After the usual noviceship, literary and philosophical studies, a half-decade was spent in teaching rhetoric at Reggio Emilia and humanities at Forlì.
Immediately after this, in 1853, the young priest was assigned to the chair of philosophy in the Roman College, and there during twelve years distinguished himself as a teacher and author.
Within a few days of his forty-fourth birthday he was appointed assistant to the provincial of the Roman Province; but his health gave way before a year had elapsed.
On some of the mooted questions in philosophy the author departed from the scholastic tradition, rejecting the Peripatetic theory of matter and form, denying the real distinction between accidents and substance, and claiming that mere resultants of mechanical and chemical forces could produce the life-activity seen in the vegetable world.
These doctrines were not widely accepted; yet they stimulated neo-Scholasticism to make better use of the researches carried on in the physical sciences.