List of Famous people born in Italy

Salvatore Pincherle was an Italian mathematician. He contributed significantly to the field of functional analysis, established the Italian Mathematical Union, and was president of the Third International Congress of Mathematicians. The Pincherle derivative is named after him.

Titus Quinctius Capitolinus Barbatus was a Roman statesman and general who served as consul six times. Titus Quinctius was a member of the gens Quinctia, one of the oldest patrician families in Rome.

Benedetto Antelami was an Italian architect and sculptor of the Romanesque school, whose "sculptural style sprang from local north Italian traditions that can be traced back to late antiquity" Little is known about his life. He was probably originally from Lombardy, perhaps born in Val d'Intelvi. It is believed from the Provençal style of his art that he served as apprentice at Saint-Trophime d'Arles. In 1178 he was at work at the Parma Cathedral, where, in the right transept, he executed a bas-relief of the Deposition from the Cross. His name and the date are inscribed in the work, which, in addition to the Provençal element, shows both classical and Byzantine influence.

Lodovico Grossi da Viadana was an Italian composer, teacher, and Franciscan friar of the Order of Friars Minor Observants. He was the first significant figure to make use of the newly developed technique of figured bass, one of the musical devices which was to define the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the Baroque eras in music.

Guido of Arezzo was an Italian music theorist and pedagogue of the medieval era. He is regarded as the inventor of modern staff notation that replaced neumatic notation. His text, the Micrologus, was the second most widely distributed treatise on music in the Middle Ages.

Alfonso Giacomo Gaspare Corti was born at Gambarana, near Pavia in 1822. A famous friend of Corti's father, Antonio Scarpa, may have kindled his boyhood interest in anatomy and medicine. As a medical student he enrolled first at the University of Pavia. Corti's favorite study there was microanatomy with Bartolomeo Panizza and Mario Rusconi. In 1845, against paternal wishes, Corti moved to Vienna to complete his medical studies and to work in the anatomical institute of Joseph Hirtl. There he received the degree in medicine in 1847 under the supervision of professor Hyrtl, with a thesis on the bloodstream system of a reptile. He was then appointed by Hyrtl to be his Second Prosector. With the outbreak of the 1848 Revolution he left Vienna, and after brief military service in Italy made visits to eminent scientists in Bern, London, and Paris. At the beginning of 1850 Corti had received the invitation of the anatomist Albert Kölliker and had moved to Würzburg, where he made friends with Virchow. At the Kölliker Laboratory he began to work on the mammalian auditory system. Corti spent a short time in Utrecht, where he visited Professors Jacobus Schroeder van der Kolk and Pieter Harting. During his stay he learned to use methods to preserve several preparations of the cochlea. From Utrecht he returned to Würzburg to complete his study of at least 200 cochleas of man and different animals. His famous paper, "Recherches sur l'organe de l'ouïe des mammiferes", appeared in 1851 in Kölliker's journal "Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie". In the same year, after the death of his father, he inherited his father's estate and the title "Marchese de San Stefano Belbo" and moved back to Italy. In 1855 Corti married the daughter from a neighboring estate, Maria Bettinzoli. His young wife presented him with a daughter Bianca, and a son Gaspare, but in 1861 she died, leaving him with the responsibility of rearing the children. Unfortunately he was gradually developing arthritis deformans. Corti's last 15 years were further darkened by the inexorable progress of his crippling illness. In 1876, on the second of October, he died at Corvino San Quirico.

Giovanni Battista Riccioli was an Italian astronomer and a Catholic priest in the Jesuit order. He is known, among other things, for his experiments with pendulums and with falling bodies, for his discussion of 126 arguments concerning the motion of the Earth, and for introducing the current scheme of lunar nomenclature. He is also widely known for discovering the first double star. He argued that the rotation of the Earth should reveal itself because on a rotating Earth, the ground moves at different speeds at different times.