Elémire Zolla (1926-2002), an Anglo-Italian polymath,writer, historian of ideas, metaphysical thinker, and spiritual seeker, has a unique place in twentieth-century religious, comparative, and cultural studies.

He was born in Turin on July 9,1926. His father, Venanzio, was a well known Anglo-Italian painter; his mother, Blanche Smith, was a musician from Kent. Zolla was brought up speaking English, Italian, French, Spanish, and German. Later he would master several other languages, including Russian (he translated Pavel Florenskii's Ikonostas as Le porte regali, Milan 1977). He graduated in law from the University of Turin, and also attended courses in psychiatry held at the town asylum.

A severe lung disease contracted at the age of twenty-two gave him recurrent reminders throughout his life of the need to cherish every drop of vital energy. From a religious point of view, he was agnostic, but a fervent believer, as he used to say, in the boundless power of belief. In the prime of his life he wrote stories, including "An Angelic Visit on Via dei Martiri", and two novels, Minuetto all'inferno (Minuet in Hell, 1956) and Cecilia o la disattenzione (Cecilia or inattention, 1961).

As a literary critic he freelanced for the main periodicals of the time,contributing essays on Franz Kafka, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. On the suggestion of Mario Praz, the leading Anglicist at the University of Rome, who had been highly impressed by Zolla's earlier investigations on Herman Melville's Clarel, on Emily Dickinson's poetry, and on Nathaniel Hawthorne's Septimius Felton, Zolla was offered the post of associate professor of American literature at the University of Rome in 1959. A full professorship followed in 1967.

Eloquence, bold knowledge, and a special gift for teaching made Zolla revered and popular among his assistants and students at the universities of Genoa and Rome. New branches of study, such as Native North-American studies and ethnopoetics, along with fecund intersections with comparative and Oriental studies, developed as a result of Zolla's work. He launched research projects involving teams of junior scholars on the superman theme in modern literature and on exoticism in American literature. He also edited and introduced Novecento Americano (American literature in the twentieth century, 1980-1983), a three-volume textbook providing monographs on fifty major American modern writers. The studies in mortem produced by some of Zolla's former disciples are noteworthy when considering the legacy of Zolla's work in this area.

A prominent and controversial figure on the Italian cultural scene from the late 1950s, Zolla became director of the Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures to the University of Genoa, where he was also chair of Anglo-American literature and Germanic philology (1970-1974). In those same years, before transferring to the University of Rome to serve as professor of American literature, he directed the Ticinese Institute for Advanced Studies at Lugano, Switzerland, where he organized summer courses dealing with the metaphysical assumptions of Latin, Greek, Hindu, Chinese, Iranian, Hebrew, Islamic, and African civilizations. Zolla was also the founder and editor of an Italian-language journal in cultural and religious studies, Conoscenza religiosa (1969-1983), and he was a regular contributor to numerous other journals, many in English. He served on the board of editors of Cahiers de l'hermetisme, Connaissance des religions, Incognita, and Quaderni di Italianistica, and was a member of the advisory board of the African Institute for the Studies of Humanistic Values at the University of Cincinnati, as well as for the Centre for the Study of Eurasian Shamanism at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, and the scientific council of the Centre d'anthropologie et de civilization Européenne at the University of Strasbourg. Zolla became professor emeritus in American Literature at the University of Rome after he retired in 1981.

After travelling extensively in four continents along with orientalist Grazia Marchianò, his second wife, a full companion in transcultural research and spiritual quest, he spent the last eleven years of his life in the hilly town of Montepulciano (Southern Tuscany), where Marchianò established the Elémire Zolla International Research Association – A.I.R.E.Z., in 2009. Fully engaged in treasuring Zolla's heritage and editing his collected works, she authored Zolla's intellectual biography, Il conoscitore di segreti (The knower of secrets, Rizzoli 2006).