Paolino Menna (1889–1969) was a priest and a Latinist from Nola (near Naples) who taught at the Regio Liceo-Ginnasio “Jacopo Sannazaro” in Naples and was headmaster of the Liceo-Ginnasio “Giosuè Carducci” in Nola in 1943/1944. He held a PhD in classical literature from the University of Naples and published a short treatise on corrupt passages in Livy (Menna 1920). During the ventennio fascista, he won awards at several Latin competitions, including the national Latin prose compositions organized by the Istituto di Studi Romani. He also participated in the Certamen Hoeufftianum in 1936 (van Binnebeke 2020: 309; the poem is printed in Eberle 1961: 82–83). In the 1930s he worked on a group of Latin compositions each named after one of the Muses; this collection was awarded a prize from the Accademia d’Italia (Anonymous 1969). Menna gathered some of his Latin essays in a single volume (Menna 1947). He also translated part of the work of Giacomo Leopardi into Latin (Renna 2005: 47, 80, 101). In the 1950s, Menna published a series of studies on Cicero’s style, which were reviewed unfavorably by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Gnomon 29, no. 1 (1957): 74) and Charles Hyart (Latomus 19, no. 2 (1960): 400). Short biographies of Menna are in Anonymous (1969), Eberle (1961: 212–213), and Minieri (1972: 171).

Bibliography

Latin texts

Menna, Paolino. 1920. De quibusdam Livii locis corruptis disseruit Paulinus Menna. Nola: Officina grafica Scala. 

———. 1935. Quaedam latinitatis specimina pro periculis certaminum experiendis,V, Tersichore [sic]. Nola: Ex Off. Dominici Basilicata Filiorumque. 

———. 1936. Quaedam latinitatis specimina pro periculis certaminum experiendis, VII, Polymnia. Nola: Ex Off. Dominici Basilicata Filiorumque. 

———. 1937. In tertio Latini sermonis certamine apud Romanorum Studiorum Institutum. Nola: Ex Off. Dominici Basilicata Filiorumque. 

———. 1938. Quaedam latinitatis specimina pro periculis certaminum experiendis, VIII. Urania. Naples: Ex. Off. Unione. 

———. 1947. Latinitatis specimina ad usum eorum qui certaturi sunt ut publice probentur. Naples: A. Rondinella. 

Secondary sources

Anonymous. 1969. ‘La scomparsa del latinista Paolino Menna’. Aspetti Letterari: Rassegna di Lettere, Scienze e Arti 29 (6): 64.

Binnebeke, Xavier van. 2020. ‘Hoeufft’s Legacy: Neo-Latin Poetry in the Archive of the Certamen Poeticum Hoeufftianum (1923-1943)’. In Studies in the Latin Literature and Epigraphy of Italian Fascism, edited by Han Lamers, Bettina Reitz-Joosse, and Valerio Sanzotta, 245–325. Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia 46. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

Eberle, Joseph. 1961. Viva Camena. Latina huius aetatis carmina [...] Cum commentariolo Iosephi et Linae IJsewijn-Jacobs ‘De litteris Latinis recentioribus’. Zürich/Stuttgart: Artemis.

Minieri, Antonio. 1973. Compendio della terra di Nola (storia e leggenda). Nola: Palo.

Renna, Enrico, ed. 2005. Il cielo senza stelle. Operette morali ed oltre prose in traduzione latina. Naples: Sparton.

Han Lamers