Ricci

Ricci is the ninth commonest surname in Italy, carried by roughly 15,000 families, and it is not spread evenly across them. It lies thickest through the centre and the north: Liguria, the north-western corner of Lazio around Civitavecchia, the Versilia coast, and Emilia. South of that it very nearly disappears, though the word does not. The dialect term rizzo, used of a man with frizzy hair and of one whose temper was reckoned harsh and spiky, hardened into Ricci in the centre and north and into Rizzo and Rizzuto in the Mezzogiorno: one observation entering the record from two directions and coming out as two names.

Ostilio Ricci da Fermo, 1540 to 1603, taught mathematics in Florence at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, the drawing academy Vasari founded in 1560, and by 1580 was court mathematician to Grand Duke Francesco de' Medici. He had trained under Niccolo Tartaglia, and he held a view of his subject the universities did not share: mathematics was not a distinct science but a practical instrument for problems in mechanics and engineering.

His name survives because of a student he was never meant to have. Vincenzo Galilei had enrolled his son at Pisa to read medicine; in 1580 the son went to Ricci's lectures instead. Ricci put Euclid and Archimedes in front of him, and both run deep through everything Galileo did afterwards.

Matteo Ricci was born at Macerata, in the Papal States and today in the Marche, on 6 October 1552. He read law at Rome for two years, entered the Society of Jesus in April 1571 at the Roman College, and studied mathematics, cosmology and astronomy there under Christopher Clavius. He sailed from Lisbon in March 1578, reached Portuguese Goa that September, and in 1582 was summoned to Macau to prepare to enter China.

He landed in August 1582 and began on the language, becoming one of the first Western scholars to master the Chinese script and classical Chinese. In 1583 the governor of Zhaoqing, Wang Pan, who had heard of his skill as a mathematician and cartographer, invited him and Michele Ruggieri to settle there, and Ricci stayed until 1589. In 1584 he drew the first European-style world map written in Chinese. The pair also compiled the first Portuguese to Chinese dictionary in any European language, inventing a way of writing Chinese words in the Latin alphabet to do it.

Expelled from Zhaoqing in 1588, he rebuilt the mission at Shaoguan, reached Nanjing and Nanchang in 1595, and in August 1597 was made Major Superior of the China mission. In 1601 the Wanli Emperor invited him to court as an adviser, the first Westerner asked into the Forbidden City, in recognition of his science and above all of his predictions of solar eclipses. He never met the reclusive emperor, who granted him a generous stipend regardless, and he founded the oldest Catholic church in Beijing.

He read and wrote the literary Chinese of scholars and officials, adopted the dress of the Confucian literati, and argued in The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven that Confucian thought and Christian doctrine were not opposed but strikingly alike. With the agronomist Xu Guangqi, one of the officials he converted, he published a Chinese translation of Euclid's Elements in 1607 and rendered some of the Confucian classics into Latin, the first time either had been attempted. He died in Beijing on 11 May 1610. Ming law sent foreigners who died in China to burial at Macau, but the court petitioned and the emperor gave him ground in the capital instead.

Michelangelo Ricci was born in Rome on 30 January 1619 into a family of low social standing whose origins lay in Bergamo. Set that against Lorenzo Ricci, born in 1703 into an old Tuscan house: nothing joins the two households, and a surname this common carries people from opposite ends of the order at once. He took his mathematics from Benedetto Castelli, who had been Galileo's own student, so the name stands on both sides of Galileo, the teacher who started him and a man carrying his school forward.

A friend of Evangelista Torricelli, he took a real part in the experiments that led to the mercury barometer. His published mathematics is a treatise of nineteen pages, the Exercitatio geometrica de maximis et minimis of 1666, reprinted as an appendix to Mercator's Logarithmo-Technia in 1688. Epilepsy from birth barred him from ordination under the canon law of the day, yet Innocent XI created him Cardinal-Deacon of Santa Maria in Aquiro on 1 September 1681, and he used the position to protect working scientists against the schoolmen. Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, 1853 to 1925, later had the Ricci curvature named after him.

Sebastiano Ricci was born at Belluno on 1 August 1659 and apprenticed in 1671 to Federico Cervelli in Venice. His career reads like a map of the Italian courts: an oratory near Parma finished with Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena for 4,482 lire, the Piacenza apartments of the Duchess of Parma painted in 1687 with the life of the Farnese pope Paul III, a copy of Raphael's Coronation of Charlemagne made in the Vatican for Louis XIV, the ceiling of the Blue Hall at Schonbrunn in 1702. Florence in 1706 gave him the work many count his best, a fresco cycle in the Palazzo Marucelli-Fenzi and rooms in the Pitti Palace for Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici.

Lord Burlington paid him 770 pounds for eight canvases in London, Paris admitted him to its Royal Academy on 18 May 1718, and he went home to Venice a wealthy man, dying there on 15 May 1734.

His nephew Marco Ricci, born at Belluno on 6 June 1676, learned the trade from him and then went where his uncle could not follow. Landscape was Marco's own country: alpine pastorals, country storms, ruins and village courtyards, about half of it in tempera on goatskin rather than oil. The Earl of Manchester, ambassador to Venice, brought him to England in 1708, and in London he and Pellegrini painted stage scenery for the Italian operas at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket. From 1723 he etched twenty-three prints that anticipate Piranesi, and he is reckoned the founder of a new Venetian landscape manner.

Lorenzo Ricci was born in Florence on 2 August 1703 into one of the most ancient and illustrious families of Tuscany, and was admitted to the Society at barely fifteen on 16 December 1718. He taught at Siena and Rome, and from 1751 to 1755 was spiritual director at the Roman College, giving the Spiritual Exercises, which by every account was the work he actually wanted. In May 1758 the nineteenth General Congregation elected him eighteenth Superior General of the Society of Jesus on the second ballot. He asked to be released from it.

Four months later an attempt was made on the life of King Joseph I of Portugal, and in September 1759 the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal and from Brazil, Goa and Macao. France followed in 1764, Spain and Naples in 1767, Parma in 1768. Clement XIV suppressed the order by Dominus ac Redemptor on 21 July 1773, and Ricci was put behind bars in the Castel Sant'Angelo, though no charge against the Jesuits was ever brought in a court of law. Before he died on 24 November 1775 he declared in front of witnesses that the Society had given no ground warranting its suppression, and that there was no right reason why he should have been put in jail. He is buried in the crypt of the Gesu in Rome.

The Riccis of the last two centuries went into performance and design. Luigi Ricci, 1805 to 1859, and Federico Ricci, 1809 to 1877, were Italian composers; Ruggiero Ricci, 1918 to 2012, was an American violinist. Nina Ricci, 1883 to 1970, became a French fashion designer and put the surname on a house of couture, and Nino Ricci, born 1959, is a Canadian novelist. Four centuries after Matteo Ricci left Macerata for Lisbon, a name that began as a remark about somebody's hair is still travelling.