Umberto Rizzitano

Rizzitano's attention to the issue of dialogue between religions and cultures led him, at the express invitation of the Arab Republic of Libya, to participate, as an Italian observer, in the Islamic-Christian colloquium held in Tripoli from 1 to 5 February 1975. He organized a famous international conference, held in Rome, Venice and Palermo, on the "Arab presence in European culture". In 1979 he became President of the Istituto per l'Oriente Carlo Alfonso Nallino, the oldest Italian non-university research center for modern and contemporary Arabists. His contributions on the emerging Egyptian literature of the twentieth century are fundamental, without forgetting the Arab-Sicilian literati, such as Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣiqillī, called "al-Ballanūbī" (or Billanūbī, that is "of Villanova").

In 1959 the chair in Palermo of Arabic language and literature was finally filled after decades of vacancy. Rizzitano was the undisputed winner. At the same time, his statement on the "Return of the teaching of the Arabic language and literature to the University of Palermo" outlined a budget and an operational project aimed at encouraging participation by the younger generation. Through tireless research, Rizzitano shaped this project assuming the role of bridge between Italian and Arab cultures.

In 1949 he participated in the first translation into Italian, for Einaudi, of the complete Arabic version of One Thousand and One Nights, – together with his fraternal friend Francesco Gabrieli, Antonio Cesaro, Virginia Vacca and Costantino Pansera and in that same 1944, he translated the novel Zaynab by Mohammed Hussein Heikal. In 1965 he published for the Institute for the Orient the masterpiece of Ṭāhā Ḥuseyn, al-Ayyām (‘The Days’) and between 1975 and 1977 he participated in the first world edition of the manuscript of the geographical work of al-Idrisi sponsored by the Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" of Naples and by the Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente of Rome and updated the Biblioteca arabo-sicula by Michele Amari, in view of the National Edition of the works of the great Sicilian scholar.

He graduated in 1937 from the University of Rome, where Prof. Michelangelo Guidi, acted as advisor on a thesis on the Umayyad poet, Abū Miḥǧan Nuṣayb b. Rabāḥ (أبو محجن نصيب بن رباح), on which he gave a report to the XX International Congress of Orientalists (Brussels, 5–10 September 1938). Rizzitano participated in WWII. When he almost immediately fell prisoner in 1940, to the Egyptian Sidi Barrani, he managed to escape and reach Cairo clandestinely before regaining Italy.