The Greek-Italian Hellenist Mario Vitti died in Rome at the age of 96.

He was crystal clear until the last day of his life.

A leading scholar of our language, a close friend of Odysseus Elytis, Mikis Theodorakis and many other writers and artists, he had published in Italy his much-translated work History of Modern Greek Literature and had taught modern Greek for many years at the University of Tusia, in central Italy .

Recently, the chair of modern Greek studies of the University of Rome had dedicated to him the Observatory of the Laboratory for the Greek Language.

Mario Vitti was born in 1926 in Istanbul. On his mother’s side, Vitti is of Greek origin.

He grew up in the Greek community of Istanbul and speaks and writes equally well in Greek and Italian.

Shortly after the Second World War the family moved from Istanbul to Italy. He studied in Rome where he began his work as a researcher of new Greek literature.

From 1957 he worked at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”.

In 1968 he was appointed permanent professor at the University of Palermo. He was also a visiting professor at the universities of Paris, Geneva and Thessaloniki. He recently taught at the University of Tuscany. Vitti lives in Rome and is the president of the Italian Association of New Greek Studies (Associazione Nazionale di Studi Neogreci).

He is one of Italy’s leading experts on the full range of modern Greek literature. Greek literature owes to Vitti the second birth of the oldest text of the modern Greek Theater (the dialogue of Nikolaos Sofianos), the religious drama Eugena – (Venice 1646) by Theodoros Montzelese from Zakynthos and 2 volumes of texts by Andreas Kalvos. Vitti discovered and made known a book by an anonymous Greek author, published in Braila, Romania in 1870, entitled “Military Life in Greece”).

Vitti studied the works of Elytis and Seferis. He has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Paris, Thessaloniki and Cyprus and was awarded by the Union of Greek Writers.