Natalino Sapégno (10 November 1901 - 11 April 1990) was a literary critic and Italian academician. He came to prominence as a leading scholar of fourteenth century Italian literature. Biography Provenance and early years Natalino Sapégno was born in Aosta, which was the (still overwhelmingly French-speaking) city from where his mother's family came. However, he spent his first sixteen years growing up in Turin, where his father was employed as a senior official with the government tax office. In 1917, along with his older sister Giuliana, he was entrusted, for a year, to the care of his maternal grandparents in Aosta. Here, for a year, he completed his schooling at the prestigious "liceo classico Principe di Napoli" (secondary school) where the politician-historian Federico Chabod was among his contemporaries. Student years During 1918 he transferred to the University of Turin. He was initially uncertain whether to enrol in the Mathematics Faculty or in the Humanities ("facoltà di lettere") faculty: in the end he opted for the latter. Soon after arriving at the university he had his first encounter with the future anti-fascist journalist Piero Gobetti, in the context of a competition in which they were both involved for a student-bursary from Turin's "Collegio delle province". Sapégno's education initially led him to view the political world through the prism of the influential liberal philosopher-polemicist Benedetto Croce, and he quickly became a friend of Gobetti, and after its launch in 1922, a backer of Gobetti's (as matters turned out short-lived) cultural and political weekly publication, La Rivoluzione liberale. While he was still at university Sapégno's father died young, in 1919. By the time he died Giuseppe Maria Sapégno had risen to become head of the Turin Tax Office (" segretario capo dell’Intendenza di Finanza di Torino"), and the sudden loss of his salary left the family in financial difficulties. Nevertheless, Natalino Sapégno continued to attend the university. On 10 July 1922 he graduated with a doctorate. His dissertation was supervised by Vittorio Cian and concerned the vernacular work of the Franciscan Umbrian friar Jacopone da Todi. Later he was able, in two successive months, to base two articles published in literary journals on his doctoral work. The text was later revised and published in book form in 1926. Post-graduate years During 1924 Sapégno edited for publication a selection of philosophical pamphlets by Thomas Aquinas as part of a series being produced under the