Francesco Salis-Seewis, the son of Count Olderico, a Swiss soldier in the service of Francis IV, Duke of Modena, was born in Modena in 1835. Although he came from a Protestant family, his father, a convert, baptised him in the Catholic faith against the wishes of his mother, with the Duke of Modena as godfather. After first being educated at the Collegio San Carlo in Modena and at the Collegio dei nobili in Turin, he studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Modena before becoming a novice with the Jesuits in Verona.

He finished his education at the Università Gregoriana in Rome, where he was a student of Angelo Secchi who would have liked him to be his successor as director at the observatory of the Collegio Romano, had he not already been decided to ask him to take on first devote himself to the teaching of classics at the Collegio di Verona and then the headship of the Convitto Fagnani at Bressanone.

From 1875 he wrote articles for “Civiltà Cattolica”, where he covered a great variety of subjects, from philosophy to botany, from economics to astronomy, from mathematics to geology and medicine, but with particular vigour in the rebuttal of evolutionist theories. In this context one should place his negative review of Raffaello Caverni’s publication De’ nuovi studi della filosofia, published in 1877. As well as his works on scientific topics, he was a prolific militant journalist on contemporary issues, mainly directed towards the defence of the faith and of the temporal power of the Church of Rome. He died in Genoa in 1898.