internationally because of his research into the life of writer and statesman, Paolo Sarpi, and his own writing about the relationship between law and society in Italy.

Cozzi grew up in Legnano, a municipality of Milan, and went to military school. At the age of 20, he became a second lieutenant in the Alpine troops. While attending a training school in Parma he was kicked by a horse and suffered a leg wound. A vaccine injected into him to treat the wound caused a serious infection and although his condition stabilised after a few months he was left paralysed in his lower limbs.

He had to have frequent periods in hospital, but his medical treatment, rather than demoralising him, stimulated him intellectually. He began to take an interest in politics and came into contact with the Liberal Party in Italy. He contributed to the Resistance in 1943, while lying in his hospital bed, by writing for Italian newspapers that carried propaganda pieces. He later left the Liberal Party for the Radical party and then joined L'Unità Popolare, a short-lived Democratic and Liberal political party.

Despite being paralysed, Cozzi prepared to take his university exams and he graduated in History of Italian Law at the University of Milan in 1949. His thesis was about the writer Paolo Sarpi, and the relationship between the state and the church in Italy.

Cozzi moved to Venice to continue his research, even though life was difficult for him there because of his disability. He also found it difficult to find accommodation because of the large population in the city at the time. 

Paolo Sarpi, the Venetian writer on whose
work Cozzi became a leading authority

After the founding of the Institute for the History of Venetian Society and State, he was appointed its secretary in 1955.

His first book, about Nicolò Contarini, who was the Doge of Venice in 1630, had to be dictated by Cozzi to his mother in 1958 because his illness had once again forced him to lie in bed.

Cozzi was appointed to teach history at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature in Venice and while attending a meeting at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in 1960, he met Luisa Zille, an expert in philology, who he married in 1962 in Venice. He later collaborated with his wife to edit the Complete Works of Paolo Sarpi.

In 1966, Cozzi was appointed by the ancient University of Padua to teach medieval and modern history at their faculty of Political Sciences.

After returning to teach at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in 1970, he fought for a degree course in history to be created there. 

Cozzi was a prolific writer about criminal justice and prisons in the Venetian Republic and he also wrote The History of Venice, published in two volumes in 1986 and 1992.

In 1987, he became a board member of the newly established, Treviso-based Benetton Foundation for Studies and Research.

All Cozzi’s writing and research had to be interspersed with long periods in hospital because of complications with his health. He suffered a further blow when his wife, Luisa, who was suffering from depression, took her own life in 1995.

Cozzi’s teaching career came to an end in 1998 with a ceremony at Ca’ Foscari, where he was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus.

The historian died in 2001 in Venice at the age of 78. He was buried in the cemetery at Zero Branco next to his wife, Luisa. His gravestone bears the inscription: ‘Still together, always together.’

Casa Luisa e Gaetano Cozzi, just outside Zero
Branco, has a library housing the Cozzi archive

Travel tip:

Zero Branco is a comune - municipality - in the province of Treviso in the Veneto, located about 20km (12 miles) northwest of Venice and about 10km (6 miles) southwest of Treviso.  Casa Luisa e Gaetano Cozzi in Via Milan is now a cultural centre in the countryside outside Zero Branco, having been bequeathed to Fondazione Benetton in Gaetano Cozzi’s will. It is an eight-hectare complex consisting of a former farmhouse, rustic outbuildings, and agricultural land, which is used by the Benetton Foundation for agricultural research.  A library houses Cozzi’s documents and archives that are made available to scholars. Luisa’s Bechstein piano is preserved there and musical activities take place at Casa Cozzi in her memory.

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Porticoes and weeping willow trees line the
picturesque Canale Buranelli in pretty Treviso

Travel tip:

The pretty town of Treviso is 30km (19 miles) north of Venice. Visitors can stroll along by canals, but unlike Venice they are fringed by willow trees and adorned with the occasional water wheel and you won’t encounter large tour groups coming in the opposite direction. There are plenty of restaurants serving authentic cucina trevigiana and cucina veneta, but at more modest prices than you will find in Venice, and plenty of places to sample locally-produced Prosecco. Treviso is close to the so-called strada del prosecco, the road between Valdobbiadene and Conegliano, which is lined with wineries producing Prosecco DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata), the stamp of quality given to the best Italian wines. It takes only about ten minutes to walk from the railway station through the 16th century Venetian walls and along Via Roma, Corso del Popolo, and Via XX Settembre to Piazza dei Signori, at the centre of Treviso. From this central square, a short walk through Piazza San Vito leads to a picturesque part of Treviso, Canale Buranelli. You can walk alongside the canal under the porticos of the houses and see the flower decorated balconies on the ornate buildings on the other side. Nearby is Treviso's fish market - the  Pescheria (fish market), which is held daily on a very small island in the middle of the River Sile. Treviso’s Duomo, built in the 12th century but remodelled in the 15th, 16th, and 18th centuries, housing Titian’s Annunciation, painted in 1570, and frescoes painted by his arch rival, Pordenone.

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More reading:

Paolo Sarpi, the patriotic Venetian who the Pope wanted dead

Luciano Benetton, the entrepreneur who co-founded clothing brand

Why Treviso commemorates star tenor Mario del Monaco

Also on this day:

1616: Europe's first free public school opens in Frascati, near Rome

1881: The birth of car manufacturer Ettore Bugatti

1904: The birth of Umberto II, the last king of Italy

1919: The birth of cycling great Fausto Coppi

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