In spite of the countless writings on Fabio Besta, few of them focus on his life and human experience. In most cases, they are limited to a few biographical paragraphs. The few exceptions are often incomplete, superficial, imperfect and sometimes contain serious errors. In order to fill this gap, an extensive research has been carried out about the life of Fabio Besta and his family using a wide variety of sources, particularly primary sources. A considerable number of these were archives which, in many cases, had never been consulted before or had been consulted only very roughly. In particular, the sections devoted to Fabio Besta’s youth (from 1845 to 1864) as well as to his first teaching experiences and further “technical” studies (from 1864 to 1872) have been extremely difficult to reconstruct. From this activity not only an unpublished profile of Besta emerges, but also a different profile from the one that official historiography has handed down to us.
Keywords: Fabio Besta, biography, Ca’ Foscari
