The Italian Translation of The Urantia Book

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Guglielmo “Memo” Z.

By Guglielmo “Memo” Z., Verona, Italy

The Urantia Book was translated into Italian after a series of apparently fortuitous events.

In 1980, I was employed by a large local company. I was a husband and father, and I was a physically fit fellow.

But then things began to change, to go wrong. My reality went in a down trend, and I was feeling depressed, hopeless, and desperate to find something.

At the invitation of a friend, I attended a few meetings of an esoteric association, where I met Giuseppe Zecchinato, who introduced me to The Urantia Book, which he had discovered in France during a meeting (concerning cold fusion) with Jacques Weiss, the chief translator of the French translation of The Urantia Book.

Zecchinato procured a copy, which he began to read immediately upon his return to Italy.

Following Zecchinato’s example, but years later, I bought a copy of the French translation of The Urantia Book. My reading of the French translation was challenging as it had been years since I had studied French in school. But I persisted and read the book in its entirety. After doing so, I desired to translate it into Italian, which I did, using the French translation as my “original” text, as I did not know English. The translation took me more than five years to complete. When I told Zecchinato what I had done, he told me that he had commenced an Italian translation of the book but had not worked on it in quite a few years.

He wanted to inform Urantia Foundation that I had translated the book into Italian, but I convinced him not to do so because I questioned the quality of my translation―and especially because I translated the French translation, not the English text, into Italian.

So I obtained a copy of the English text, and Zecchianato, who was fluent in English, and I commenced a comparison of the Italian translation with the English text.

Zecchianato and I met every weekend at his residence, correcting and revising my translation. Unfortunately, Zecchianato, who was up in years, became ill, which limited his ability to participate in the project. Our progress was slow, but the revision was finally completed. We had been in communications with Georges Michelson-Dupont, who visited us in Verona. Georges arranged for a professional translator to check the accuracy and beauty of our translation. Shortly thereafter, Zecchinato died.

By this time I had retired and decided to compare the English and the Italian texts one more time, after which I sent all the files to Urantia Foundation, which printed the translation.

Finally, Il Libro di Urantia was available to readers of the Italian language.