Associated with the best European academies and welcomed into Bologna's sophisticated salons as a poet, Clotilde Tambroni was one of a small group of women who brought the Alma Mater to international fame in the second half of the 18th century. These women were allowed to take up professorships with the clear objective of causing a stir, rather than starting a serious academic and social revolution. However, it can safely be said that Tambroni, Bassi, Dalle Donne and Morandi made history, however briefly.
Clotilde Tambroni was born to a humble family. Her father Paolo was the cook at the monastery of San Patroclo, a renowned religious centre, once the medieval seat of the Università dei Legisti Ultramontani (University of Foreign Jurists).
As a girl, the Jesuit Emanuele Aponte, professor of Greek at the University of Bologna, had taken up lodgings in the Tambroni house. It is said that the young Clotilde learned the classical language with great ease by spying on the lessons that the master gave to his private students, thus arousing Aponte's heartfelt interest. As a result, he took her under her care, teaching her both Greek and Latin (Tambroni would later be remembered as a true polyglot, speaking also French, English and Spanish). Clotilde also owed her out-of-the-ordinary education to another Jesuit: the writer of tragedies and melodramas, Juan Bautista Colmes.
The accolades received in the early 1790s soon emancipated Clotilde from her family status and made her famous in intellectual circles throughout Europe. In 1790, the nobleman Niccolò Fava Ghisilieri acted as her intermediary for the local Accademia degli Inestricati, the first of many institutes that would compete to have her in their ranks (among them are the prestigious Accademia romana dell’Arcadia (1792), where Tambroni took the name of Doriclea Sidonia (or Sicionia)).
The year of her definitive consecration came in 1793 when, at the behest of the city Senate, then legitimised to appoint academic professors, Clotilde Tambroni was hired as a lecturer of Particulae Grecae, (today's Greek Language and Literature), although she had never taken the degree examination.
In those days, that particular course was fundamentally necessary for those who wanted to make poetry 'in the ancient style', with some elementary rudiments of metrics and Greek language. Although we don’t know much about the manner and content of Tambroni's teaching, it is assumed that she too had a more literary than philological and linguistic approach to the subject.
The lecturer's career suffered a sudden blow when, in 1798, university professors had to swear allegiance to the new republican constitution. Tambroni, along with 11 other professors, including Galvani, did not accept the imposition, mainly because of her religious convictions and her distrust of the compatibility of democratic ideals and Catholic dogmas. She was thus removed from her teaching post. However, she earned the recognition of the pontiff, who that year allowed her to own and study volumes placed on the Index of Prohibited Books.
Fortunately, the expulsion was only temporary and by 1799 Tambroni was reinstated; not before she had completed, with the ever-present Aponte, a successful trip to Spain, during which she even became an associate of the Royal Academy.
As is evident from numerous letters, for Clotilde teaching was a profession, a job like any other, embarked on with the intent to earn money. She had a new mentality that saw education as professional training and not just as cultural enrichment. This explains her stubbornness in coping with precarious situations, such as when, in 1803, she sent a petition directly to Francesco Melzi d'Eril, Vice-President of the Italian Republic; this was granted, and resulted in a salary increase the following year.
However, the situation in which not only her course, but the entire Faculty of Humanities found itself was truly dramatic. The university reform sought by Napoleon had exalted practical and scientific disciplines, only to regroup and confine the humanities, now considered antiquated. Humanities and Law had thus been lumped together in the new Faculty of Law and Fine Arts.
Obviously, Tambroni was against this reform and in 1806, upon taking the stage to deliver the inaugural speech of the academic year, she took the opportunity to recall the historical association between science and literature.
Her speech was made even more memorable by her seeking to exalt the role of women in the cultural world. Tambroni claimed the importance of certain women in the classical world, such as Hypatia and Aspasia, linking their example to that of her Bolognese colleagues, Laura Bassi, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Anna Morandi and Maria Dalle Donne. She had been a kind of godmother to the latter when, in 1799, she accompanied her and introduced her to the graduation committee in the Anatomical Theatre of the Archiginnasio. The role that these women played was as important as it was insufficient to preserve their achievement within the University. They represented a brief opening that was soon closed again: indeed, we would have to wait until the end of the 19th century to observe a timid reappearance of female teachers and students, this time ineluctably destined to grow and not disappear.
At that point, however, both the fate of women and that of Tambroni's professorship had been scarred by Napoleon’s cultural change. Two years later, in 1808, the Greek language was suppressed, and Clotilde had to take early retirement.
In her last years, she gratefully devoted herself to taking care of her old master Aponte, by then completely immobilised, without, however, giving up her poetic compositions (both in Greek and Italian) and frequenting the city’s sophisticated circles, such as that of the Countess Teresa Carniani Malvezzi, who later became a great friend and lover of Leopardi.
By the time the Greek Language and Literature course was reintroduced by Murat in 1814, it was too late for Tambroni. Long ill, she had retired to her home at Via Barberia 23, where she died in 1817.
The city and the University honoured her with a commemoration in the Archiginnasio, during which Canon Filippo Schiassi dedicated a eulogy to her. He is also responsible for the inscriptions that still commemorate the Greek scholar from Bologna: one engraved on her tomb, surmounted by a bust of the illustrious woman executed by Adamo Tadolini under the supervision of Canova, a great devotee of Tambroni; the other on the commemorative plaque once placed in the Great Hall and now located just above the entrance to the Palazzo Poggi Museum.
Tambroni's fame survived throughout the 19th century, gradually taking on symbolic and romantic values. In 1872, Abbot Luigi Taccani published a curious educational handbook entitled Clotilde Tambroni, o La più nobile missione della donna (Clotilde Tambroni, or The noblest mission of womankind), in which the unsuspecting Clotilde is transformed into a teacher of Christian virtues – a figure similar to the one portrayed in the biography of the Greek scholar by Giulia Cavallari Cantalamessa in 1899.