On October 31, local time, Professor Luigi Reitani, an outstanding expert in German literature at the University of Udine in Italy, died of complications of the new crown at the age of 62.
On 1 November, Roberto Pinton, president of the University of Udine, was deeply saddened by the "untimely death" of Luigi Reitani, a professor of German literature in the Department of German Chinese, Communication, Education and Society, which he called a great loss to the entire academic community.
Rector Roberto Pinton recalled that Luigi Reitani was one of the region's most important scientific and cultural figures and "an un punto di riferimento" of the University of Udine. Since 1991 he has been teaching at the University of Udine and in 2005 became full professor of German literature. In addition, he is a visiting professor at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria and the University of Basel in Switzerland. From 2008 to 2013, he served as an independent member of the municipal council responsible for culture in Udine. From 2015 to 2019, he was Director of the Italian Institute of Culture in Berlin, Germany, organizing public events to promote the Italian language and culture, and cooperating with the Italian Embassy in Germany on cultural policy.
Professor Luigi Reitani is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Italian Germanic Institute and serves as Director of the Editorial Department of the Institute, as well as an executive position in the Italian Association for Science and Literature, and is a member of several international scientific committees and editorial boards of magazines, including Fellows of Queen's College, Oxford, fellows of the Austrian Literary Society in Vienna, among others.
Professor Luigi Reitani's research career was devoted to the German poet Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, Austrian literature of the 19th to 21st centuries, and Italian-German relations. He is known as the most outstanding international scholar of Hölderlin studies. Professor Luigi Reitani has published more than 200 papers and academic publications, some of which have been translated into French, English, Polish and Croatian. It has a wide influence in German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and Italy.
In 2002, he won the Mondello Prize for his translation of all of Hölderlin's poems; thereafter, he also won the Lorenzo Montano Prize for Works of Fiction, the Bella Translation Prize, etc.
In 2010, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Republic of Austria for his contribution to the spread of Austrian culture in Italy. In 2020 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Although Professor Reitani was vaccinated in the spring of this year (2021), he died of complications from COVID-19. The Italian mainstream press gave him a high evaluation: Ansa called him "the great Germanic scholar, Hölderlin scholar", the Newspaper Manifesto called him "a radical change in linguistics with enthusiasm and irony", and Le Figaro called him "the greatest Germanic scientist of his generation".