Appendini Franjo Maria: Memorie spettanti ad alcuni uomini illustri di Cattaro / del padre Francesco Maria Appendini delle Scuole pie.

Franjo Maria Appendini: Memorie spettanti ad alcuni uomini illustri di Cattaro / del padre Francesco Maria Appendini delle Scuole pie.

Franjo Maria Appendini (Poirino, in Piedmont, November 6, 1768 - Zadar, January 30, 1837) (Italian form Francesco Maria Appendini) was a priest from the Piarist order. He was among the first Croatian biographers and linguists. He wrote poems, biographies, speeches and obituaries as well as biobibliographic and historiographic contributions.

He was born in 1768 in Poirino in Piedmont. He was educated in Turin and Rome, where in 1787 he joined the order of Piarists. Among his professors was Marko Faustin Galjuf from Dubrovnik, who persuaded him to go to Dubrovnik in 1791. In the city where he would stay for over forty years, Appendini was ordained a priest in 1792. For many years, he worked as a professor of rhetoric at the Piarist Collegium Ragusinum (where his brother Urban also taught from 1795), and in 1808 he became the director of the newly founded Liceum-convictum. After the arrival of the Austrian authorities, the lyceum was turned into a gymnasium, and Appendini became its prefect and professor of geography and history.

In Dubrovnik, he developed a versatile cultural activity; he organized school literary academies, participated in the work of the Enlightenment Society, wrote appropriate poems in Italian and Latin, maintained close relations with cultural workers and scientists in the city and abroad, and was also known as an excellent pedagogue and speaker. Having learned the Croatian language, he also dealt with linguistics, although some of his works in that area, for example Dell' analogia della lingua antichi popoli..., are full of unscientific and arbitrary interpretations. He is the author of Croatian grammar and a dictionary of the Croatian language, Grammatica della lingua Illirica compilata dal padre Francesco Maria Appendini delle scuole pie proffesore di eloquenza nel collegio di Ragusa, which is his most valuable work. editions: 1808, 1828, 1848 and 1850. The review in Croatian that referred to this book was the first of its kind in the history of Croatian journalism, and was published in Kraljski Dalmatin no. 38 from 1808.

His historical contributions are discussions about the burial of Epidaurus and the origin of St. Jeronima, two-volume Notizie istorico-critiche sulla antichità storia e letteratura de' Ragusei (Dubrovnik 1802-1803), a comprehensive overview of the political and cultural history of Dubrovnik. His diary of events related to the Russian-Montenegrin siege of Dubrovnik in 1806 is of exceptional importance, and the public did not find out about him until 1906. In 1835, F. M. Appendini moved to Zadar, where he became the manager of the lyceum there and the general director of the Dalmatian gymnasiums, taking over the duties that his brother held from 1824 until his death in 1834. Urban. He used them, however, for less than two years; he died on January 30, 1837.