This able and interesting traveller, descended from a respectable Roman family, was born at Padua, whither his relations had many years previously removed. Being designed by his parents for some monastic order, he was at a very early age sent to Rome, the original abode of his ancestors, where he received his education, and spent the greater part of his youth. Here the sciences would appear to have obtained a decided preference in his mind, over every other branch of study; particularly hydraulics, to which he owed the reputation which he afterward acquired in the world, and a success which was by no means equal to his deserts. The invasion of Italy, and the capture of Rome by the French, disturbed the peaceful but insignificant plan of life which he had traced out for himself. Instead of a monk he became a traveller. Departing from Rome in the year 1800, he for some time wandered about the Continent, deriving his subsistence, as he himself observes, from his own knowledge and industry, and occasional remittances from his family, who, though by no means wealthy, seem to have been generously disposed to afford him a support, which he, in a short time, no less generously refused to accept. In the year 1803 he arrived in England, where he not long afterward married. In this country he supported himself, as is well known, by performing in public feats of prodigious strength, and by scientific exhibitions; still, with a manly independence, preferring the gaining of a precarious subsistence by these means to the idea of draining the slender resources of his family, or of resorting to those more easy but less reputable sources of gain which too frequently employ the talents of foreigners in England. Having remained nine years in Great Britain, Belzoni conceived the desire of visiting the south of Europe; and, taking his wife along with him, travelled through Portugal, Spain, and Malta. It seems to have been during this part of his travels that he learned, from what he considered unexceptionable authority, that his scientific knowledge might be turned to good account in Egypt, where an hydraulic machine would be of the greatest utility in irrigating the fields, which want water only to make them produce at any season of the year.