[5] Born in 1716 into a patrician family, after attending his early schools in his native Comacchio, having been orphaned by his father, in order to continue his studies he entered the Celestines[6]in 1734, changing his secular name of Tito Benvenuto to the religious name of Appiano.

In the Neapolitan city he published in 1745 Poetic, Historical and Critical Portraits, a work favorably received in the Neapolitan cultural circles frequented by Buonafede, in which critical judgments on some important exponents of modern thought (such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Baruch Spinoza) coexist with partial welcomes of others (René Descartes and John Locke), in a composite style between Baroque and Arcadian[6].

In 1771, partly due to the benevolence with which the church hierarchies had received his writings, he was appointed procurator general of the congregation and transferred to Rome.

Buonafede, who in Rome had enjoyed the benevolence of Pope Clement XIV and that of the literary and Arcadian salons, was not comfortable in the isolation of his new residence[6].

In 1785 Pope Pius VI appointed him perpetual abbot of St. Eusebius, a position that, without requiring excessive care, ensured Buonafede those economic benefits that allowed him to quietly attend to his literary and philosophical works and to complete the work, dedicated to the same Pope, Of the Restoration of All Philosophy, which was particularly critical of modern thought that had wanted to make itself independent from the teaching of the Catholic Church[6].