BOTTA, Carlo Giuseppe Guglielmo, Italian historian, was born in 1766 at San Giorgio, in Piedmont. He studied medicine at the university of Turin, and obtained his doctor’s degree when about twenty years of age. Having rendered himself obnoxious to the Government during the political commotions that followed the French Revolution, he was imprisoned for nearly two years; and on his release in 1794 he withdrew to France, only to return to his native country as a physician in the French army, whose progress he followed as far as Venice. Here he joined the expedition to Corfu, from which he did not get back to Italy till 1798. From that year, when he was appointed by Joubert a member of the provisional government at Piedmont, till the fall of the Napoleonic system in 1814, he continued to have considerable political influence; and though towards the close of that period he acted with an independence that proved offensive to Napoleon himself, and on the restoration of the Bourbons adapted his conduct to the circumstances of the time, he was still in sufficient favour with the Bonapartist party to receive from them, during their brief resumption of authority in 1815, the appointment (soon afterwards resigned) of rector of the university at Roυ,en. Ami0 all the vicissitudes of his early manhood Botta had never allowed his pen to be long idle, and in the political quiet that followed 1816 he naturally devoted himself more exclusively to literature. By 1824 he had completed a history of Italy from 1789 to 1814 (4 vols.), on which his fame principally rests, for though the continuation of Guicciardini, which he was afterwards encouraged to undertake, is a careful and laborious work, he had not the erudition necessary for the satisfactory restoration of the past. Though living ...