Domenico Catabene

Niccolò Ariosto, as soon as he reached Ferrara in 1484 took on as tutor for his first two sons Ludovico and Gabriele the student Domenico Catabene from Argenta, the son of ser Uguloto. The presence of this student-tutor is recorded in two documents in May and November 1485. We know for sure that Domenico Catabene lived in the Ariosto household. There is nonetheless not a great deal of biographical information on the man to which Gabriele Ariosto alludes in the prologue of the Scolastica (the continuation of the play that Ludovico never finished I Studenti): “Ch’era al lor stato un precettor medesimo; / E ch’ambi avean seguiti i stessi studii”. Domenico Catabene came from quite a good family from Argenta to which also belonged the famous XV century jurist Anton Maria Catabene, a professor of law at Ferrara University, who esteemed and was a friend of Niccolò Ariosto as well as being his testament’s executor. Another professor for the family, this one a grammarian, was Giulio Catabene, from Argenta, who worked in Ferrara between1492 and 1509. In the same Studio in Ferrara, Giuliano Catabene and Giovanni Catabene also taught. In the period in which Domenico was a tutor in the Ariosto household, he frequented the Studio in Ferrara with a view to obtaining a diploma as a notary,  a profession he then did in Ferrara for the rest of his life. He was not a pedagogue by profession but a sound student who in this way paid for his education. He was Ludovico’s tutor for two years only, 1484-1486: he gave the poet his first rudiments. In the three years that followed (1486-1489) the poet’s education was entrusted to the humanist Luca Ripa.