Cesare Cantù (Italian pronunciation: [ˈtʃeːzare kanˈtu; ˈtʃɛː-]; December 5, 1804 – March 11, 1895) was an Italian historian.Cantù was born December 5, 1804 at Brivio, in Lombardy. He studied in Milan, at the College of St. Alexander Barnabite, and began his career as a teacher.[1] His first literary essay (1828) was a romantic poem entitled Algiso, and in the following year he produced a Storia Della città e Della diocese di Como in two volumes (Como, 1829). The death of his father then left him in charge of a large family, and he worked very hard both as a teacher and a writer to provide for them. His prodigious literary activity led to his falling under the suspicions of the Austrian police, who thought he was a member of young Italy, and he was arrested in 1833. Cesare Cantù. While in prison writing materials were denied him, but he managed to write on rags with a tooth-pick and candle smoke, and thus composed the novel Margherita Pusterla (Milan, 1838). On his release a year later, as he was prohibited from teaching,[1] literature became his only recourse. In 1836 the Turinese publisher, Giuseppe Pomba, commissioned him to write a universal history, which his vast reading enabled him to do. In six years the work was completed in seventy-two volumes, and immediately achieved general popularity; the publisher made a fortune out of it, and Cantù's royalties amounted, it is said, to 300,000 lire (£12,000). Less