A scion of the middle Florentine nobility, Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni attended the University of Pisa without graduating and, after an internship in a law firm, entered the public administration, working at a long career which culminated in the direction of the Royal Gallery of the Uffizi from 1775 to 1793. As a convinced follower of the political reforms of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Hapsburg-Lorena (1747-1792), he was an admired intellectual and for several years directed the "Novelle letterarie", one of the most prestigious cultural reviews of the time. He wrote Memorie per servire alla vita di Dante Alighieri ed alla storia della sua famiglia ("Memoirs to Serve Dante Alighieri and the History of his Family", Venice, 1759) and the Nuovi dialoghi dei mor ti ("New Dialogues of the Dead", Florence, 1770, but with the false printing location of Cosmopolis), one of which portrays an imaginary meeting between Galileo and the Abbot Anton Maria Salvini, a Florentine poet, whose lives were separated by more than a decade, without even a day in common. The Dialogues were placed on the Index shortly after publication for being too harsh in their treatment of religious figures. Among Giuseppe Pelli's works there is also the Efemeridi, an imposing manuscript diary in 80 volumes conserved at the National Library of Florence and a small part at the Institute and Museum of the History of Science of Florence, which provides a daily record of the long period from 1759 to 1808. At IMSS there are also four files of the Magazzino universale, in cui si contiene un ammasso di notizie riguardanti la maggior parte delle scienze ("Universal Repository, which contain piles of news mostly regarding science"), a work of vast erudition that exemplifies the encyclopedic culture of the author to pursue the most varied fields of study