Silvestri, Tommaso (Abba)

Hearing. Founder of the first Italian school for the deaf, the Istituto Statale dei Sordomuti, in Rome in 1784. Trained by the Abbe de l'Epee, but also studied the techniques of Konrad Amman and Hervas y Panduro. Apparently Silvestri attempted to merge these three diverse teaching methods, but found the results unsatisfactory. He also wrote the manuscript for the first Italian treatise on deaf education, On the Way to Quickly Instruct and Teach Speech to People Who are Deaf from Birth, but only a fragment survived his death, and that was not published until a century later.