“ Zanella was a broad-minded and patriotic ecclesiastic, and his character is justly held in equal honour with his poetry, which, if hardly to be termed powerful, wears a stamp of peculiar elegance and finish, and asserts a place of its own in modern Italian literature. ”

“ Of his other compositions, the most individual are those in which, deeply impressed by the problems of his day, he has sought to reconcile science and religion, especially the fine dialogue between Milton and Galileo, where the former, impressed by Galileo's predictions of the intellectual consequences of scientific progress, resolves “to justify the ways of God to man.” ”