His first Sanskrit grammar in Italian. The diplomat said of him: “Everything that came out of his pen is perfect”
CASTELNUOVO NIGRA. Born in 1811, son of the doctor from Piverone, after the years of high school Botta Flechia he attended the lectures of Professor Paravia at the faculty of literature in Turin.
The passion for foreign languages often led him to travel abroad for a year and led him to discover the great epics of India at the British Museum in London.
He translated 20,000 verses of the Mahabharata which allowed him to publish the first Sanskrit grammar in Italian. From 1860 he continuously held the chair of “Comparative Grammar of Indo-European and Sanskrit languages”.
His scientific contributions range from etymology, to dialectology, to toponymy, but also to ornithology.
He was also a collector of some unpublished literary documents that he intended to publish, including some letters from Carlo Botta and a collection of popular songs from Piedmont, donated in 1853 to Costantino Nigra.
The Piveronese hills, in fact, were not only places of idleness for him: the dialogue with the old farmers was a source of precious annotations for his dialectological research in which he distinguished himself for the scientific rigor of the pioneer. He died on July 3, 1892, when he was now 81 years old.
On 24 November he was commemorated in the Senate, which he was unable to enter for health reasons, despite the appointment; the same day that Nigra was sworn in as a senator.
The bond that unites the two cannot be explained only by the affinity of their cultural interests. Two years later, in the moving memory he read in Piverone on the occasion of the inauguration of the monument erected to the master Flechia, Costantino Nigra wrote about him: «Philologists of every country know what his value was in the field of science. But how high his character was and how warm his heart was, we alone know that we lived close to him. Everything that came out of his pen is perfect. Flechia was joined by two young disciples, and to these he freely and freely dispensed what he had learned with the greatest effort. In the warm spring mornings of 1847, the rare strollers along the avenues of the Valentino often met the solitary group of three scholars. One of these later became an illustrious Sanskrit professor himself… it was Giacomo Lignana. The other, the youngest, was me, who remain, only of the three, to remember them and to cry for them ». –
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