Giovanni Battista Venturi was born in 1746 in Bibbiano, a small village in the Province of Reggio Emilia, Italy. At the age of 23, he was ordained as a Catholic priest and, in the same year, was appointed as a teacher of logic at the University of Reggio Emilia. In 1774, he moved to the University of Modena as a professor of geometry and philosophy. Over the next years, Venturi would also have success as a university-level mathematics instructor, a civil engineer, a politician, a statesman, a confidant of Napoleon I Bonaparte, and, in later years, as a renowned historian.
