‘Un Eroico Traduttore. Pietro Antoniutti, Translator and Cultural Mediator between Venice and Europe, 1780–1820

Over the last four decades, a large number of multidisciplinary studies have contributed to enhance our knowledge of the importance of translations as sources to investigate historical phenomena. These studies have shown the need to develop a research methodology capable of examining the translations in all their richness and complexity, paying specific attention not just to the so-called material vectors (the forms taken on by the new, translated versions), but also to all those actors that take part in the translation process, be they the publishers, the patrons of publishing projects, and – obviously – the translators themselves. This chapter aims at addressing this point, investigating the work of Pietro Antoniutti (1732–1827), Friulian priest whose career as translator was entirely devoted to the realisation of Italian versions of eighteenth-century English and Scottish bestsellers. Educated in Gorizia, Venice, Vienna and Istanbul, Antoniutti translated more than 30 works of European – and American – historians, scientists, philosophers, with the ambitious purpose to provide his Venetian readers with editions of writings that might bestow them with the conceptual tools to understand the developments taking place in society and political institutions of the Republic of Venice au tournant des Lumières.