17th-century literature
The 17th century in Italian literature was traditionally described as a
period of “decadence” in which writers who were devoid of sentiment
resorted to exaggeration and tried to cloak the poverty of their subject
matter beneath an exuberance of form. (In this period, it is said,
freedom of thought and expression was fettered by the
Counter-Reformation, by the political supremacy of Spain, and by the
conservatism of the Accademia della Crusca, whose aim it was to ensure
the hegemony of Florence by promoting the “purity” of the Tuscan
language. The “baroque” style of writing was not, however, simply an
Italian phenomenon. It was at this time that Gongorism (the ingenious
metaphorical style of the poet Luis de Góngora) flourished in Spain and
the witty “conceits” of the Metaphysical poets were popular in England.
Far from being exhausted, indeed, this was an extremely vital period, so
much so that in the last decades of the 20th century a new and more
comprehensive understanding of the literature of the Italian Baroque has
been formulated by scholars conversant with the changing attitude toward
this phase of civilization in Germany, France, and England.
Poetry and prose
The popularity of satire was a reaction against
prevailing conditions. Prominent in this genre was the Neapolitan
Salvator Rosa, who attacked in seven satires the vices and shortcomings
of the age. The Modenese Alessandro Tassoni acquired great fame with La
secchia rapita (1622; The Rape of the Bucket), a mock-heroic poem that
is both an epic and a personal satire.
The most serious poet of the
period was Tommaso Campanella, a Dominican friar, who spent most of his
adult life in prison as a subversive. Campanella is perhaps less well
known for his rough-hewn philosophical verse than for the Città del sole
(1602; Campanella’s City of the Sun), a vision of political utopia, in
which he advocated the uniting of humanity under a theocracy based on
natural religion.
The most successful and representative poet during this period was
Giambattista Marino, author of a large collection of lyric verse (La
lira [1608–14; “The Lyre”] and La sampogna [1620; “The Syrinx”]) and a
long mythological poem, Adone (1623), in which the Ovidian myth of the
love of Venus and Adonis, told by Shakespeare in 200 stanzas, is
inflated by Marino to more than 8,000. Marino derived inspiration from
the poetry of the late 16th century, but his aim—typical of the age—was
to excite wonder by novelty. His work is characterized by “conceits” of
fantastic ingenuity, far-fetched metaphor, sensuality, extreme facility,
and a superb technical skill. His imitators were innumerable, and most
17th-century Italian poets were influenced by his work.
Gabriello Chiabrera, soberer in style than
Marino, was successful in
imitating the metres of classical poetry (especially of the Greek
Pindar) and excelled in the composition of musical canzonette (rhymed
poems with short lines modeled on the French Pléiade’s adaptation of the
Greek verse form known as the anacreontic). Toward the end of the
century a patriotic sonneteer, Vincenzo da Filicaia, and Alessandro
Guidi, who wrote exalted odes, were hailed as major poets and reformers
of the excesses of the Baroque. Though they retained much of the earlier
bombast, their consciousness of the need for rational reform led to the
foundation of the Accademia dell’Arcadia.
Among prose writers of the period, the satirist Traiano Boccalini
stood out with Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612–13; Advertisements from
Parnassus) in the fight against Spanish domination. A history of the
Council of Trent (which defined Catholic doctrines in reaction to the
Reformation) was written by Paolo Sarpi, an advocate of the liberty of
the Venetian state against papal interference, and a history of the
rising of the Low Countries against Spain was written by Guido
Bentivoglio. The Venetian novels of Girolamo Brusoni are still of
interest, as are the travels of Pietro della Valle and the tales of the
Neapolitan Giambattista Basile. All the restless energy of this period
reached its climax in the work of Galileo, a scientist who laid the
foundations of mathematical philosophy and earned a prominent place in
the history of Italian literature through the vigour and clarity of his
prose.
Music drama and the Accademia dell’Arcadia With the rise of the music
drama and the opera, Italian authors worked to an increasing extent with
the lyric stage. Librettos written by poets such as Ottavio Rinuccini
were planned with dramatic and musical artistry. During the 17th century
a popular spirit entered the opera houses: intermezzi (short dramatic or
musical light entertainments) were required between the acts, a practice
that undermined the dramatic unity of the performance as a whole, and
toward the end of the century every vestige of theatrical propriety was
abandoned. The spread of Marino’s influence was felt by many to be an
abuse. In 1690 the Accademia dell’Arcadia was founded in Rome for the
express purpose of eradicating “bad taste.” The purpose of the academy
was in tune with a genuinely felt need. Many of its members were
rationalist followers of René Descartes with severe classical
sympathies, but their reaction consisted mainly in imitating the
simplicity of the nymphs and shepherds who were supposed to have lived
in the Golden Age, and thus a new artifice replaced an old one. A
typical exponent of the Arcadian lyric was Pietro Metastasio, the
18th-century reformer of the operatic libretto.
Giovanni Pietro Giorgetti
Anthony Oldcorn
Salvator Rosa
Salvator Rosa, (b. June 20,
1615, Arenella, Sicily, Spanish Habsburg domain [now in
Italy]—d. March 15, 1673, Rome, Papal States [Italy]),
Italian Baroque painter and etcher of the Neapolitan school
remembered for his wildly romantic or “sublime” landscapes,
marine paintings, and battle pictures. He was also an
accomplished poet, satirist, actor, and musician.
Rosa studied painting in
Naples, coming under the influence of the Spanish painter
and engraver José de Ribera. Rosa went to Rome in 1635 to
study, but he soon contracted malaria. He returned to
Naples, where he painted numerous battle and marine pictures
and developed his peculiar style of landscape—picturesquely
wild scenes of nature with shepherds, seamen, soldiers, or
bandits—the whole infused with a romantic poetic quality.
His reputation as a painter
preceded his return to Rome in 1639. Already famous as an
artist, he also became a popular comic actor. During the
Carnival of 1639 he rashly satirized the famous architect
and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, thereby making a powerful
enemy. For some years thereafter the environment of Florence
was more comfortable for him than that of Rome. In Florence
he enjoyed the patronage of Cardinal Giovanni Carlo de’
Medici. Rosa’s own house became the centre of a literary,
musical, and artistic circle called the Accademia dei
Percossi; here also Rosa’s flamboyant personality found
expression in acting. In 1649 he returned and finally
settled in Rome. Rosa, who had regarded his landscapes more
as recreation than as serious art, now turned largely to
religious and historical painting. In 1660 he began etching
and completed a number of successful prints. His satires
were posthumously published in 1710.
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Tommaso Campanella
Tommaso Campanella, original name Giovanni Domenico
Campanella (b. Sept. 5, 1568, Stilo, Kingdom of Naples
[Italy]—d. May 21, 1639, Paris, France), Italian philosopher
and writer who sought to reconcile Renaissance humanism with
Roman Catholic theology. He is best remembered for his
socialistic work La città del sole (1602; “The City of the
Sun”), written while he was a prisoner of the Spanish crown
(1599–1626).
Entering the Dominican
order in 1583, at which time he adopted the name Tommaso, he
was influenced by the work of Italian philosopher Bernardino
Telesio, an opponent of Scholastic Aristotelianism. Without
permission from his order, Campanella went in 1589 to
Naples, where his Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (1591;
“Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses”) was published.
Reflecting Telesio’s concern for an empirical approach to
philosophy, it stressed the necessity for human experience
as a basis for philosophy. The work resulted in his arrest,
trial, and brief imprisonment for heresy. On his release, he
went to Padua, where he was arrested, charged with sodomy
(1593), acquitted, and then charged with having engaged a
Jew in a debate over matters of Christian faith. Sent to
Rome for trial, he renounced in 1596 the heresy of which he
had been accused.
Campanella’s interest in
pragmatism and in political reform were already evident in
such early writings as De monarchia Christianorum (1593; “On
Christian Monarchy”) and Dialogo politico contra Luterani,
Calvinisti ed altri eretici (1595; “Political Dialogue
Against Lutherans, Calvinists, and Other Heretics”), in
which he asserted that sinful humanity can be regenerated
through a religious reformation founded on establishment of
a universal ecclesiastical empire. These abstractions
yielded to a more limited, though still utopian, plan of
reform after his return to Stilo in 1598, where the misery
of the people moved him deeply. In accordance with this
plan, Campanella became in 1599 the spiritual leader of a
plot to overthrow Spanish rule in Calabria. The plot was
discovered, and he was arrested and taken to Naples. Forced
under torture to confess his leadership in the plot, he
feigned madness to escape death and was sentenced to life
imprisonment.
In prison Campanella
reverted to Roman Catholic orthodoxy and wrote his
celebrated utopian work, La città del sole. His ideal
commonwealth was to be governed by men enlightened by
reason, with every man’s work designed to contribute to the
good of the community. Private property, undue wealth, and
poverty would be nonexistent, for no man would be permitted
more than he needed.
During Campanella’s prison
term of 27 years, he also wrote lyric poems, of which only a
few survive—in Scelta (1622; “Selections”). Considered by
some critics to be the most original poetry in Italian
literature of the period, the collection includes madrigals,
sonnets, conventional love poems, and metaphysical hymns.
His Metafisica (1638) expounds his theory of metaphysics
based on a trinitarian structure of power, wisdom, and love.
In the 30 books of the Theologia (1613–14), he reconsidered
Roman Catholic doctrines in the light of his metaphysical
theory.
One month after his release
in 1626, Campanella was imprisoned in Rome on charges of
heresy. He used flattery and his reputation as an astrologer
to gain the favour of Pope Urban VIII, and he was freed in
1629. He tried in vain to get his new ideas accepted by
Rome, but discovery of his complicity in an anti-Spanish
plot in Naples in 1634 caused him to flee to France, where
he was welcomed by King Louis XIII and Cardinal de
Richelieu.
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Giambattista Marino
Giambattista Marino, Marino also spelled Marini (b. Oct. 18,
1569, Naples—d. March 25, 1625, Naples), Italian poet,
founder of the school of Marinism (later Secentismo), which
dominated 17th-century Italian poetry. Marino’s own work,
praised throughout Europe, far surpassed that of his
imitators, who carried his complicated word play and
elaborate conceits and metaphors to such extremes that
Marinism became a pejorative term. His work was translated
all over Europe.
Marino trained for the law
because of parental pressure but refused to practice his
profession. His life after 1590 consisted of wild living,
wandering between Italian and French courts, frequent money
problems, brushes with the law, and immense success with the
poetry that he managed to get published despite censorship.
Much of his early work was circulated, with great acclaim,
in manuscript and published later in his life. In 1596 he
wrote La sampogna (“The Syrinx”), a series of sensual idylls
using mythological and pastoral subjects, but he was unable
to publish it until 1620.
After serving for a while
as secretary to a Neapolitan prince, Marino was arrested in
1598 and 1600 for immorality, each time obtaining release
through powerful admirers. He went to Rome and attached
himself to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, a nephew of the
Pope. Together they visited several Italian cities. Marino
tried to publish some of his voluptuous poems in Parma but
was halted by the Inquisition. Finally he was able to
publish his early poetry as Le rime (1602; “The Rhymes”) and
under the title La lira, 2 vol. (1608 and 1614; “The Lyre”).
At Torino (Turin) from 1608
to 1615 he enjoyed the patronage of the duke of Savoy but
was resented for his satirical poems against a rival poet,
Gaspare Murtola (La Murtoleide, 1619; “The Murtoliad”).
Murtola had him imprisoned for this offense and others; and,
though his friends secured his release, Marino left Torino
for Paris in 1615, where he stayed until 1623 under the
patronage of Marie de Médicis and Louis XIII.
Before leaving Paris Marino
published his most important work, a labour of 20 years,
Adone (1623; definitive ed. by R. Balsamo-Crivelli, 1922;
Adonis [selections]). Adone, an enormous poem (45,000
lines), relates, with many digressions, the love story of
Venus and Adonis and shows the best and worst of Marino’s
style. The best is found in brilliant passages, written in a
masterly style; the worst, in excessive conceits and
metaphors, word play, and hyperbole. On returning to Italy
in 1623, Marino encountered new difficulties with
censorship, but he stayed in Naples until his death.
Other works for which
Marino is remembered are La galeria (1620; “The Gallery”),
an attempt to recreate works of art poetically, and La
strage degli innocenti (1632; The Slaughter of the
Innocents). His correspondence was published as Lettere
(“Letters”) in 1627.
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Gabriello Chiabrera
Gabriello Chiabrera, (b. June 18, 1552, Savona [Italy]—d.
Oct. 14, 1638, Savona), Italian poet whose introduction of
new metres and a Hellenic style enlarged the range of lyric
forms available to later Italian poets.
Chiabrera studied
philosophy in Rome, lived for a time in the household of a
cardinal, and then returned to Savona, where civic and
diplomatic posts and the protection of several princes gave
him the leisure to write a prodigious amount of poetry in
various forms: lyrics, narrative poems, eclogues, epitaphs,
epics, tragedies, and satires. His canzones (lyrics derived
from Provençal poetry) introduced stylistic innovations. His
best works, however, are his graceful, musical canzonettas;
these are lighthearted compositions, apparently influenced
by the 16th-century French Pléiade poets, in which he
experiments with the introduction of 4-, 5-, 6-, 8-, and
9-syllable lines (rather than the 11- and 7-syllable lines
of previous practice) and with varieties of syllabic stress.
Because of the success of Chiabrera’s experiments,
subsequent poets had a choice of many new lyric types. His
work was imitated by the 18th-century Italian Arcadian poets
and was admired by the 19th-century Romantic poet William
Wordsworth, who translated some of his epitaphs.
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Giambattista Vico
Italian philosopher
born June 23, 1668, Naples [Italy]
died Jan. 23, 1744, Naples
Main
Italian philosopher of cultural history and law, who is
recognized today as a forerunner of cultural anthropology,
or ethnology. He attempted, especially in his major work,
the Scienza nuova (1725; “New Science”), to bring about the
convergence of history, from the one side, and the more
systematic social sciences, from the other, so that their
interpenetration could form a single science of humanity.
Early life and career.
Vico was the son of a poor bookseller. In his family’s home
everyone was miserably huddled together in a mud-floored,
ground-level room used simultaneously as a bookshop, living
room, and kitchen. When he was scarcely seven, Vico injured
his head falling from the ladder that led to the small
second-floor attic that served as the sleeping room. The
injury appeared so serious that the doctor predicted that it
would lead to death or imbecility. Although the injury
healed, he became stern and melancholy in nature. Vico later
acknowledged this in his autobiography and observed: “such a
nature do men with profound and active spirits possess.”
He attended various schools, including a Jesuit college,
for short periods but was largely self-taught. He had to
study by candlelight in a miserable room crowded with a
large family. He often skipped his classes, because his
mediocre teachers could offer him nothing more than an arid
Scholasticism, the system of Western Christian philosophy
that flourished from the 11th to the 15th century but had
declined greatly by the time of Vico. Despite his life of
poverty, he was able to escape occasionally to the
countryside; these excursions opened immense horizons beyond
his limited early environment. In fact, personal experience,
rather than reading, was the primary source of Vico’s unique
genius, although his reading was extensive, varied, and
always distinguished by a personal interpretation.
In the course of his reading Vico encountered his first
master, the Greek philosopher Plato. A critical spirit
quickly intervened, and he turned to Tacitus, a Roman
historian, and to Machiavelli, an Italian statesman and
political philosopher, who portrayed men not as they should
be but as they unfortunately are. Thus, contrasts soon
became an important element in his thought: between nature
and spirit; between the body, as “this sombre prison,” and
the soul; between the high aspirations of the imprisoned
soul and the fall that awaits it when it yields to the
desires of the senses.
Vico’s thought became increasingly independent, and he
preferred to meditate in solitude; but, at the same time, he
frequented the fashionable salons, where he met several
scholars of the time, such as Thomas Corneille, a French
dramatist, and Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, a literary
historian, with whom he debated. Gradually, this circle of
scholars became attracted by the ideas of René Descartes,
Benedict de Spinoza, and John Locke, which were penetrating
Naples at the end of the 17th century. Although Vico was
distantly involved in the controversies, he continued to
depend more upon the course of his own self-instruction.
Following an attack of typhus, Vico left Naples and
accepted a tutoring position in the home of the Duca della
Rocca at Vatolla, south of Salerno, where he wrote his most
authentic, and most despondent, poetry. There, secretly
infatuated with his pupil, the young Giulia della Rocca, he
discovered the pain of “social barriers”—barriers that were
insuperable, because they were the vestige of entrenched
ancient structures. Giulia, who admired Vico, died at the
age of 22, shortly after her marriage to a young man “of her
sphere.” Although Vico always had a longing for a peaceful
world, he felt that the discord that governs the individual
spreads and that history itself only partially obeys the
designs of Providence.
After his return to Naples, Vico found the next few years
less difficult. He recovered from his ill-fated passion and
in December 1699 married a childhood friend, Teresa Destito,
who was well intentioned but almost illiterate and incapable
of understanding him. In the same year he obtained a chair
of rhetoric at the University of Naples. One of the duties
of the professor of rhetoric was to open the academic year
with a Latin oration, and Vico carried out this
responsibility by giving the introductory lectures between
1699 and 1708. The last one, printed in 1709 under the title
De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (“On the Method of the
Studies of Our Time”), is rich with his reflections about
pedagogical methods. This work was followed almost
immediately by the publication of Vico’s great metaphysical
essay De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia (“On the Ancient
Wisdom of the Italians”), which was a refutation of the
Rationalistic system of Descartes.
This tranquil interval, during which he brought his aging
father to live with him, did not last. Three of his eight
children died at an early age, and another, Ignazio, caused
his parents grave anxiety and was even imprisoned for his
debts. Vico was also disappointed in his own career, which
had initially appeared promising. He failed to obtain the
more prestigious and better paid chair of law that he
actively sought. When a notice contemptuous of his work
appeared in one of the scholarly publications, his fiery
temper was sparked, and he wrote his pamphlet “Vici
Vindiciae” (“The Vindications of Vico”) in reply. It was
distressing for him to see so many mediocre thinkers
favoured and to be unable to ensure publication of his most
important work.
Period of the “Scienza Nuova.” The outline of the work
that he planned to call Scienza nuova first appeared in
1720–21 in a two-volume legal treatise on the “Universal
Law.” The outline was written in Latin and appeared in a
chapter entitled “Nova Scientia Tentatur” (“The New Science
Is Attempted”). The ideas outlined here were to be fully
developed in a version that the powerful cardinal Corsini,
the future pope Clement XII, agreed to sponsor. According to
contemporary practice, this meant that he would assume the
costs of publication. At the last moment the Cardinal
withdrew, pleading financial difficulties. It is probable,
however, that the Cardinal was alarmed by certain of Vico’s
propositions, which were bold for that period, such as the
notion that human society went through a “bestial” stage and
that it is possible for society to revert to this primitive
barbarism in which men possess only an obscure form of
reason.
According to his autobiography, since he lacked money to
publish the full text of his work, Vico sold the only jewel
he possessed—a family ring—and reduced his book by
two-thirds. It appeared in 1725 under the title Scienza
nuova but was unsuccessful. Vico complained bitterly of the
virtually universal indifference that his masterpiece
evoked. He quickly regained his confidence, however, and
returned to his work with energy. His mind was crowded with
ideas, but ordering and systematizing them was a trying task
for him. He thought as a poet, not as a dialectician.
Nevertheless, he began a total revision and restructuring of
his work.
In his autobiography Vico revealed that a vain hope had
been born in him when Jean Leclerc, an encyclopaedist and
one of the greatest scholars of the time, had written to him
from Amsterdam in 1722 asking for information about him.
Vico had sent his two-volume legal treatise to him, and
Leclerc had devoted 17 two-column pages in the 1722 edition
of his Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne (“Ancient and Modern
Library”) to Vico. This, however, was a trifle in comparison
with the 70 pages devoted to Paola Mattia Doria, a friend of
Vico from the salons of Naples. His hope was further
betrayed when the Scienza nuova was not mentioned in
subsequent volumes of the celebrated Bibliothèque.
Vico’s effort to restructure his masterpiece was
completed as the second edition of the Scienza nuova. It was
actually the fourth edition, if the outline contained in the
legal treatise and the “fragments” written between 1729 and
1732 are taken into account. The definitive edition that
appeared posthumously in 1744, however, was marked terza
impressione (“third edition”) and was conceived according to
a very different and greatly revised plan.
Vico’s contemporaries portray him, in his old age,
awakening intermittently from his exhaustion to dash off
prophetic lines or to comment on a text from some classical
author for the few pupils remaining to him. He found
satisfaction in the fact that his eldest son, Gennaro,
succeeded him in his chair at the university. Surrounded by
the three survivors of his once numerous family (Ignazio had
died shortly after his release from prison), Vico died.
Since the stairway of his house was too narrow to permit
passage of his coffin, it had to be lowered through a
window, and then it was unceremoniously borne to the church
of the Oratorian priests, where his remains are still kept.
Vico’s vision.
Vico had his own vision of man and the universe, and, in a
time when the deductive method brought into fashion by
Descartes was much employed, he posed the modern problem of
sense: the sense of life and of history. He discovered the
irrational, the small flame that at certain times grows
imperceptibly in the heart of reason. His philosophy
recognized the aspirations of humanity, its obsessions and
dreams, its precarious achievements, and its frustrations
and defeats. He described human societies as passing through
stages of growth and decay. The first is a “bestial”
condition, from which emerges “the age of the gods,” in
which man is ruled by fear of the supernatural. “The age of
heroes” is the consequence of alliances formed by family
leaders to protect against internal dissent and external
attack; in this stage, society is rigidly divided into
patricians and plebeians. “The age of men” follows, as the
result of class conflict in which the plebeians achieve
equal rights, but this stage encounters the problems of
corruption, dissolution, and a possible reversion to
primitive barbarism. Vico affirmed that Providence must
right the course of history so that humanity is not engulfed
in successive cataclysms.
According to Vico, the origin of unequal social classes,
which often retain the rigidity of primitive castes, must be
attributed to imperfect forms of religion, not to
technological progress. All of Vico’s anthropology is based
on the affirmation of the absolute primacy of religion,
which was no doubt suggested to him by the thought of
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, an Italian Renaissance
philosopher. Vico observed that three principles are
dominant in the birth and regeneration of nations: “All the
people have a religion; official marriages are celebrated
among them; and the burial of the dead is a properly human
and universal custom.” Modesty and piety are the basic moral
sentiments, the pillars on which the family is built. When
they crumble, the descent toward the bestial state of man
accelerates. Without expressly saying so, Vico thought that
the degeneration that struck down the idolatrous religions
of ancient times could even overtake what for him was the
true religion—Christianity, which had established
monasteries as refuges from the world and had secured the
purity of sentiments and morals.
A second basic notion of Vico is that man has a mixed
nature: he remains closer to the beast than to the angel.
For Vico the second stage of barbarism, which closes the age
of men, arises from an excess of reflection or from the
predominance of technology. This stage heralds an imminent
new beginning of history. The fundamental perversity of the
second stage of barbarism makes it, in fact, more dangerous
than the first, which in its excess of strength contains
noble impulses that need only to be brought under control.
Man becomes a coward, an unbeliever, and an informer, hiding
his evil intentions behind “flattery and hypocritical
wheedling.” Families live huddled together in tentacled
cities, veritable “deserts of souls.” These degenerate
peoples do not hesitate to rush into the worst of slaveries
to find shelter and protection. Money becomes the only
value. This dissolution from the age of men to the bestial
state exposes humanity to a fate far worse than arrests or
regressions of civilizations. Vico hoped to serve warning to
men of the evils that could overtake them if they became
worshippers of a materialist ideology or the servants of a
science uninformed by conscience.
Influence.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German writer,
received a copy of the second edition of Scienza nuova from
an enthusiastic student of Vico whom he visited in Naples in
1787. In an article published that same year, Goethe spoke
of the dead writer whose “wisdom is now endlessly praised by
Italian legal writers.” He said that the work had been
handed to him “as though it were a sacred thing” and that it
contained “prophetic insights on the subject of the good and
the just that we shall or must attain in the future,
insights based on sober meditation about life and about the
future.” Convinced by the strength of Vico’s demonstration,
Goethe henceforth believed that the evolution of humanity
should be represented not by a continually ascending line
but by a spiral. Nevertheless, it appears that Vico’s work
was not widely read during the 18th century.
In the 19th century, Jules Michelet, a great nationalist
and romantic historian of France, called Vico “his own
Prometheus,” his intellectual forerunner. Michelet
eventually abandoned the idea of recourse to Providence but
continued to cite Virgil and Vico as his authorities.
Auguste Comte, the French Positivist philosopher, hailed
Vico as an influence in the formulation of his law of the
three states, or ages, of mankind. Karl Marx, who developed
an economic interpretation of history, owed a great deal
more to Vico than he himself acknowledged; in fact, there
was a close relationship of dependence. They were separated,
however, by their major difference over religion. Today,
many scholars see in Vico the forerunner of the sciences of
anthropology and ethnology. In fact, in recent times,
despite the obscurity of his style, Vico has been
increasingly recognized as one of the important figures in
European intellectual history, and Scienza nuova has been
accepted as one of the landmark works in that history.
Jules-Marie Chaix-Ruy
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18th-century developments
Reform of the tragic theatre
In 1713 Francesco Scipione Maffei, an
antiquary of Verona, produced Merope—a tragedy that met with great
success and pointed the way toward reform of the Italian tragic theatre.
Between 1726 and 1747 Antonio Conti—an admirer of Shakespeare—wrote four
Roman tragedies in blank verse. It was not until 1775 and the success of
his Cleopatra, however, that an important Italian tragedian finally
emerged in the person of Vittorio Alfieri. In strong contrast with
Metastasio’s and Paolo Rolli’s melodrammi—librettos set to music or
sometimes performed as plays in their own right—Alfieri’s tragedies are
harsh, bitter, and unmelodious. He chose classical and biblical themes,
and through his hatred of tyranny and love of liberty he aspired to move
his audience with magnanimous sentiments and patriotic fervour. He is at
his most profound in Saul (1782) and Mirra (1786). Alfieri’s influence
in the Romantic period and the Risorgimento was immense, and, like Carlo
Goldoni, he wrote an important autobiography, which gives a revealing
account of his struggles to provide Italy with a corpus of drama
comparable to that of the other European nations.
Goldoni’s reform of the comedy
Metastasio’s reform of the operatic
libretto was paralleled in the mid-18th century by Goldoni’s reform of
comedy. Throughout the 17th century the commedia dell’arte—a colourful
pantomime of improvisation, singing, mime, and acrobatics, often
performed by actors of great virtuosity—had gradually replaced regular
comedy, but by the early 18th century it had degenerated into mere
buffoonery and obscenity with stereotyped characters (maschere, “masks”)
and mannerisms. The dialogue was mostly improvised, and the plot—a
complicated series of stage directions, known as the scenario—dealt
mainly with forced marriages, star-crossed lovers, and the intrigues of
servants and masters. Goldoni succeeded in replacing this traditional
type of theatre with written works whose wit and vigour are especially
evident when the Venetian scene is portrayed in a refined form of the
local dialect. Perhaps because of his prolific output his work has
sometimes been thought of as lacking in depth. His social observation is
acute, however, and his characters are beautifully drawn. La locandiera
(1753; “The Innkeeper”; Eng. trans. Mirandolina), with its heroine
Mirandolina, a protofeminist, has things to say about class and the
position of women that can still be appreciated today. Goldoni’s rival
and bitter controversialist, fellow Venetian Carlo Gozzi (the
reactionary brother of the more liberal journalist Gasparo), also wrote
comedies, satirical verse, and an important autobiography. His Fiabe
teatrali (1772; “Theatrical Fables”) are fantastic and often satirical.
Among them are L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love for Three Oranges),
later made into an opera by Sergey Prokofiev, and the original Turandot,
later set to music by Giacomo Puccini.
Carlo
Goldoni
Carlo Goldoni, (b. Feb. 25, 1707, Venice—d. Feb. 6,
1793, Paris), prolific dramatist who renovated the
well-established Italian commedia dell’arte dramatic form by
replacing its masked stock figures with more realistic
characters, its loosely structured and often repetitive
action with tightly constructed plots, and its predictable
farce with a new spirit of gaiety and spontaneity. For these
innovations Goldoni is considered the founder of Italian
realistic comedy.
The precocious son of a
physician, Goldoni read comedies from his father’s library
when young and ran away from school at Rimini in 1721 with a
company of strolling players. Back in school at the papal
college in Pavia, Goldoni read comedies by Plautus, Terence,
and Aristophanes. Later he studied French in order to read
Molière.
For writing a satire on the
ladies of the town, Goldoni was expelled from the Ghislieri
College in Pavia, and he reluctantly began law studies at
the University of Pavia. Although he practiced law in Venice
(1731–33) and Pisa (1744–48) and held diplomatic
appointments, his real interest was the dramatic works he
wrote for the Teatro San Samuele in Venice.
In 1748 Goldoni agreed to
write for the Teatro Sant’Angelo company of the Venetian
actor-manager Girolamo Medebac. Although Goldoni’s early
plays veer between the old style and the new, he dispensed
with masked characters altogether in such plays as La Pamela
(performed 1750; Eng. trans., Pamela, a Comedy, 1756), a
serious drama based on Samuel Richardson’s novel.
During the 1750–51 season
Goldoni promised defecting patrons 16 new comedies and
produced some of his best, notably I pettegolezzi delle
donne (“Women’s Gossip”), a play in Venetian dialect; Il
bugiardo (The Liar, 1922), written in commedia dell’arte
style; and Il vero amico (“The True Friend”), an Italian
comedy of manners.
From 1753 to 1762 Goldoni
wrote for the Teatro San Luca (now Teatro Goldoni). There he
increasingly left commedia dell’arte behind him. Important
plays from this period are the Italian comedy of manners La
locandiera (performed 1753; Eng. trans., Mine Hostess, 1928)
and two fine plays in Venetian dialect, I rusteghi
(performed 1760; “The Tyrants”) and Le baruffe chiozzote
(performed 1762; “Quarrels at Chioggia”).
Already engaged in rivalry
with the playwright Pietro Chiari, whom he satirized in I
malcontenti (performed 1755; “The Malcontent”), Goldoni was
assailed by Carlo Gozzi, an adherent of the commedia
dell’arte, who denounced Goldoni in a satirical poem (1757),
then ridiculed both Goldoni and Chiari in a commedia
dell’arte classic, L’amore delle tre melarance (performed
1761; “The Love of the Three Oranges”).
In 1762 Goldoni left Venice
for Paris to direct the Comédie-Italienne. Subsequently, he
rewrote all of his French plays for Venetian audiences; his
French L’Éventail (performed 1763) became in Italian one of
his finest plays, Il ventaglio (performed 1764; The Fan,
1907).
Goldoni retired in 1764 to
teach Italian to the princesses at Versailles. In 1783 he
began his celebrated Mémoires in French (1787; Eng. trans.,
1814, 1926). After the French Revolution his pension was
cancelled, and he died in dire poverty.
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Carlo Gozzi
Carlo, Conte Gozzi, (b. Dec. 13, 1720, Venice—d. April
4, 1806, Venice), poet, prose writer, and dramatist, a
fierce and skillful defender of the traditional Italian
commedia dell’arte form against the dramatic innovations of
Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni. Admired in Italy and
elsewhere in Europe, Gozzi’s dramas became the basis of many
subsequent theatrical and musical works.
Born into a noble but poor
family, the younger brother of Gasparo Gozzi, Carlo joined
the army. On his return to Venice in 1744, he wrote satires
and miscellaneous prose and joined the reactionary Accademia
dei Granelleschi, a group determined to preserve Italian
literature from being corrupted by foreign influences.
Gozzi’s own crusade was to revive the traditional commedia
dell’arte. He began by attacking Carlo Goldoni, author of
many fine realistic comedies, first in a satirical poem, La
tartana degli influssi (1747), and then in an exotic
commedia dell’arte play, L’amore delle tre melarance
(performed 1761; “The Love of the Three Oranges”), in which
he personified Goldoni as a magician and Pietro Chiari as a
wicked fairy.
Following the huge success
of this play, Gozzi wrote nine other fiabe (fantastic plays;
literally, “fairy tales”), based on puppet plays, Oriental
stories, popular fables, fairy stories, and the works of
such Spanish dramatists as Tirso de Molina, Pedro Calderón
de la Barca, and Miguel de Cervantes. Outstanding among
these fiabe are Il re cervo (performed 1762; The King Stag),
Turandot (performed 1762), La donna serpente (performed
1762; “The Snake Woman”), and L’augellin belverde (performed
1765; “The Pretty Little Green Bird”).
Gozzi’s fiabe were popular
for a time in Italy and had an even more lasting influence
elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Germany, where they
were published in 1777–78. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich
Schiller, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and the Schlegels all
admired them: Schiller turned Turandot into a serious play,
and Friedrich von Schlegel compared Gozzi to William
Shakespeare. Turandot was used later as the basis for operas
by Ferruccio Busoni (performed 1917) and Giacomo Puccini
(performed 1926); L’amore delle tre melarance provided the
basis for Sergey Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three
Oranges (performed 1921).
Gozzi also wrote a vivid,
if immodest, autobiography, Memorie inutili (1797; The
Memoirs of Carlo Gozzi).
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The world of learning
Giambattista Vico, Ludovico Antonio Muratori,
Apostolo Zeno, and the already mentioned Scipione Maffei were writers
who reflected the awakening of historical consciousness in Italy.
Muratori collected the primary sources for the study of the Italian
Middle Ages; Vico, in his Scienza nuova (1725–44; The New Science),
investigated the laws governing the progress of the human race and from
the psychological study of man endeavoured to infer the laws by which
civilizations rise, flourish, and fall. Giovanni Maria Mazzuchelli and
Gerolamo Tiraboschi devoted themselves to literary history. Literary
criticism also attracted attention; Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Vico, Maffei,
Muratori, and several others, while advocating the imitation of the
classics, realized that such imitation should be cautious and thus
anticipated critical standpoints that were later to come into favour.
The Enlightenment (Illuminismo)
With the end of Spanish domination and
the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment from France, political
reforms were gradually introduced in various parts of Italy. The new
spirit of the times led men—mainly of the upper middle class—to enquire
into the mechanics of economic and social laws. The ideas and
aspirations of the Enlightenment as a whole were effectively voiced in
such organs of the new journalism as Pietro Verri’s periodical Il Caffè
(1764–66; “The Coffeehouse”). A notable contributor to Il Caffè was the
philosopher and economist Cesare Beccaria, who in his pioneering book
Dei delitti e delle pene (1764; On Crimes and Punishments) made an
eloquent plea for the abolition of torture and the death penalty.
More than anyone else, Giuseppe Parini seems to embody the literary
revival of the 18th century. In Il giorno (published in four parts,
1763–1801; “The Day”), an ambitious but unfinished social satire of
inherited wealth and nobility, he describes a day in the life of a young
Milanese patrician and reveals with masterly irony the irresponsibility
and futility of a whole way of life. His Odi (1795; “Odes”), which are
imbued with the same spirit of moral and social reform, are among the
classics of Italian poetry.
The satire in the Sermoni (1763; “Sermons”) of Gasparo Gozzi (elder
brother of Carlo) is less pungent, though directed at similar ends, and
in his two periodicals—La Gazzetta veneta and L’Osservatore—he presented
a lively chronicle of Venetian life and indicated a practical moral with
much good sense. Giuseppe Baretti—an extremely controversial figure who
published a critical journal called La Frusta letteraria (“The Literary
Whip”), in which he castigated “bad authors”—had learned
much through a
lengthy sojourn in England, where his friendship with Samuel Johnson
helped to give independence and vigour, if not always accuracy, to his
judgments. The Viaggi di Enrico Wanton (1749–64; “Travels of Enrico
Wanton”), a philosophical novel by the Venetian Zaccaria Seriman, which
tells of an imaginary voyage in the manner of
Jonathan Swift and
Voltaire, was the most all-embracing satire of the time.
Anthony Oldcorn
Literary trends of the 19th century
The 19th century was a period of political ferment leading to Italian
unification, and many outstanding writers were involved in public
affairs. Much of the literature written with a political aim, even when
not of intrinsic value, became part of Italy’s national heritage and
inspired not only those for whom it was written but all who valued
freedom.
Romanticism
Foremost among writers in the early struggles for his
country’s unity and freedom from foreign domination was Ugo Foscolo, who
reconciled passionate feeling with a formal perfection inspired by
classical models. His Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802; The Last
Letters of Jacopo Ortis) was an epistolary story, reminiscent of
Goethe’s Werther, of a young man forced to suicide by frustrated love
for both a woman and his fatherland. It was extremely moving and
popular, as was a poem, “Dei sepolcri” (1807; “On Sepulchres”), in
which, in fewer than 300 lines, he wrote lyrically on the theme of the
inspiration to be had from contemplating the tombs of the great,
exhorting Italians to be worthy of their heritage. This poem influenced
the Italian Risorgimento, or national revival, and a passage in which
Florence was praised because it preserved in the church of Santa Croce
the ashes of Michelangelo,
Machiavelli, and Galileo is still very
popular in Italy. Two odes celebrating the divine quality of beauty, 12
sonnets ranking with the best of
Petrarch’s and
Tasso’s, and an
unfinished poem, “Le grazie” (“The Graces”), also testified to Foscolo’s
outstanding poetic merit. As an exile in England from 1816 until his
death in 1827, he wrote remarkable critical essays on Italian literature
for English readers.
In Foscolo patriotism and classicism united to form a single fixed
passion, but the eclectic Vincenzo Monti was outstanding for mobility of
feeling. He saw danger to his country in the French Revolution and wrote
Il pellegrino apostolico (1782; “The Apostolic Pilgrim”) and In morte di
Ugo Bassville (1793; The Penance of Hugo), usually known as La
bassvilliana; Napoleon’s victories aroused his praise in Prometeo (c.
1805; “Prometheus”), Il bardo della selva nera (1806; “The Bard of the
Dark Wood”), and La spada di Federico II (1806; “The Sword of Frederick
II”); in Il fanatismo and La superstizione (1797) he attacked the
papacy; later he extolled the Austrians. Thus every great event made him
change his mind, through lack of political conviction, yet he achieved
greatness in La bellezza dell’universo (1781; “The Beauty of the
Universe”), in the lyrics inspired by domestic affections, and in a
translation of the Iliad, a masterpiece of Neoclassical beauty.
Opposing movements
Melchiorre Cesarotti occupied a prominent position
in the world of learning at the end of the 18th century, and his
translations of James Macpherson’s Ossian poetry, Poesie di Ossian
(1763–72), influenced Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, and others by their
mysterious and gloomy fantasy, so alien to the classical inspiration;
Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue (1785; “Essay on the Philosophy of
Languages”) was an important essay in the dispute on the Italian
language. The trend was toward pedantic classicism as a reaction against
an excessive Gallicism favoured by some 18th-century writers. Among the
purists was Antonio Cesari, who brought out a new enlarged edition of
the Vocabolario della Crusca (the first Italian dictionary, published by
the Accademia della Crusca in 1612). He wrote Sopra lo stato presente
della lingua italiana (1810; “On the Present State of the Italian
Language”) and endeavoured to establish the supremacy of Tuscan and of
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as models. But a Lombard school opposed
this Tuscan supremacy. Monti, its leader, issued Proposta di alcune
correzioni ed aggiunte al vocabolario della Crusca (1817–26; “Proposal
for Some Corrections and Additions to the Crusca Dictionary”), which
attacked the Tuscanism of the Crusca. By contrast, the patriot Pietro
Giordani—for a time a journalistic colleague of Monti—was a great
exponent of purismo. His views did not stem from literary pedantry,
however, but from a concern that all social groups throughout Italy
should have a common means of communication. In this respect he was
linguistically opposed to the great Romantic poet Carlo Porta, who
lampooned the aristocracy and clergy and expressed sympathy with the
humble and wretched in narrative poems composed not in Italian but in a
lively Milanese dialect. All Italy took part in the disputes about
language, literature, and politics.
An artificial form of classicism was associated with the Napoleonic
domination of Italy, so that when Napoleon fell, forces antagonistic to
classicism arose. Literary Romanticism had already won favour with the
French, who erroneously thought themselves akin to the German Romantics.
Between 1816 and 1818 a battle was fought for Romanticism, particularly
in Milan, where a Romantic periodical, Il Conciliatore (1818–19; “The
Peacemaker”), was published. Giovanni Berchet (patriotic poet whose
Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo [1816; “Half-Serious
Letter from Grisostomo to His Son”] is an important manifesto of Italian
popular romanticism), Silvio Pellico, Ludovico di Breme, Giovita
Scalvini, and Ermes Visconti were among its contributors. Their efforts
were silenced in 1820 when several of them were arrested by the Austrian
police because of their liberal opinions; among them was Pellico, who
later wrote a famous account of his experiences, Le mie prigioni (1832;
My Prisons).
Alessandro Manzoni (grandson of reformer Cesare Beccaria) was the
chief exponent of Italian Romanticism, but perhaps an even higher claim
to fame was his contribution to the resolution of the language problem.
In 1821 he started working on a panoramic novel about the lives of
simple people placed against a background of major historical events,
and, in order that this should be accessible to a wide readership, he
decided to write it in an idiom as close as possible to modern educated
Florentine speech. This was a formidable enterprise for someone whose
first languages were French and Milanese dialect—and to whom spoken
Florentine was virtually a foreign tongue—and for the first draft
(completed in 1823) he had to resort to Francesco Cherubini’s
Italian-Milanese dictionary. The second draft was published in 1825–27
under the title I promessi sposi (The Betrothed); and the final
definitive edition came out in 1840–42 after a long, painstaking process
of revision aimed at making the text conform more closely with
colloquial Florentine usage. The result of this effort was clear,
expressive prose—neither pretentious nor provincial—and the way in which
the novel caught the public’s imagination attested to Manzoni’s success
in addressing the sort of people to whom conventional literary Italian
was almost as remote as Latin. Ironically, Manzoni the innovator became,
in his turn, the model for a new kind of purism, with “Manzonians”
composing works in an affected Tuscan, and it required authors with
fresh ideas—not poor imitators—to continue the task of disencumbering
and modernizing written Italian.
Manzoni’s genius as a poet showed in the odes Il cinque maggio (1821;
“The Fifth of May”), written on the death of Napoleon, and Marzo 1821
(1821; “March 1821”) and in passages of his Inni sacri (1812–22; Sacred
Hymns), five poems in celebration of church holy days, describing human
affections. His tragedies, Il conte di Carmagnola (performed 1820; “The
Count of Carmagnola”) and Adelchi (1822), about the Frankish conquest of
Italy, marked a victory of Romanticism over classicism; they contained
passages of great lyrical beauty but lacked strong dramatic power.
The foremost Italian poet of the age was
Giacomo Leopardi, an
outstanding scholar and thinker whose philological works together with
his philosophical writings, Operette morali, would alone place him among
the great writers of the 19th century. Embittered by solitude, sickness,
and near penury, he realized from age 20 the vanity of hope. Though he
developed a doctrine of universal pessimism, seeing life as evil and
death as the only comfort, the poetry based on these bitter, despairing
premises was far from depressing. Most of Leopardi’s poems were
contained in one book, I canti (“Songs”; Eng. trans. The Poems of
Leopardi), first published in 1831. Some were patriotic and were once
very popular; but the most memorable came from deeper lyrical
inspiration. Among them were “L’infinito,” a meditation on infinity; “A
Silvia,” on the memory of a girl who died when he was 20; Le ricordanze,
an evocation of his childhood; “Il passero solitario,” comparing the
lonely poet with the bird that sings in isolation; and “La quiete dopo
la tempesta” and “Il sabato del villaggio,” two pictures of village
life. They balance depth of meaning and formal beauty, simplicity of
diction, intensity, and verbal music.
Alessandro Manzoni
Alessandro Manzoni, (b.
March 7, 1785, Milan—d. May 22, 1873, Milan), Italian poet
and novelist whose novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed,
1952) had immense patriotic appeal for Italians of the
nationalistic Risorgimento period and is generally ranked
among the masterpieces of world literature.
After Manzoni’s parents
separated in 1792, he spent much of his childhood in
religious schools. In 1805 he joined his mother and her
lover in Paris, where he moved in radical circles and became
a convert to Voltairian skepticism. His anticlerical poem
“Il trionfo della libertà” demonstrates his independence of
thought. When his mother’s lover and his father died, the
former left him a comfortable income, through his mother.
In 1808 he married
Henriette Blondel, a Calvinist, who soon converted to Roman
Catholicism, and two years later Manzoni himself returned to
Catholicism. Retiring to a quiet life in Milan and at his
villa in Brusiglio, he wrote (1812–15) a series of religious
poems, Inni sacri (1815; The Sacred Hymns), on the church
feasts of Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter, and a hymn to
Mary. The last, and perhaps the finest, of the series, “La
pentecoste,” was published in 1822.
During these years, Manzoni
also produced the treatise Osservazioni sulla morale
cattolica (1819; “Observations on Catholic Ethics”); an ode
on the Piedmontese revolution of 1821, “Marzo 1821”; and two
historical tragedies influenced by Shakespeare: Il conte di
Carmagnola (1820), a romantic work depicting a 15th-century
conflict between Venice and Milan; and Adelchi (performed
1822), a richly poetic drama about Charlemagne’s overthrow
of the Lombard kingdom and conquest of Italy. Another ode,
written on the death of Napoleon in 1821, “Il cinque maggio”
(1822; “The Napoleonic Ode”), was considered by Goethe, one
of the first to translate it into German, as the greatest of
many written to commemorate the event.
Manzoni’s masterpiece, I
promessi sposi, 3 vol. (1825–27), is a novel set in early
17th-century Lombardy during the period of the Milanese
insurrection, the Thirty Years’ War, and the plague. It is a
sympathetic portrayal of the struggle of two peasant lovers
whose wish to marry is thwarted by a vicious local tyrant
and the cowardice of their parish priest. A courageous friar
takes up the lovers’ cause and helps them through many
adventures to safety and marriage. Manzoni’s resigned
tolerance of the evils of life and his concept of religion
as the ultimate comfort and inspiration of humanity give the
novel its moral dimension, while a pleasant vein of humour
in the book contributes to the reader’s enjoyment. The novel
brought Manzoni immediate fame and praise from all quarters,
in Italy and elsewhere.
Prompted by the patriotic
urge to forge a language that would be accessible to a wide
readership rather than a narrow elite, Manzoni decided to
write his novel in an idiom as close as possible to
contemporary educated Florentine speech. The final edition
of I promessi sposi (1840–42), rendered in clear, expressive
prose purged of all antiquated rhetorical forms, reached
exactly the sort of broad audience he had aimed at, and its
prose became the model for many subsequent Italian writers.
Manzoni’s wife died in
1833; his second wife and most of his children also
predeceased him. These calamities deepened rather than
destroyed his faith. Revered by the men of his time, he was
made a senator of Italy in 1860. A stroke followed the death
of his oldest son in 1873, and he died that same year and
was buried with a state funeral.
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Giacomo Leopardi
Giacomo Leopardi, (b. June
29, 1798, Recanati, Papal States—d. June 14, 1837, Naples),
Italian poet, scholar, and philosopher whose outstanding
scholarly and philosophical works and superb lyric poetry
place him among the great writers of the 19th century.
A precocious, congenitally
deformed child of noble but apparently insensitive parents,
Giacomo quickly exhausted the resources of his tutors. At
the age of 16 he independently had mastered Greek, Latin,
and several modern languages, had translated many classical
works, and had written two tragedies, many Italian poems,
and several scholarly commentaries. Excessive study
permanently damaged his health: after bouts of poor vision,
he eventually became blind in one eye and developed a
cerebrospinal condition that afflicted him all his life.
Forced to suspend his studies for long periods, wounded by
his parents’ unconcern, and sustained only by happy
relationships with his brother and sister, he poured out his
hopes and his bitterness in poems such as Appressamento
della morte (written 1816, published 1835; “Approach of
Death”), a visionary work in terza rima, imitative of
Petrarch and Dante but written with considerable poetic
skill and inspired by a genuine feeling of despair.
Two experiences in 1817 and
1818 robbed Leopardi of whatever optimism he had left: his
frustrated love for his married cousin, Gertrude Cassi
(subject of his journal Diario d’amore and the elegy “Il
primo amore”), and the death from consumption of Terese
Fattorini, young daughter of his father’s coachman, subject
of one of his greatest lyrics, “A Silvia.” The last lines of
this poem express the anguish he felt all his life: “O
nature, nature, / Why dost thou not fulfill / Thy first fair
promise? / Why dost thou deceive / Thy children so?”
Leopardi’s inner suffering
was lightened in 1818 by a visit from the scholar and
patriot Pietro Giordani, who urged him to escape from his
painful situation at home. At last he went to Rome for a few
unhappy months (1822–23), then returned home for another
painful period, brightened only by the 1824 publication of
his verse collection Canzoni. In 1825 he accepted an offer
to edit Cicero’s works in Milan. For the next few years he
travelled between Bologna, Recanati, Pisa, and Florence and
published Versi (1826), an enlarged collection of poems; and
Operette morali (1827; “Minor Moral Works”), an influential
philosophical exposition, mainly in dialogue form, of his
doctrine of despair.
Lack of money forced him to
live at Recanati (1828–30), but he escaped again to Florence
through the financial help of friends and published a
further collection of poems, I canti (1831). Frustrated love
for a Florentine beauty, Fanny Targioni-Tozzetti, inspired
some of his saddest lyrics. A young Neapolitan exile,
Antonio Ranieri, became his friend and only comfort.
Leopardi moved to Rome,
then to Florence, and finally settled in Naples in 1833,
where, among other works, he wrote Ginestra (1836), a long
poem included in Ranieri’s posthumous collection of his
works (1845). The death that he had long regarded as the
only liberation came to him suddenly in a cholera epidemic
in Naples.
Leopardi’s genius, his
frustrated hopes, and his pain found their best outlet in
his poetry, which is admired for its brilliance, intensity,
and effortless musicality. His finest poems are probably the
lyrics called “Idillii” in early editions of his poetry,
among which is “A Silvia.” One English translation of his
prose works is James Thomson’s Essays, Dialogues, and
Thoughts (1905). Among many translations of Leopardi’s
poetry are R.C. Trevelyan’s Translations From Leopardi
(1941) and J.-P. Barricelli’s Poems (1963).
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The Risorgimento and after
Circumstances made it inevitable that
Italian Romanticism should become heavily involved with the patriotic
myths of the Risorgimento; yet, while this served a useful civic purpose
at the time, it did not encourage literature of consistent artistic
merit or enduring readability. Of the writings produced by figures
associated in some way with Italy’s struggle for nationhood, it tends to
be the less typical ones that attract attention today: the dialect
poetry of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli describing the life of contemporary
papal Rome; compositions by Giuseppe Giusti satirizing petty tyrants,
political turncoats, and coarse parvenus; or the works of the republican
Roman Catholic from Dalmatia, Niccolò Tommaseo. The undoubted
masterpiece of Risorgimento narrative literature is Ippolito Nievo’s
Confessioni di un italiano (published posthumously in 1867; “Confessions
of an Italian”; Eng. trans. The Castle of Fratta), which marks Nievo as
the most important novelist to emerge in the interval between Manzoni
and Giovanni Verga. Giuseppe Mazzini’s letters can still be studied with
profit, as can the memoirs of Luigi Settembrini (Ricordanze della mia
vita [1879–80; “Recollections of My Life”]) and Massimo D’Azeglio (I
miei ricordi [1868; Things I Remember]). D’Azeglio’s historical novels
and those of Francesco Guerrazzi now have a rather limited interest; and
Mazzini’s didactic writings—of great merit in their good intentions—are
generally regarded as unduly oratorical. Giovanni Prati and Aleardo
Aleardi, protagonists of the “Second Romanticism,” wrote poetry of a
sentimentality that helped to provoke a variety of reactive movements,
including scapigliatura and verismo.
Giosuè Carducci was an outstanding figure whose enthusiastic support
for the national cause during the struggle of 1859–61 was changed to
disillusionment by the difficulties in which the new kingdom was
involved. The bitterness of some of his poetry revealed frustration and
rebelliousness. Rime nuove (The New Lyrics) and Odi barbare (The
Barbarian Odes), both of which appeared in the 1880s, contained the best
of his poetry: memories of childhood, evocations of landscape, laments
for domestic sorrows, an inspired representation of historical events,
an ambitious effort to resuscitate the glory of Roman history, and an
anachronistic but sincere cult of pagan civilization. He tried to adapt
Latin prosody to Italian verse, which sometimes produced good poems, but
his opposition to Romanticism and his rhetorical tirades provoked a
strong reaction, and his metrical reform was short-lived. He was also a
scholarly historian of literature, and his literary essays had permanent
value, although philosophical criticism such as that of Francesco De
Sanctis was uncongenial to him. Both his poetry and his criticism were
cited when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1906.
De Sanctis himself was connected politically with the Risorgimento,
but he is remembered chiefly for his critical writings. His most
important works were various critical essays and Storia della
letteratura italiana (1870–71; History of Italian Literature). His main
tenet was that literature was to be judged not on its intellectual or
moralistic content so much as by the spirit of its “form,” and the role
of the critic was to discover how this form had been unconsciously and
spontaneously conceived by studying its creator’s temperament and
background and the age in which he lived. De Sanctis was not properly
appreciated in his day but came into his own at the turn of the century
when Benedetto Croce rescued his works from oblivion.
While Carducci was still alive,
Giovanni Pascoli acquired a
reputation and succeeded him in the chair of Italian literature at the
University of Bologna. His art was often impressionistic and
fragmentary, his language occasionally laborious, but his lyricism, at
first timid in inspiration in Myricae (1891; “Tamarisks”), rose to
fuller tones when he attempted the loftier themes of antiquity: Roman
heritage and greater Italy. His original vein still found expression in
Canti di Castelvecchio (1903; “Songs of Castelvecchio”) and in the
classicism of Poemi conviviali (1904; “Convivial Poems”). Later he
produced—both in humanistic Latin and in self-consciously elaborate
Italian—heroic hymns in honour of two sacred cities, Rome and Turin.
Giosuè Carducci
Giosuè Carducci, (b. July
27, 1835, Val di Castello, near Lucca, Tuscany [now
Italy]—d. Feb. 16, 1907, Bologna, Italy), Italian poet,
winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906, and one of
the most influential literary figures of his age.
The son of a republican
country doctor, Carducci spent his childhood in the wild
Maremma region of southern Tuscany. He studied at the
University of Pisa and in 1860 became professor of Italian
literature at Bologna, where he lectured for more than 40
years. He was made a senator for life in 1890 and was
revered by the Italians as a national poet.
In his youth Carducci was
the centre of a group of young men determined to overthrow
the prevailing Romanticism and to return to classical
models. Giuseppe Parini, Vincenzo Monti, and Ugo Foscolo
were his masters, and their influence is evident in his
first books of poems (Rime, 1857; later collected in
Juvenilia [1880] and Levia gravia [1868; “Light and Serious
Poems”]). He showed both his great power as a poet and the
strength of his republican, anticlerical feeling in his hymn
to Satan, “Inno a Satana” (1863), and in his Giambi ed epodi
(1867–69; “Iambics and Epodes”), inspired chiefly by
contemporary politics. Its violent, bitter language reflects
the virile, rebellious character of the poet.
Rime nuove (1887; The New
Lyrics) and Odi barbare (1877; The Barbarian Odes) contain
the best of Carducci’s poetry: the evocations of the Maremma
landscape and the memories of childhood; the lament for the
loss of his only son; the representation of great historical
events; and the ambitious attempts to recall the glory of
Roman history and the pagan happiness of classical
civilization. Carducci’s enthusiasm for the classical in art
led him to adapt Latin prosody to Italian verse, and his Odi
barbare are written in metres imitative of Horace and
Virgil. His research in Italian literature was warmed by his
poetic imagination and style, and his best prose works equal
his poetry.
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Giovanni Pascoli
Giovanni Pascoli, (b. Dec.
31, 1855, San Mauro di Romagna, Kingdom of Sardinia—d. April
6, 1912, Bologna, Italy), Italian classical scholar and poet
whose graceful and melancholy Italian lyric poems, perfect
in form, rhythmic in style, and innovative in wording, were
an important influence on the crepuscolari (“twilight
poets”; see crepuscolarismo).
Pascoli had an extremely
painful childhood: his father was mysteriously assassinated
when he was 12, his mother died when he was 13, and five
other children in the family died by the time he reached
adulthood. He also experienced a long period of
psychological duress while studying on a scholarship at the
University of Bologna under the great poet Giosuè Carducci.
Pascoli was arrested and imprisoned for a few months in 1879
for preaching political anarchy. Following his imprisonment
he took his younger siblings to live with him, and from 1882
began a career of teaching, first in secondary schools and
then in various Italian universities, as professor of Greek,
Latin, and Italian literature. In 1905 he was appointed to
the chair of Italian literature at the University of
Bologna.
Pascoli’s first literary
work, a great success, was Myricae (1891; “Tamarisks”), a
volume of short, delicate, musical lyrics inspired by nature
and domestic themes and reflecting the psychological unrest
of his student years. Some easing of inner turmoil is
apparent in his next volume, usually considered his best,
Canti di Castelvecchio (1903, definitive ed., 1907; “Songs
of Castelvecchio”), a collection of moving evocations of his
sad childhood and celebrations of nature and family life.
Subsequent volumes include the classically inspired and more
formal Poemi conviviali (1904) and two collections
influenced by Virgil’s Georgics, Carducci’s work, and the
French Symbolists: Primi poemetti (1904, originally
published as Poemetti, 1897) and Nuovi poemetti (1909).
Pascoli’s Latin poems won poetry prizes and exhibited a
fluent skill; Gabriele D’Annunzio considered him the finest
Latin poet since the Augustan age. During his later years
Pascoli wrote several nationalistic and historic poetic
works, notably Poemi del Risorgimento (1913). English
translations of his poems were published in 1923 and 1927.
He also translated poems of Wordsworth, Shelley, and
Tennyson. An Italian literary award, the Pascoli Prize, was
established in 1962 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of
his death, and his birthplace was named San Mauro Pascoli.
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The veristi and other narrative writers
The patriotic niceties and
sentimental Romanticism of much Risorgimento writing inevitably provoked
a reaction. The first serious opposition came from the scapigliati
(literally, “disheveled,” or “bohemians”), adherents of an antibourgeois
literary and artistic movement that flourished in the northern
metropolises of Milan and Turin during the last four decades of the 19th
century and whose declared aim was to link up with the most advanced
Romantic currents from abroad. Unfortunately the movement—perhaps by its
very nature—lacked intellectual cohesion and tended to cultivate the
eccentric as an end in itself. The scapigliati, however, made a useful
contribution in social criticism and in their informal linguistic
approach. Among the foremost scapigliati were Giuseppe Rovani, whose
monumental novel about Milanese life, I cento anni (The Hundred Years),
was issued in installments (1856–58 and 1864–65); Emilio Praga, a poet
tormented by contradictions; and Arrigo Boito, poet, musician, and
librettist for Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff and Otello.
A more lasting and fruitful successor to conventional Italian
Romanticism was verismo (“realism”; first theoretically expounded by
Luigi Capuana in 1872), a movement initially inspired by the French
Naturalist writers and influenced by positivist and determinist ideas.
The veristi were not concerned with sermons or noble sentiments but with
observable phenomena. When they dealt with the Italy of the
Risorgimento, they showed it warts and all. The greatest of verismo
narrators was without a doubt Giovanni Verga, who explained in a
preamble to a short story, “L’amante di Gramigna” (1880; Eng. trans.
“Gramigna’s Lover” ), that in a perfect novel the sincerity of its
reality would be so evident that the hand of the artist would be
absolutely invisible and the work of art would seem to have matured
spontaneously without any point of contact with its author. At times
Verga almost seems to have achieved this unattainable goal, and in his
two great narrative works dealing with the victims of social and
economic change, I Malavoglia (1881; “The Malavoglia Family”; Eng.
trans. The House by the Medlar Tree) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889), the
reader often has the sensation of being put down in an unfamiliar milieu
and—as would happen in real life—left to pick up the threads from gossip
and chance remarks. Another verista, Federico De Roberto, in his novel I
vicerè (1894; The Viceroys), has given a cynical and wryly funny account
of an aristocratic Sicilian family that adapted all too well to change.
Capuana, the founder of verismo and most rigorous adherent to its
impersonal method of narration, is known principally for his dramatic
psychological study, Il marchese di Roccaverdina (1901; “The Marquis of
Roccaverdina”).
In their search for documentary exactitude the veristi paid close
attention to regional background. For Verga, De Roberto, and Capuana,
this was Sicily. Matilde Serao, on the other hand, has given a detailed
and colourful reportage of the Neapolitan scene, while Renato Fucini
conveyed the atmosphere of traditional Tuscany. Emilio De Marchi,
another writer in the realist mold, has Milan for his setting and in
Demetrio Pianelli (1890) has painted a candid but essentially kindly
portrait of the new Milanese urban middle class. Antonio Fogazzaro was
akin to the veristi in his powers of observation and in his descriptions
of minor characters; but he was strongly influenced by Manzoni, and his
best narrative work, Piccolo mondo antico (1895; The Little World of the
Past), is a nostalgic look back to a supposedly less individualistic age
when inner tranquillity was seemingly achieved by devotion to a shared
ideal. The veristi had a leavening effect on Italian literature
generally, and their influence can be discerned, for example, in the
early novels of the Sardinian Grazia Deledda (awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature for 1926) and to some extent in the narrative works of
the Sienese writer Federigo Tozzi, including Con gli occhi chiusi (1919;
“With Closed Eyes”) and Tre croci (1920; Three Crosses). Tozzi, however,
belongs psychologically and stylistically to the 20th century.
Giovanni Carsaniga
Anthony Oldcorn
Giovanni Verga
Giovanni Verga, (b. Sept.
2, 1840, Catania, Sicily—d. Jan. 27, 1922, Catania),
novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, most important
of the Italian verismo (Realist) school of novelists (see
verismo). His reputation was slow to develop, but modern
critics have assessed him as one of the greatest of all
Italian novelists. His influence was particularly marked on
the post-World War II generation of Italian authors; a
landmark film of the Neorealist cinema movement, Luchino
Visconti’s Terra trema (1948; The Earth Trembles), was based
on Verga’s novel I malavoglia.
Born to a family of
Sicilian landowners, Verga went to Florence in 1869 and
later lived in Milan, where the ideas of other writers much
influenced his work. In 1893 he returned to Catania.
Starting with historical
and patriotic novels, Verga went on to write novels in which
psychological observation was combined with romantic
elements, as in Eva (1873), Tigre reale (1873; “Royal
Tigress”), and Eros (1875). These sentimental works were
later referred to by Verga as novels “of elegance and
adultery.” Eventually he developed the powers that made him
prominent among the European novelists of the late 19th
century, and within a few years he produced his
masterpieces: the short stories of Vita dei campi (1880;
“Life in the Fields”) and Novelle rusticane (1883; Little
Novels of Sicily), the great novels I malavoglia (1881) and
Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889), and Cavalleria rusticana (1884),
a play rewritten from a short story, which became immensely
popular as an opera (1890) by Pietro Mascagni.
Verga wrote with terse
accuracy and an intensity of human feeling that constitute a
distinctively lyrical Realism. His realistic representations
of the life of the poor peasants and fishermen of Sicily are
particularly notable, and indeed, his strong feeling for
locale helped start a movement of regionalist writing in
Italy. His stories most commonly treated man’s struggle for
material betterment, which Verga saw as foredoomed. D.H.
Lawrence translated several of his works into English,
including Cavalleria rusticana and Mastro-don Gesualdo.
Another notable English translation is The House by the
Medlar Tree (1953), Eric Mosbacher’s version of I
malavoglia.
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Grazia Deledda
Grazia Deledda, (b. Sept.
27, 1871, Nuoro, Sardinia, Italy—d. Aug. 15, 1936, Rome),
novelist who was influenced by the verismo (“realism”)
school in Italian literature. She was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1926.
Deledda married very young
and moved to Rome, where she lived quietly, frequently
visiting her native Sardinia. With little formal schooling,
at age 17 Deledda wrote her first stories, based on
sentimental treatment of folklore themes. With Il vecchio
della montagna (1900; “The Old Man of the Mountain”) she
began to write about the tragic effects of temptation and
sin among primitive human beings.
Among her most notable
works are Dopo il divorzio (1902; After the Divorce); Elias
Portolu (1903), the story of a mystical former convict in
love with his brother’s bride; Cenere (1904; Ashes; film,
1916, starring Eleonora Duse), in which an illegitimate son
causes his mother’s suicide; and La madre (1920; The Woman
and the Priest; U.S. title, The Mother), the tragedy of a
mother who realizes her dream of her son’s becoming a priest
only to see him yield to the temptations of the flesh. In
these and others of her more than 40 novels, Deledda often
used Sardinia’s landscape as a metaphor for the difficulties
in her characters’ lives. The ancient ways of Sardinia often
conflict with modern mores, and her characters are forced to
work out solutions to their moral issues. Cosima, an
autobiographical novel, was published posthumously in 1937.
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The 20th century
Gabriele D’Annunzio’s nationalism
After unification the new Italy was
preoccupied with practical problems, and by the early 20th century a
great deal of reasonably successful effort had been directed toward
raising living standards, promoting social harmony, and healing the
split between church and state. It was in this prosaic and pragmatic
atmosphere that the middle classes—bored with the unheroic and
positivist spirit of former decades—began to feel the need for a new
myth. Thus, it is easy to understand how imaginations across the
political spectrum came to be fired by the extravagant personality of
aesthete Gabriele D’Annunzio—man of action, nationalist, literary
virtuoso, and (not least) exhibitionist—whose life and art seemed to be
a blend of Jacob Burckhardt’s “complete man” and the superman of
Friedrich Nietzsche. At a distance from those times, it should be
possible to evaluate D’Annunzio more clearly. There is, however, no
critical consensus about his writings, although he is generally praised
for his autobiographical novel, Il piacere (1889; The Child of
Pleasure); for the early books of his poetic Laudi del cielo, del mare,
della terra, e degli eroi (1904–12; “Praises of the Sky, of the Sea, of
the Earth, and of the Heroes”), especially the book titled Alcyone
(1903; Halcyon); for the impressionistic prose of Notturno (1921;
“Nocturne”); and for his late memoirs.
Gabriele D’Annunzio
Gabriele D’Annunzio, (b.
March 12, 1863, Pescara, Italy—d. March 1, 1938, Gardone
Riviera, on Lake Garda), Italian poet, novelist, dramatist,
short-story writer, journalist, military hero, and political
leader, the leading writer of Italy in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries.
The son of a politically
prominent and wealthy Pescara landowner, D’Annunzio was
educated at the University of Rome. When he was 16 his first
poems, Primo vere (1879; “In Early Spring”), were published.
The poems in Canto novo (1882; “New Song”) had more
individuality and were full of exuberance and passionate,
sensuous descriptions. The autobiographical novel Il piacere
(1898; The Child of Pleasure) introduces the first of
D’Annunzio’s passionate Nietzschean-superman heroes; another
appears in L’innocente (1892; The Intruder). D’Annunzio had
already become famous when his best-known novel, Il trionfo
della morte (1894; The Triumph of Death), appeared. It and
his next major novel, Le vergini delle rocce (1896; The
Maidens of the Rocks), featured viciously self-seeking and
wholly amoral Nietzschean heroes.
D’Annunzio continued his
prodigious literary production until World War I. His major
poetic work is the lyrical collection Laudi del cielo del
mare della terra e degli eroi (1899; “In Praise of Sky, Sea,
Earth, and Heroes”). The third book in this series, Alcyone
(1904), a re-creation of the smells, tastes, sounds, and
experiences of a Tuscan summer, is considered by many his
greatest poetic work.
In 1894 D’Annunzio had
begun a long liaison with the actress Eleonora Duse and had
turned to writing plays for her, notably the tragedies La
Gioconda (performed 1899) and Francesca da Rimini (performed
1901). He eventually broke off the relationship and exposed
their intimacy in the erotic novel Il fuoco (1900; The Flame
of Life). D’Annunzio’s greatest play was La figlia di Iorio
(performed 1904; The Daughter of Jorio), a powerful poetic
drama of the fears and superstitions of Abruzzi peasants.
New plays and a novel
followed, but these failed to finance D’Annunzio’s
extravagant lifestyle, and his indebtedness forced him to
flee to France in 1910. When World War I broke out, he
returned to Italy to passionately urge his country’s entry
into the war. After Italy declared war he plunged into the
fighting himself, seeking out dangerous assignments in
several branches of the service, finally in the air force,
where he lost an eye in combat. D’Annunzio was fond of bold,
individual military actions. Two of his best known came in
1918: his flight over Vienna (volo di Vienna), where he
dropped thousands of propaganda leaflets over the city, and
his prank at Buccari Bay (beffa di Buccari), a daring
surprise attack on the Austrian fleet with power boats.
In 1919 D’Annunzio and
about 300 supporters, in defiance of the Treaty of
Versailles, occupied the Dalmatian port of Fiume (Rijeka in
present-day Croatia), which the Italian government and the
Allies were proposing to incorporate into the new Yugoslav
state but which D’Annunzio believed rightly belonged to
Italy. D’Annunzio ruled Fiume as dictator until December
1920, at which time Italian military forces compelled him to
abdicate his rule. Nevertheless, by his bold action he had
established Italy’s interest in Fiume, and the port became
Italian in 1924. D’Annunzio subsequently became an ardent
Fascist and was rewarded by Benito Mussolini with a title
and a national edition of his works, but he exercised no
further influence on Italian politics and was marginalized
by the regime. He retired to Gardone Riviera in Lombardy and
wrote some memoirs and confessions. There D’Annunzio built a
stadium and displayed a ship half-buried in the hillside.
After his death, a large mausoleum was constructed there to
contain his remains. Gardone Riviera became not only his
monument but a monument to Italian nationalism and one of
Italy’s most visited tourist sites.
D’Annunzio’s colourful
career, his scandalous amours, his daring in wartime, his
eloquence and political leadership in two national crises,
all contributed to make him one of the most striking
personalities of his day. D’Annunzio’s literary works are
marked by their egocentric perspective, their fluent and
melodious style, and an overriding emphasis on the
gratification of the senses, whether through the love of
women or of nature. Apart from certain interesting
autobiographical works such as Notturno (1921; published in
Nocturne and Five Tales of Love and Death), D’Annunzio’s
prose is somewhat tedious; he was too receptive of
contemporary thought and style, so that his work is liable
to indiscriminately reflect the influences of other writers.
The same can be said of most of his plays, with the
exception of La figlia di Iorio, which has powerful and
vivid characterizations.
As a poet D’Annunzio
derived much of his power from his great emotional
susceptibility. Already in Primo vere and Canto novo, he had
shown an astonishing gift for rendering with precision and
power the healthy exuberance and youthful intensity of a boy
in love with nature and women. Though he then turned to
morbid and decadent themes in his subsequent poems, he
recovered the vitality of his inspiration and found a new,
more musical form for its expression in the great work of
his maturity, the Laudi, and especially its third book,
Alcyone. Some of the poems in this book, in which D’Annunzio
proclaims his sensuous, joyful feeling of communion with
nature, are among the masterpieces of modern Italian poetry.
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Benedetto Croce’s criticism
Although D’Annunzio’s fame was worldwide,
the function of modernizing intellectual life fell mainly to Benedetto
Croce in almost 70 books and in the bimonthly review La Critica
(1903–44). Perhaps his most influential work was his literary criticism,
which he expounded and continually revised in articles and books
spanning nearly half a century.
Croce’s beliefs implied condemnation of fascism’s ideology, but he
was not seriously molested by the fascist regime, and through the
darkest days La Critica remained a source of encouragement to at least a
restricted circle of freedom-loving intellectuals. Unfortunately, his
highly systematized approach to criticism led to a certain rigidity and
a refusal to recognize the merits of some obviously important writers,
and this was undoubtedly one reason why after World War II his authority
waned. His monumental corpus of philosophical, critical, and historical
works of great scholarship, humour, and common sense remains, however,
the greatest single intellectual feat in the history of modern Italian
culture.
Benedetto
Croce
Benedetto Croce, (b. Feb.
25, 1866, Pescasseroli, Italy—d. Nov. 20, 1952, Naples),
historian, humanist, and foremost Italian philosopher of the
first half of the 20th century.
Early life.
Croce belonged to a family of landed proprietors with
estates in the Abruzzi region of central Italy but chiefly
resident in Naples. His background was religious,
monarchical, and conservative. Croce spent almost his whole
life in Naples, becoming intimately identified with and a
keen observer of its life and a biographer of its heroes.
His life, of which he left a too-modest record in his
autobiography, falls roughly into four phases; each develops
the dual theme of his intellectual and moral growth and his
gradual, ever-deepening identification with the moral
character and destiny of the Italian nation.
The first period of Croce’s
life (until about 1900) was the period of Croce’s agony.
Orphaned (with his brother, Alfonso) by the earthquake of
Casamicciola in 1883, his life became, in his words, a “bad
dream.” The stable world of childhood and youth was
shattered, leaving him forever marked. Henceforth, he was a
solitary figure, despite his considerable activity in the
world.
His salvation lay in work.
Disillusioned with the university, he set out upon an
austere course of study, to become one of the great
self-taught students of history. His writings of this period
are universally alert, intelligent, and engaging; although
limited in scope, they show a fine sobriety of style, as
well as wit, irony, and a fiery polemical spirit, although
lyricism, which he eulogized, eluded him. Ostensibly, he had
little taste for politics; actually, several basic attitudes
were forming. Disillusioned with the nationalistic liberal
leaders of the period following the Risorgimento (the
19th-century movement for Italian unity), he began to
develop his own convictions on how an ethical, democratic,
liberal government should be structured. He
“coquetted”—according to his autobiography—with socialism
and Marxism, eventually discarding these views after a
thorough examination and severe criticism of both positions.
Nevertheless, he was subject to a constant and profound
malaise. Subliminally, he desired but saw no public
relevance for his activity; the limited world of erudition
palled on him.
Founding of La Critica.
He was delivered from this malaise, and the second
period of his life was opened in 1903 by the founding of La
Critica, a journal of cultural criticism, in which, during
the course of the next 41 years, he published nearly all his
writings and reviewed all of the most important historical,
philosophical, and literary work that was being produced in
Europe at the time. At this same time he began the
systematic exposition of his “Philosophy of the Spirit,” his
chief intellectual achievement. This term designates two
distinct, but related, aspects of his thought: (1) In the
first aspect, philosophy of spirit designates the
construction of a philosophical system on the remote pattern
of the Rationalism of classical Romantic philosophy. Its
principle is the “circularity” of spirit within the
structure of the system and in historical time. The phases,
or moments, of spirit in this system are theoretical and
practical; they are distinguished, respectively, into
aesthetic, logical, and economic and ethical. The circular
dynamic moves between both the lesser and the greater
moments. The law of this circularity is that of absolute
immanence. This system is documented in the volumes Estetica
come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (1902;
Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic),
Logica come scienza del concetto puro (1909; “Logic as the
Science of Pure Conception”; Eng. trans. Logic), Filosofia
della pratica: economia ed etica (1909; Philosophy of the
Practical: Economic and Ethic), and Teoria e storia della
storiografia (1917; History: Its Theory and Practice). (2)
Croce gradually abandoned, without explicitly renouncing,
this schematism in response primarily to methodological
considerations in history. Its moments are not dissolved but
are concretized into the flow of historical action and
thought. History becomes the unique mediational principle
for all the moments of spirit, while spirit—i.e., human
consciousness—is completely spontaneous, without a
predetermined structure. This change is signaled by the
publication of La storia come pensiero e come azione (1938;
“History as Thought and Action”; Eng. trans. History as the
Story of Liberty). To this period some have attached the
term historical positivism, but Croce himself has called it
absolute historicism and identified it as the definitive
form of his thought. The philosophy of spirit in its
asystematic form produced the effective method of Croce’s
later work, as in the anthology Filosofia, poesia, storia
(1951; Philosophy, Poetry, History).
According to Croce, “The
foundation of La Critica marked the beginning of a new
period in my life, the period of maturity or harmony between
myself and reality.” Through this journal he found the
larger public theatre he sought. “La Critica was the most
direct service I could render to Italian culture. . . . I
was engaged in politics in the broad sense . . . uniting the
role of a student and of a citizen.” Through La Critica
Croce’s public role as teacher of modern Italy emerged.
Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the prime minister who
presided over the formation of a unified Italy, had said,
“Having made Italy, we must make Italians.” La Critica took
up this task.
The image of the Italian
which animates this work is severe and beautiful. Creative
effort, a passion for freedom united to a profound sense of
civic duty, a life-style purged of all rhetoric and
sentimental romanticism, unambiguous norms of public and
private truth, a sense of history united to an obligation to
the future, unceasing but constructive self-criticism: these
were its elements. This image strongly reflected the
personal ideal that Croce had gradually formed for himself.
But history was preparing to put this ideal to the test.
Struggle with fascism.
The test was to be fascism, the political attitude that
places the nation or race at the centre of life and history
and disregards the individual and his rights. So gradual was
this preparation that Croce himself did not at once perceive
it. He confessed that he first saw in fascism a movement to
the right of the political spectrum that might restrain and
counteract the leftist tendencies toward unrestricted
individual freedom released by World War I. But as the
character of the Benito Mussolini regime revealed itself,
his opposition hardened, becoming absolute, beyond
compromise. He became, within and without Italy, the symbol
of the opposition to fascism, the rallying point of the
lovers of liberty. In fascism Croce saw not merely another
form of political tyranny. He saw it as the emergence of
that other Italy, in which egoism displaced civic virtue,
rhetoric dislodged poetry and truth, and the pretentious
gesture replaced authentic action.
His consciousness of his
role as the moral teacher of Italy was strengthened.
Instruction now took the form of the composition of the
great histories—a history of Europe in the 19th century, of
Italy from 1871 to 1915, and of the Kingdom of Naples. Their
didactic character was unmistakable; in them Croce pointed
out how the historical path of Italy had become la via
smarrita (“the lost way”). Moreover, the lesson was intended
for Europe and for the entire Western world as well.
In the maelstrom of
conflict and ambiguity that followed Italy’s defeat in World
War II, a voice of moral authority that could speak for the
true Italy was demanded. Croce’s was unanimously recognized
as that voice. And with authority that voice recalled Italy
to the inner spiritual resources through which it might
renew itself. It matters little that Croce’s own project for
the rebuilding of Italy—the retention of the monarchy with
certain dynastic changes, the return to the principles of a
revived Liberal Party in government—was not the one realized
in history. More important is the fact that the new Italy,
in its democratic form, was inspired by his spirit.
This last public duty
fulfilled, Croce returned to his studies. In his own
library—one of the finest collections in Europe within its
own scope—he established the Italian Institute for
Historical Studies as a research centre. Asked his state of
health, he replied with true stoic equanimity, “I am dying
at my work.” He died at age 86.
A. Robert Caponigri
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Literary trends before World War I
While Croce was starting his
arduous task, literary life revolved mainly around reviews such as
Leonardo (1903), Hermes (1904), La Voce (1908), and Lacerba (1913),
founded and edited by relatively small literary coteries. The two main
literary trends were Crepuscolarismo (the Twilight School), which, in
reaction to the high-flown rhetoric of D’Annunzio, favoured a colloquial
style to express dissatisfaction with the present and memories of sweet
things past, as in the work of Guido Gozzano and Sergio Corazzini, and
Futurismo, which rejected everything traditional in art and demanded
complete freedom of expression. The leader of the Futuristi was Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, editor of Poesia, a fashionable cosmopolitan review.
Both Crepuscolari and Futuristi were part of a complex European
tradition of disillusionment and revolt, the former inheriting the
sophisticated pessimism of French and Flemish Decadents, the latter a
fundamental episode in the history of the western European avant-garde
as it developed from the French poets
Stéphane Mallarmé and
Arthur
Rimbaud to
Guillaume Apollinaire and the Cubist, Surrealist, and Dada
movements. Both trends shared a feeling of revulsion against D’Annunzian
flamboyance and magniloquence, from which they attempted to free
themselves. Paradoxically, both also derived many elements of their
style from D’Annunzio: the “crepuscular” mood of D’Annunzio’s Poema
paradisiaco (1893; “Paradisiacal Poem”) can be found in each movement,
and most Futuristic “new theories”—the identification of art with
action, heroism, and speed; the free use of words—were implied in
D’Annunzio’s Laus Vitae (1903; “In Praise of Life”).
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
in full Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (b. Dec. 22, 1876,
Alexandria—d. Dec. 2, 1944, Bellagio, Italy), Italian-French
prose writer, novelist, poet, and dramatist, the ideological
founder of Futurism, an early 20th-century literary,
artistic, and political movement.
Marinetti was educated in
Egypt, France, Italy, and Switzerland and began his literary
career working for an Italian–French magazine in Milan.
During most of his life his base was in France, though he
made frequent trips to Italy and wrote in the languages of
both countries. Such early poetry as the French Destruction
(1904) showed the vigour and anarchic experimentation with
form characteristic of his later work.
Futurism had its official
beginning with the publication of Marinetti’s “Manifeste de
Futurisme” in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro (Feb. 20, 1909;
see the Manifesto of Futurism). His ideas were quickly
adopted in Italy, where the writers Aldo Palazzeschi,
Corrado Govoni, and Ardengo Soffici were among his most
important disciples.
Marinetti’s manifesto was
also endorsed by Futurist painters, who published a
manifesto of their own in 1910. Such painters and sculptors
as Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini
carried out Marinetti’s ideas.
Marinetti’s later works
reiterated the themes introduced in his 1909 manifesto. In
1910 he published a chaotic novel (entitled Mafarka le
Futuriste in France and Mafarka il futurista in Italy),
which illustrated and elaborated on his theory. He also
applied Futurism to drama in such plays as the French Le Roi
bombance (performed 1909; “The Feasting King”) and the
Italian Anti-neutralità (1912; “Anti-Neutrality”) and summed
up his dramatic theory in a prose work, Teatro sintetico
futurista (1916; “Synthetic Futurist Theatre”).
In a volume of poems,
Guerra sola igiene del mundo (1915; “War the Only Hygiene of
the World”), Marinetti exulted over the outbreak of World
War I and urged that Italy be involved. He became an active
Fascist, an enthusiastic backer of Mussolini, and argued in
Futurismo e Fascismo (1924), that Fascism was the natural
extension of Futurism. Although his views helped temporarily
to ignite Italian patriotism, Marinetti lost most of his
following by the second decade of the 20th century.
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The "return to order"
The end of World War I saw a longing for the
revival of tradition, summed up in the aims of the review La Ronda,
founded in 1919 by the poet Vincenzo Cardarelli and others, which
advocated a return to classical stylistic values. This led to an
excessive cult of form in the narrow sense—as exemplified by the elegant
but somewhat bloodless essays (elzeviri) published in Italian newspapers
on page three—and obviously fitted in with the stifling of free
expression under fascism. The sterility of this period, however, should
not be exaggerated. The 20 years of fascist rule were hardly conducive
to creativity, but in the dark picture there were a few glimmers of
light. With 1923 came the publication of Italo Svevo’s Coscienza di Zeno
(The Confessions of Zeno), a gem of psychological observation and Jewish humour, which a few years later was internationally “discovered” in
Italy by Eugenio Montale and in France through the mediation of
James
Joyce. The surreal writings of Massimo Bontempelli (Il figlio di due
madri [1929; “The Son of Two Mothers”]) and of Dino Buzzati (Il deserto
dei Tartari [1940; The Tartar Steppe]) were perhaps in part an escape
from the prevailing political climate, but they stand up artistically
nonetheless. Riccardo Bacchelli, with Il diavolo a Pontelungo (1927; The
Devil at the Long Bridge) and Il mulino del Po (1938–40; The Mill on the
Po), produced historical narrative writing of lasting quality. Aldo
Palazzeschi, in Stampe dell’Ottocento (1932; “Nineteenth-Century
Engravings”) and Sorelle Materassi (1934; The Sisters Materassi),
reached the height of his storytelling powers. Meanwhile, the Florentine
literary reviews Solaria, Frontespizio, and Letteratura, while having to
tread carefully with the authorities, provided an outlet for new talent.
Carlo Emilio Gadda had his first narrative work (La Madonna dei filosofi
[1931; “The Philosophers’ Madonna”]) published in Solaria, while the
first part of his masterpiece, La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with
Grief), was serialized between 1938 and 1941 in Letteratura. Novelists
such as
Alberto Moravia, Corrado Alvaro (Gente in Aspromonte [1930;
Revolt in Aspromonte]), and Carlo Bernari had to use circumspection in
stating their views but were not completely silenced. The controversial
Ignazio Silone, having chosen exile, could speak openly in Fontamara
(1930). Antonio Gramsci, an unwilling “guest” of the regime, gave
testimony to the triumph of spirit over oppression in Lettere dal
carcere (1947; Letters from Prison).
Italo Svevo
Italo Svevo, pseudonym of
Ettore Schmitz (b. Dec. 19, 1861, Trieste, Austrian Empire
[now in Italy]—d. Sept. 13, 1928, Motta di Livenza, Italy),
Italian novelist and short-story writer, a pioneer of the
psychological novel in Italy.
Svevo (whose pseudonym
means “Italian Swabian”) was the son of a German-Jewish
glassware merchant and an Italian mother. At 12 he was sent
to a boarding school near Würzburg, Ger. He later returned
to a commercial school in Trieste, but his father’s business
difficulties forced him to leave school and become a bank
clerk. He continued to read on his own and began to write.
Svevo’s first novel, Una
vita (1892; A Life), was revolutionary in its analytic,
introspective treatment of the agonies of an ineffectual
hero (a pattern Svevo repeated in subsequent works). A
powerful but rambling work, the book was ignored upon its
publication. So was its successor, Senilità (1898; As a Man
Grows Older), featuring another bewildered hero. Svevo had
been teaching at a commercial school, and, with Senilità’s
failure, he formally gave up writing and became engrossed in
his father-in-law’s business.
Ironically, business
frequently required Svevo to visit England in the years that
followed, and a decisive step in his life was to engage a
young man, James Joyce, in 1907 as his English tutor in
Trieste. They became close friends, and Joyce let the
middle-aged businessman read portions of his unpublished
Dubliners, after which Svevo timidly produced his own two
novels. Joyce’s tremendous admiration for them, along with
other factors, encouraged Svevo to return to writing. He
wrote what became his most famous novel, La coscienza di
Zeno (1923; Confessions of Zeno), a brilliant work in the
form of a patient’s statement for his psychiatrist.
Published at Svevo’s own expense, as were his other works,
this novel was also a failure, until a few years later, when
Joyce gave Svevo’s work to two French critics, Valéry
Larbaud and Benjamin Cremieux, who publicized him and made
him famous. In Italy his reputation grew more slowly, though
the poet Eugenio Montale wrote a laudatory essay on him in a
1925 issue of L’Esame.
While working on a sequel
to Zeno, Svevo was killed in an automobile accident. Among
posthumously published works are two short-story
collections, La novella del buon vecchio e della bella
fanciulla, e altre prose inedite e postume (1930; The Nice
Old Man and the Pretty Girl), with a preface by Montale, and
Corto viaggio sentimentale e altri racconti inediti (1949;
Short Sentimental Journey and Other Stories); as well as
Saggi e pagine sparse (1954; “Essays and Scattered Pages”);
Commedie (1960), a collection of dramatic work; and Further
Confessions of Zeno (1969), an English translation of his
incomplete novel. Svevo’s correspondence with Montale was
published as Lettere (1966). Svevo ultimately has been
recognized as one of the most important figures in modern
Italian literary history.
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Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia, pseudonym
of Alberto Pincherle (b. Nov. 28, 1907, Rome, Italy—d. Sept.
26, 1990, Rome), Italian journalist, short-story writer, and
novelist known for his fictional portrayals of social
alienation and loveless sexuality. He was a major figure in
20th-century Italian literature.
Moravia contracted
tuberculosis of the bone (a form of osteomyelitis usually
caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis) at the age of 8, but,
during several years in which he was confined to bed and two
years in sanatoriums, he studied French, German, and
English; read Giovanni Boccaccio, Ludovico Ariosto, William
Shakespeare, and Molière; and began to write. Moravia was a
journalist for a time in Turin and a foreign correspondent
in London. His first novel, Gli indifferenti (1929; Time of
Indifference), is a scathingly realistic study of the moral
corruption of a middle-class mother and two of her children.
It became a sensation. Some of his more important novels are
Agostino (1944; Two Adolescents); La Romana (1947; The Woman
of Rome); La disubbidienza (1948; Disobedience); and Il
conformista (1951; The Conformist), all on themes of
isolation and alienation. La ciociara (1957; Two Women)
tells of an adaptation to post-World War II Italian life. La
noia (1960; The Empty Canvas) is the story of a painter
unable to find meaning either in love or work. Many of
Moravia’s books were made into motion pictures.
His books of short stories
include Racconti romani (1954; Roman Tales) and Nuovi
racconti romani (1959; More Roman Tales). Racconti di
Alberto Moravia (1968) is a collection of earlier stories.
Later short-story collections include Il paradiso (1970;
“Paradise”) and Boh (1976; The Voice of the Sea and Other
Stories).
Most of Moravia’s works
deal with emotional aridity, isolation, and existential
frustration and express the futility of either sexual
promiscuity or conjugal love as an escape. Critics have
praised the author’s stark, unadorned style, his
psychological penetration, his narrative skill, and his
ability to create authentic characters and realistic
dialogue.
Moravia’s views on
literature and realism are expressed in a stimulating book
of essays, L’uomo come fine (1963; Man as an End), and his
autobiography, Alberto Moravia’s Life, was published in
1990. He was married for a time to the novelist Elsa Morante
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Luigi Pirandello
Drama, which a few playwrights and producers were
trying to extricate from old-fashioned realistic formulas and the more
recent superhuman theories of D’Annunzio, was increasingly dominated by
Luigi Pirandello. His own experience of the “unreal,” through his
calamitous family life and his wife’s insanity, enabled him to see the
limitations of realism. From initial short-story writing, in which he
explored the incoherence of personality, the lack of communication
between individuals, the uncertain boundaries between sanity and
insanity or reality and appearance, and the relativity of truth, he
turned to drama as a better means of expressing life’s absurdity and the
ambiguous relationship between fact and fiction.
To multiply the fragmentation of levels of reality,
Pirandello tried
to destroy conventional dramatic structures and to adopt new ones: a
play within a play in Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921; Six
Characters in Search of an Author) and a scripted improvisation in
Questa sera si recita a soggetto (1930; Tonight We Improvise). This was
a way of transferring the dissociation of reality from the plane of
content to that of form, thereby achieving an almost perfect unity
between ideas and dramatic structure. Pirandello’s plays, including
perhaps his best, Enrico IV (1922; Henry IV), often contain logical
arguments: several critics, including Croce, were misled into thinking
that he intended to express in this way a coherent philosophy, whereas
he used logic as a dramatic symbol. Pirandello was awarded the 1934
Nobel Prize for Literature.
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello, (b. June
28, 1867, Agrigento, Sicily, Italy—d. Dec. 10, 1936, Rome),
Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, winner
of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention
of the “theatre within the theatre” in the play Sei
personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921; Six Characters in Search
of an Author), he became an important innovator in modern
drama.
Pirandello was the son of a
sulfur merchant who wanted him to enter commerce.
Pirandello, however, was not interested in business; he
wanted to study. He first went to Palermo, the capital of
Sicily, and, in 1887, to the University of Rome. After a
quarrel with the professor of classics there, he went in
1888 to the University of Bonn, Ger., where in 1891 he
gained his doctorate in philology for a thesis on the
dialect of Agrigento.
In 1894 his father arranged
his marriage to Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of a
business associate, a wealthy sulfur merchant. This marriage
gave him financial independence, allowing him to live in
Rome and to write. He had already published an early volume
of verse, Mal giocondo (1889), which paid tribute to the
poetic fashions set by Giosuè Carducci. This was followed by
other volumes of verse, including Pasqua di Gea (1891;
dedicated to Jenny Schulz-Lander, the love he had left
behind in Bonn) and a translation of J.W. von Goethe’s Roman
Elegies (1896; Elegie romane). But his first significant
works were short stories, which at first he contributed to
periodicals without payment.
In 1903 a landslide shut
down the sulfur mine in which his wife’s and his father’s
capital was invested. Suddenly poor, Pirandello was forced
to earn his living not only by writing but also by teaching
Italian at a teacher’s college in Rome. As a further result
of the financial disaster, his wife developed a persecution
mania, which manifested itself in a frenzied jealousy of her
husband. His torment ended only with her removal to a
sanatorium in 1919 (she died in 1959). It was this bitter
experience that finally determined the theme of his most
characteristic work, already perceptible in his early short
stories—the exploration of the tightly closed world of the
forever changeable human personality.
Pirandello’s early
narrative style stems from the verismo (“realism”) of two
Italian novelists of the late 19th century—Luigi Capuana and
Giovanni Verga. The titles of Pirandello’s early collections
of short stories—Amori senza amore (1894; “Loves Without
Love”) and Beffe della morte e della vita (1902–03; “The
Jests of Life and Death”)—suggest the wry nature of his
realism that is seen also in his first novels: L’esclusa
(1901; The Outcast) and Il turno (1902; Eng. trans. The
Merry-Go-Round of Love). Success came with his third novel,
often acclaimed as his best, Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904; The
Late Mattia Pascal). Although the theme is not typically “Pirandellian,”
since the obstacles confronting its hero result from
external circumstances, it already shows the acute
psychological observation that was later to be directed
toward the exploration of his characters’ subconscious.
Pirandello’s understanding
of psychology was sharpened by reading such works as Les
altérations de la personnalité (1892), by the French
experimental psychologist Alfred Binet; and traces of its
influence can be seen in the long essay L’umorismo (1908; On
Humor), in which he examines the principles of his art.
Common to both books is the theory of the subconscious
personality, which postulates that what a person knows, or
thinks he knows, is the least part of what he is. Pirandello
had begun to focus his writing on the themes of psychology
even before he knew of the work of Sigmund Freud, the
founder of psychoanalysis. The psychological themes used by
Pirandello found their most complete expression in the
volumes of short stories La trappola (1915; “The Trap”) and
E domani, lunedì . . . (1917; “And Tomorrow, Monday . . .
”), and in such individual stories as “Una voce,” “Pena di
vivere così,” and “Con altri occhi.”
Meanwhile, he had been
writing other novels, notably I vecchi e i giovani (1913;
The Old and The Young) and Uno, nessuno e centomila
(1925–26; One, None, and a Hundred Thousand). Both are more
typical than Il fu Mattia Pascal. The first, a historical
novel reflecting the Sicily of the end of the 19th century
and the general bitterness at the loss of the ideals of the
Risorgimento (the movement that led to the unification of
Italy), suffers from Pirandello’s tendency to “discompose”
rather than to “compose” (to use his own terms, in
L’umorismo), so that individual episodes stand out at the
expense of the work as a whole. Uno, nessuno e centomila,
however, is at once the most original and the most typical
of his novels. It is a surrealistic description of the
consequences of the hero’s discovery that his wife (and
others) see him with quite different eyes than he does
himself. Its exploration of the reality of personality is of
a type better known from his plays.
Pirandello wrote over 50
plays. He had first turned to the theatre in 1898 with
L’epilogo, but the accidents that prevented its production
until 1910 (when it was retitled La morsa) kept him from
other than sporadic attempts at drama until the success of
Così è (se vi pare) in 1917. This delay may have been
fortunate for the development of his dramatic powers.
L’epilogo does not greatly differ from other drama of its
period, but Così è (se vi pare) began the series of plays
that were to make him world famous in the 1920s. Its title
can be translated as Right You Are (If You Think You Are). A
demonstration, in dramatic terms, of the relativity of
truth, and a rejection of the idea of any objective reality
not at the mercy of individual vision, it anticipates
Pirandello’s two great plays, Six Characters in Search of an
Author (1921) and Enrico IV (1922; Henry IV). Six Characters
is the most arresting presentation of the typical
Pirandellian contrast between art, which is unchanging, and
life, which is an inconstant flux. Characters that have been
rejected by their author materialize on stage, throbbing
with a more intense vitality than the real actors, who,
inevitably, distort their drama as they attempt its
presentation. And in Henry IV the theme is madness, which
lies just under the skin of ordinary life and is, perhaps,
superior to ordinary life in its construction of a
satisfying reality. The play finds dramatic strength in its
hero’s choice of retirement into unreality in preference to
life in the uncertain world.
The production of Six
Characters in Paris in 1923 made Pirandello widely known,
and his work became one of the central influences on the
French theatre. French drama from the existentialistic
pessimism of Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul Sartre to the
absurdist comedy of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett is
tinged with “Pirandellianism.” His influence can also be
detected in the drama of other countries, even in the
religious verse dramas of T.S. Eliot.
In 1920 Pirandello said of
his own art:
I think that life is a very
sad piece of buffoonery; because we have in ourselves,
without being able to know why, wherefore or whence, the
need to deceive ourselves constantly by creating a reality
(one for each and never the same for all), which from time
to time is discovered to be vain and illusory . . . My art
is full of bitter compassion for all those who deceive
themselves; but this compassion cannot fail to be followed
by the ferocious derision of destiny which condemns man to
deception.
This despairing outlook
attained its most vigorous expression in Pirandello’s plays,
which were criticized at first for being too “cerebral” but
later recognized for their underlying sensitivity and
compassion. The plays’ main themes are the necessity and the
vanity of illusion, and the multifarious appearances, all of
them unreal, of what is presumed to be the truth. A human
being is not what he thinks he is, but instead is “one, no
one and a hundred thousand,” according to his appearance to
this person or that, which is always different from the
image of himself in his own mind. Pirandello’s plays reflect
the verismo of Capuana and Verga in dealing mostly with
people in modest circumstances, such as clerks, teachers,
and lodging-house keepers, but from whose vicissitudes he
draws conclusions of general human significance.
The universal acclaim that
followed Six Characters and Henry IV sent Pirandello touring
the world (1925–27) with his own company, the Teatro d’Arte
in Rome. It also emboldened him to disfigure some of his
later plays (e.g., Ciascuno a suo modo [1924]) by calling
attention to himself, just as in some of the later short
stories it is the surrealistic and fantastic elements that
are accentuated.
After the dissolution,
because of financial losses, of the Teatro d’Arte in 1928,
Pirandello spent his remaining years in frequent and
extensive travel. In his will he requested that there should
be no public ceremony marking his death—only “a hearse of
the poor, the horse and the coachman.”
John Humphreys
Whitfield
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The Hermetic movement
Poetry in the fascist period underwent a process
of involution, partly influenced by French Symbolism, with its faith in
the mystical power of words, and partly under the stress of changed
political conditions after World War I, during which literature had
declined. Many poets of the wartime generation, weary of tradition and
rhetoric, had been seeking new expression: some, like the Futuristi, had
tried to work rhetoric out of their system by letting it run amok;
others, such as Camillo Sbarbaro (Pianissimo [1914], Trucioli [1920;
“Shavings”]), cultivated a style purified of unessential elements. Out
of those efforts grew a poetry combining the acoustic potentialities of
words with emotional restraint and consisting mainly of fragmentary
utterances in which words were enhanced by contextual isolation and
disruption of syntactic and semantic links. The resultant obscurity
compensated poets for loss of influence in a society subservient to
dictatorship by turning them into an elite and allowed some, notably
Eugenio Montale (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975), to
express their pessimism covertly. The name of this movement, Ermetismo
(“Hermeticism”), hinted at both its aristocratic ambitions and its
esoteric theory and practice.
The model for these poets was Giuseppe Ungaretti. Born, like the Futurist
Marinetti, of Italian parents in the
cosmopolitan Egyptian seaport of Alexandria, Ungaretti studied in Paris,
where among his friends were the avant-garde poet
Guillaume Apollinaire
and the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. He came of age in the
trenches of World War I, and in his first book of poems, L’Allegria
(1914–19; “Joie de Vivre”), he confronted that harrowing experience in
verse that is stripped of all its traditional amenities. In these poems
each word is pronounced in isolation, as if a petrified, shell-shocked
language had to be invented from scratch. In Sentimento del tempo (1933;
“Sentiment of Time”) Ungaretti exhibited what is considered his second
Symbolist manner; it is, in contrast with his earlier work, luxuriant,
rich, and strange. This allusive and hieratic poetry recovers many
elements of the tradition and couches them in a splendid but opaque
diction. Thus, what in the 1920s had appeared revolutionary proved later
to be only another facet of the formalistic Petrarchan tradition.
Against this background of refinement, obscurity, and unreality, only
the simple and moving poems of the Triestine poet Umberto Saba preserved
an immediate appeal.
Eugenio Montale
Eugenio Montale, (b.
October 12, 1896, Genoa, Italy—d. September 12, 1981,
Milan), Italian poet, prose writer, editor, and translator
who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.
As a young man, Montale
trained as an opera singer. He was drafted to serve in World
War I, and, when the war was over, he resumed his music
studies. Increasingly he became involved in literary
activity. He was cofounder in 1922 of Primo tempo (“First
Time”), a literary journal; worked for the publisher
Bemporad (1927–28); served as director of the Gabinetto
Vieusseux Library in Florence (1929–38); was a freelance
translator and poetry critic for La fiera letteraria
(1938–48; “The Literary Fair”); and in 1948 became literary
editor and later music editor for the Milan daily newspaper
Corriere della Sera (“Evening Courier”).
Montale’s first book of
poems, Ossi di seppia (1925; “Cuttlefish Bones”), expressed
the bitter pessimism of the postwar period. In this book he
used the symbols of the desolate and rocky Ligurian coast to
express his feelings. A tragic vision of the world as a dry,
barren, hostile wilderness not unlike T.S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land inspired Montale’s best early poems.
The works that followed
Ossi di seppia included La casa dei doganieri e altre poesie
(1932; “The House of the Customs Officer and Other Poems”),
Le occasioni (1939; “The Occasions”), and Finisterre (1943;
“Land’s End”), which critics found progressively more
introverted and obscure. Montale’s later works, beginning
with La bufera e altro (1956; The Storm, and Other Poems),
were written with increasing skill and a personal warmth
that his earlier works had lacked. His other collections of
poems include Satura (1962), Accordi e pastelli (1962;
“Harmony and Pastels”), Il colpevole (1966), and Xenia
(1966), the last work a gentle and evocative series of love
poems in memory of his wife, who died in 1963. Diario del
’71 e del ’72 was published in 1973. Montale published three
volumes of collected Poesie in 1948, 1949, and 1957.
Montale was considered in
the 1930s and ’40s to be a Hermetic poet. Along with
Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, he was
influenced by French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé,
Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Valéry and sought to convey
experiences through the emotional suggestiveness of words
and a symbolism of purely subjective meaning. In his later
poetry, however, Montale often expressed his thoughts in
more direct and simple language. He won many literary prizes
and much critical acclaim. In 1999 a volume of Montale’s
work entitled Collected Poems: 1920–1954, translated by
Jonathan Galassi, was published; in addition to its English
translations it offers helpful annotations, a chronology,
and an essay on the poet.
Montale also rendered into
Italian the poetry of William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and
Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as prose works by Herman
Melville, Eugene O’Neill, and other writers. His newspaper
stories and sketches were published in La farfalla di Dinard
(1956; The Butterfly of Dinard).
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Giuseppe Ungaretti
Giuseppe Ungaretti, (b.
Feb. 10, 1888, Alexandria—d. June 1, 1970, Milan), Italian
poet, founder of the Hermetic movement (see Hermeticism)
that brought about a reorientation in modern Italian poetry.
Born in Egypt of parents
who were Italian settlers, Ungaretti lived in Alexandria
until he was 24; the desert regions of Egypt were to provide
recurring images in his later work. He went to Paris in 1912
to study at the Sorbonne and became close friends with the
poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Péguy, and Paul Valéry
and the then avant-garde artists Pablo Picasso, Georges
Braque, and Fernand Léger. Contact with French Symbolist
poetry, particularly that of Stéphane Mallarmé, was one of
the most important influences of his life.
At the outbreak of World
War I, Ungaretti enlisted in the Italian Army, and while on
the battlefield he wrote his first volume of poetry, each
poem dated individually as if it were to be his last. These
poems, published in Il porto sepolto (1916; “The Buried
Port”), used neither rhyme, punctuation, nor traditional
form; this was Ungaretti’s first attempt to strip ornament
from words and to present them in their purest, most
evocative form. Though reflecting the experimental attitude
of the Futurists, Ungaretti’s poetry developed in a coherent
and original direction, as is apparent in Allegria di
naufragi (1919; “Gay Shipwrecks”), which shows the influence
of Giacomo Leopardi and includes revised poems from
Ungaretti’s first volume.
Further change is evident
in Sentimento del tempo (1933; “The Feeling of Time”),
which, containing poems written between 1919 and 1932, used
more obscure language and difficult symbolism.
Ungaretti went to South
America for a cultural conference and from 1936 to 1942
taught Italian literature at the University of São Paulo,
Brazil. His nine-year-old son died in Brazil, and
Ungaretti’s anguish over his loss as well as his sorrow over
the atrocities of Nazism and World War II are expressed in
the poems Il dolore (1947; “Grief ”). In 1942 Ungaretti
returned to Italy and taught contemporary Italian literature
at the University of Rome until his retirement in 1957.
Important volumes published during this time are La terra
promessa (1950; “The Promised Land”) and Un grido e paesaggi
(1952). Among his later volumes were Il taccuino del vecchio
(1960; “An Old Man’s Notebook”) and Morte delle stagioni
(1967; “Death of the Seasons”).
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Social commitment and the new realism
During World War II the walls
of the Hermetic ivory tower began to crumble. Ungaretti’s style became
so intricate as to be almost unrecognizable as his own. Salvatore
Quasimodo adopted a new engagé, or committed, style, which won critical
admiration, including the 1959 Nobel Prize for Literature, and others
followed suit in a drift toward social realism.
This development had been foreshadowed by some writers under fascism.
In 1929
Alberto Moravia had written a scathing indictment of
middle-class moral indifference, Gli indifferenti (1929; Time of
Indifference). Carlo Bernari wrote a novel about the working classes,
Tre operai (1934; “Three Workmen”); Cesare Pavese produced Paesi tuoi
(1941; “Your Lands”; Eng. trans. The Harvesters); and Elio Vittorini
wrote Conversazione in Sicilia (1941; Conversation in Sicily); all
definitely promised a new literary development. From these and from the
discovery of American literature (William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell,
John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and
Ernest Hemingway, translated mainly
by Elio Vittorini and Pavese), postwar writing took its cue. Certain
English authors, the homegrown veristi, and the ideas of Marxism were
also an influence on postwar authors, to whom in varying degrees the
rather imprecise label of Neorealism (applied also to postwar Italian
cinema) was attached. It was a stimulating time in which to write, with
a wealth of unused material at hand.
There were the social and economic
problems of the south, described by Carlo Levi in his poetic portrait of Lucania, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945; Christ Stopped at Eboli),
and by Rocco Scotellaro (Contadini del sud [1954; “Peasants of the
South”]) and Francesco Jovine (Le terre del Sacramento [1950; “The Lands
of the Sacrament”; Eng. trans. The Estate in Abruzzi]). Vivid pictures
of the Florentine working classes were painted by Vasco Pratolini (Il
quartiere [1945; “The District”; Eng. trans. The Naked Streets] and
Metello [1955; Eng. trans. Metello]) and of the Roman subproletariat by
Pier Paolo Pasolini (Ragazzi di vita [1955; The Ragazzi] and Una vita
violenta [1959; A Violent Life]). There were memories of the north’s
struggle against fascist and Nazi domination from Vittorini and from
Beppe Fenoglio (I ventitrè giorni della città di Alba [1952; The
Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba]).
There were sad tales of lost
war by Giuseppe Berto (Il cielo è rosso [1947; The Sky Is Red] and
Guerra in camicia nera [1955; “A Blackshirt’s War”]) and by Mario Rigoni
Stern (Il sergente nella neve [1952; The Sergeant in the Snow]). By
contrast, there were humorous recollections of provincial life under
fascism—for example, Mario Tobino’s Bandiera nera (1950; “Black Flag”)
and Goffredo Parise’s Prete bello (1954; “The Handsome Priest”; Eng.
trans. The Priest Among the Pigeons). In contrast to the more topical
appeal of these writings, the great virtue of Pavese’s narrative was the
universality of its characters and themes. Among his finest works may be
numbered La casa in collina (1949; The House on the Hill) and La luna e
i falò (1950; The Moon and the Bonfires). Also of lasting relevance is
Primo Levi’s moving account of how human dignity survived the
degradations of Auschwitz (Se questo è un uomo [1947; If This Is a
Man]).
Cesare Pavese
Cesare Pavese, (b. Sept. 9,
1908, Santo Stefano Belbo, Italy—d. Aug. 27, 1950, Turin),
Italian poet, critic, novelist, and translator, who
introduced many modern U.S. and English writers to Italy.
Born in a small town in
which his father, an official, owned property, he moved with
his family to Turin, where he attended high school and the
university. Denied an outlet for his creative powers by
Fascist control of literature, Pavese translated many
20th-century U.S. writers in the 1930s and ’40s: Sherwood
Anderson, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos,
Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner; a 19th-century
writer who influenced him profoundly, Herman Melville (one
of his first translations was of Moby Dick); and the Irish
novelist James Joyce. He also published criticism,
posthumously collected in La letteratura americana e altri
saggi (1951; American Literature, Essays and Opinions,
1970). His work probably did more to foster the reading and
appreciation of U.S. writers in Italy than that of any other
single man.
A founder and, until his
death, an editor of the publishing house of Einaudi, Pavese
also edited the anti-Fascist review La Cultura. His work led
to his arrest and imprisonment by the government in 1935, an
experience later recalled in “Il carcere” (published in
Prima che il gallo canti, 1949; in The Political Prisoner,
1955) and the novella Il compagno (1947; The Comrade, 1959).
His first volume of lyric poetry, Lavorare stanca (1936;
Hard Labor, 1976), followed his release from prison. An
initial novella, Paesi tuoi (1941; The Harvesters, 1961),
recalled, as many of his works do, the sacred places of
childhood. Between 1943 and 1945 he lived with partisans of
the anti-Fascist Resistance in the hills of Piedmont.
The bulk of Pavese’s work,
mostly short stories and novellas, appeared between the end
of the war and his death. Partly through the influence of
Melville, Pavese became preoccupied with myth, symbol, and
archetype. One of his most striking books is Dialoghi con
Leucò (1947; Dialogues with Leucò, 1965), poetically written
conversations about the human condition. The novel
considered his best, La luna e i falò (1950; The Moon and
the Bonfires, 1950), is a bleak, yet compassionate story of
a hero who tries to find himself by visiting the place in
which he grew up. Several other works are notable,
especially La bella estate (1949; in The Political Prisoner,
1955). Shortly after receiving the Strega Prize for it,
Pavese committed suicide in a hotel room.
A Pavese Prize for
literature was established in 1957, and some of Pavese’s
most significant work was published after his death, notably
a volume of love lyrics that is thought to contain his best
poetry, Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (1951; “Death
Will Stare at Me out of Your Eyes”); the story collection
Notte di festa (1953; Festival Night and Other Stories,
1964); and the striking chronicle of his inner life, Il
mestiere di vivere, diario 1935–1950 (1952; London, This
Business of Living, New York, The Burning Brand: Diaries
1935–1950, both 1961).
Many collections of
Pavese’s work have appeared, including Racconti (1960; Told
in Confidence and Other Stories, 1971), a collection of much
of his best fiction; Poesie edite e inedite (1962), edited
by Italo Calvino; and Lettere (1966), which covers the
period from 1924 to 1950. A poetry collection in English, A
Mania for Solitude, Selected Poems 1930–1950, was published
in 1969.
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Elio Vittorini
Elio Vittorini, (b. July 23, 1908, Syracuse, Sicily,
Italy—d. Feb. 13, 1966, Milan), novelist, translator, and
literary critic, the author of outstanding novels of Italian
Neorealism mirroring his country’s experience of fascism and
the social, political, and spiritual agonies of 20th-century
man. With Cesare Pavese he was also a pioneer in the
translation into Italian of English and American writers.
The son of a railroad
employee, Vittorini left school when he was 17, and six
months later he became a road-construction worker in
northern Italy. He then moved to Florence, learned English
while working as a proofreader, and began to publish short
stories in the journal Solaria. He made his living until
1941 by translating the works of such American and English
writers as William Saroyan, D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Allan Poe,
William Faulkner, Daniel Defoe, and Ernest Hemingway, in
addition to the British poets T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and
Louis MacNeice.
Vittorini’s first major
novel, Il garofano rosso (written 1933–35, published 1948;
The Red Carnation), while overtly portraying the personal,
scholastic, and sexual problems of an adolescent boy, also
conveys the poisonous political atmosphere of fascism. In
1936 Vittorini began writing his most important novel,
Conversazione in Sicilia (1941, rev. ed. 1965; Eng. trans.,
Conversation in Sicily; U.S. title In Sicily), the clearest
expression of his anti-fascist feelings. The action of the
book is less important than the emotional agony of its hero,
brought on by his constant consciousness of fascism, war,
and the plight of his brothers.
Recognizing the novel’s
power, the fascist government censored its serialization in
Letteratura in 1936–38 and even withdrew an entire issue of
that periodical from circulation. In 1942, after publication
of the book, Vittorini was called in for questioning and
finally was imprisoned in 1943. Released after the German
occupation, he continued to fight fascism through the
Resistance movement.
After the war Vittorini
published the influential politico-cultural periodical Il
Politecnico (1945–47) and later edited the Milan literary
quarterly Il Menabò with Italo Calvino. He then became head
of the foreign-literature section of a major Italian
publishing house.
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Carlo Levi
Carlo Levi, (b. Nov. 29, 1902, Turin, Italy—d. Jan. 4, 1975,
Rome), Italian writer, painter, and political journalist
whose first documentary novel became an international
literary sensation and enhanced the trend toward social
realism in postwar Italian literature.
Levi was a painter and a
practicing physician when he was exiled (1935–36) to the
southern district of Lucania for anti-Fascist activities.
His Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945; Christ Stopped at
Eboli) reflects the visual sensitivity of a painter and the
compassionate objectivity of a doctor. Quickly acclaimed a
literary masterpiece, it was widely translated.
Though Levi’s first novel
is unquestionably his masterpiece, he wrote other important
nonfiction works. His Paura della libertà (1947; Of Fear and
Freedom) proclaims the necessity of intellectual freedom
despite an inherent human dread of it. L’orologio (1950; The
Watch) deals with a postwar Cabinet crisis in Rome; Le
parole sono pietre (1955; Words Are Stones) is a study of
Sicily; and La doppia notte dei tigli (1959; The Linden
Trees, or The Two-Fold Night) is a presentation of postwar
Germany.
Levi directed a periodical
in Florence for a time and contributed to several other
magazines. Later he devoted himself to painting.
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Vasco Pratolini
Vasco Pratolini, (b. Oct. 19, 1913, Florence, Italy—d. Jan.
12, 1991, Rome), Italian short-story writer and novelist,
known particularly for compassionate portraits of the
Florentine poor during the Fascist era. He is considered a
major figure in Italian Neorealism.
Pratolini was reared in
Florence, the setting of nearly all his fiction, in a poor
family. He held various jobs until his health failed. His
illness forced his confinement in a sanatorium from 1935 to
1937. He had no formal education but was an incessant
reader, and during his confinement he began to write.
Pratolini went to Rome,
where he met the novelist Elio Vittorini, who introduced him
into literary circles and became a close friend. Like
Vittorini, Pratolini rejected fascism; the Fascist
government shut down Pratolini’s literary magazine, Campo di
Marte, within nine months of its founding in 1939.
His first important novel,
Il quartiere (1944; The Naked Streets), offers a vivid,
exciting portrait of a gang of Florentine adolescents.
Cronaca familiare (1947; Two Brothers) is a tender story of
Pratolini’s dead brother. Cronache di poveri amanti (1947; A
Tale of Poor Lovers), which has been called one of the
finest works of Italian Neorealism, became an immediate
best-seller and won two international literary prizes. The
novel gives a panoramic view of the Florentine poor at the
time of the Fascist triumph in 1925–26. Un eroe del nostro
tempo (1949; A Hero of Today, or, A Hero of Our Time)
attacks fascism.
Between 1955 and 1966
Pratolini published three novels under the general title Una
storia italiana (“An Italian Story”), covering the period
from 1875 to 1945. The first, Metello (1955), considered the
finest of the three, follows its working-class hero through
the labour disputes after 1875 and climaxes with a
successful building masons’ strike in 1902. The second, Lo
scialo (1960; “The Waste”), depicts the lassitude of the
lower classes between 1902 and the mid-1920s preparatory to
the Fascist takeover. The final volume, Allegoria e
derisione (1966; “Allegory and Derision”), deals with the
triumph and fall of Fascism, focusing on the moral and
intellectual conflicts of the Florentine intelligentsia.
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Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini, (b. March 5, 1922, Bologna, Italy—d.
Nov. 2, 1975, Ostia, near Rome), Italian motion-picture
director, poet, and novelist, noted for his socially
critical, stylistically unorthodox films.
The son of an Italian army
officer, Pasolini was educated in schools of the various
cities of northern Italy where his father was successively
posted. He attended the University of Bologna, studying art
history and literature. Pasolini’s stay of refuge among the
oppressed peasantry of the Friuli region during World War II
led to his later becoming a Marxist, albeit an unorthodox
one. His poverty-stricken existence in Rome during the 1950s
furnished the material for his first two novels, Ragazzi di
vita (1955; The Ragazzi) and Una vita violenta (1959; A
Violent Life). These brutally realistic depictions of the
poverty and squalor of slum life in Rome were similar in
character to his first film, Accattone (1961), and all three
works dealt with the lives of thieves, prostitutes, and
other denizens of the Roman underworld.
Pasolini’s best known film,
Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964; The Gospel According to
Saint Matthew), is an austere, documentary-style retelling
of the life and martyrdom of Jesus Christ. The comic
allegory Uccellacci e Uccellini (1966; The Hawks and the
Sparrows) was followed by two films attempting to re-create
ancient myths from a contemporary viewpoint, Oedipus Rex
(1967) and Medea (1969). Pasolini’s use of eroticism,
violence, and depravity as vehicles for his political and
religious speculations in such films as Teorema (1968;
“Theorem”) and Porcile (1969; “Pigsty”) brought him into
conflict with conservative elements of the Roman Catholic
Church. He then ventured into medieval eroticism with Il
Decamerone (1971) and The Canterbury Tales (1972). In
addition to his motion pictures, Pasolini published numerous
volumes of poetry and several works of literary criticism.
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Primo Levi
Primo Levi, (b. July 31, 1919, Turin, Italy—d. April 11,
1987, Turin), Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, noted for
his restrained and moving autobiographical account of and
reflections on survival in the Nazi concentration camps.
Levi was brought up in the
small Jewish community in Turin, studied at the University
of Turin, and graduated summa cum laude in chemistry in
1941. Two years later he joined friends in northern Italy in
an attempt to connect with a resistance movement, but he was
captured and sent to Auschwitz. While there, Levi worked as
a slave labourer for an I.G. Farbenindustrie
synthetic-rubber factory. Upon the liberation of Auschwitz
by the Soviets in 1945, Levi returned to Turin, where in
1961 he became the general manager of a factory producing
paints, enamels, and synthetic resins; the association was
to last some 30 years.
Levi’s first book, Se
questo è un uomo (1947; If This Is a Man, or Survival in
Auschwitz), demonstrated extraordinary qualities of humanity
and detachment in its analysis of the atrocities he had
witnessed. His later autobiographical works, La tregua
(1963; The Truce, or The Reawakening) and I sommersi e i
salvati (1986; The Drowned and the Saved), are further
reflections on his wartime experiences. Il sistema periodico
(1975; The Periodic Table) is a collection of 21
meditations, each named for a chemical element, on the
analogies between the physical, chemical, and moral spheres;
of all of Levi’s works, it is probably his greatest critical
and popular success. He also wrote poetry, novels, and short
stories. His death was apparently a suicide.
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Other writings
Literary tastes gradually became less homogeneous. On
the one hand, there was the rediscovery of the experimentalism of Carlo
Emilio Gadda, whose best works had been written between 1938 and 1947.
On the other, there was the runaway success of
Giuseppe Iomasi di
Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo (1958; The Leopard), an old-fashioned
historical novel that presents a soft-focused, flattering view of a
family similar to the one described so pitilessly by Federico De Roberto
in I vicerè. For this reason, it is easier to see Italian writing in
terms of individual territory rather than general trends.
Carlo Cassola’s most memorable novels use the stillness of rural
Tuscany as a background to the interior reality of its inhabitants, and
in this his lineage can be traced to other Tuscan writers such as Romano
Bilenchi (La siccità [1941; “The Drought”]) and Nicola Lisi (Diario di
un parroco di campagna [1942; “Diary of a Country Priest”]) or in some
respects back to Federigo Tozzi. Especially typical of Cassola’s works
are Il taglio del bosco (1953; The Felling of the Forest), Un cuore
arido (1961; An Arid Heart), and Un uomo solo (1978; “A Man by
Himself”).
Giorgio Bassani’s domain is the sadly nostalgic world of Ferrara in
days gone by, with particular emphasis on its Jewish community (Il
giardino dei Finzi-Contini [1962; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis]).
ltalo Calvino concentrated on fantastic tales (Il visconte dimezzato
[1952; The Cloven Viscount], Il barone rampante [1957; The Baron in the
Trees], and Il cavaliere inesistente [1959; The Nonexistent Knight])
and, later, on moralizing science fiction (Le cosmicomiche [1965;
Cosmicomics] and Ti con zero [1968; t zero]). Paolo Volponi’s province
is the human consequences of Italy’s rapid postwar industrialization
(Memoriale [1962], La macchina mondiale [1965; The Worldwide Machine],
and Corporale [1974]).
Leonardo Sciascia’s sphere is his native Sicily,
whose present and past he displays with concerned and scholarly insight,
with two of his better-known books—in the format of thrillers—covering
the sinister operations of the local Mafia (Il giorno della civetta
[1963; The Day of the Owl] and A ciascuno il suo [1966; “To Each His
Own”; Eng. trans. A Man’s Blessing]). After a Neorealistic phase,
Giuseppe Berto plunged into the world of psychological introspection (Il
male oscuro [1964; “The Dark Sickness”] and La cosa buffa [1966; “The
Funny Thing”; Eng. trans. Antonio in Love]). Natalia Ginzburg’s
territory is the family, whether she reminisces about her own (Lessico
famigliare [1963; Family Sayings]), handles fictional characters
(Famiglia [1977; Family]), or ventures into historical biography (La
famiglia Manzoni [1983; The Manzoni Family]). Giovanni Arpino excelled
at personal sympathies that cross cultural boundaries (La suora giovane
[1959; The Novice] and Il fratello italiano [1980; “The Italian
Brother”]). Fulvio Tomizza also tackled this theme in L’amicizia (1980;
“The Friendship”).
Meanwhile,
Alberto Moravia and Mario Soldati defended their corners
as never less than conspicuously competent writers.
Moravia generally
plowed a lone furrow. Of his mature writings, Agostino (1944; Eng.
trans. Agostino), Il conformista (1951; The Conformist), and La noia
(1960; “The Tedium”; Eng. trans. Empty Canvas) stand out as particular
achievements. Soldati, in works such as Le lettere da Capri (1953; The
Capri Letters) and Le due città (1964; “The Two Cities”)—and in a later
novel, L’incendio (1981; “The Fire”), which takes a quizzical look at
the modern art business—showed himself to be a consistently skilled and
entertaining narrator. There are many other accomplished authors who
could be classified in this way, including Elsa Morante, who with
L’isola de Arturo (1957; Arturo’s Island) and La storia (1974; History)
carved a unique niche for herself. Set in Rome during the years 1941–47,
the combination of fact and allegory is a tour de force and one of the
most remarkable narrative works that came out of Italy after World War
II.
Calvino’s fascinating later works, Le città invisibili (1972;
Invisible Cities), Il castello dei destini incrociati (1973; The Castle
of Crossed Destinies), Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979; If
on a Winter’s Night a Traveler), and Palomar (1983; Eng. trans. Mr.
Palomar), continue to explore the possibilities and limitations of
literature and its attempt to represent our world. An ironic, detached,
but deeply responsible rationalist, analyzing and recombining the
elements of fiction in a rigorously precise “classical” prose style
(which lends itself to translation into other languages),
Calvino is
without a doubt the most important Italian writer of the second half of
the 20th century.
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Giuseppe Iomasi di
Lampedusa
Giuseppe Tomasi di
Lampedusa, (b. Dec. 23, 1896, Palermo, Sicily, Italy—d. July
23, 1957, Rome), Italian author, duke of Palma, and prince
of Lampedusa, internationally renowned for his only
completed novel, Il gattopardo (1958; The Leopard).
Born into the Sicilian
aristocracy, Lampedusa served as an artillery officer during
World War I. After his capture and imprisonment in Hungary,
he escaped and returned to Italy on foot. After a nervous
breakdown precluded the diplomatic career to which he had
aspired, he devoted himself to an intensely private life of
intellectual activity, reading in several languages,
discussing literature with a small group of friends, and
writing for his own enjoyment.
In 1955 Lampedusa began
writing the novel that, although rejected by publishers
during his lifetime, brought him world acclaim with its
posthumous publication. The novel is a psychological study
of Don Fabrizio, prince of Salina (called the Leopard, after
his family crest), who witnesses with detachment the
transfer of power in Sicily from the old Bourbon aristocracy
to the new Kingdom of Italy and the grasping, unscrupulous
liberal bourgeoisie during the 1860s. Don Fabrizio’s nephew,
by contrast, participates opportunistically in the
revolution and marries into the new class.
While adhering to the Don’s
conservative viewpoint, the novel unfolds in a series of
compelling dramatic scenes, matched by richness of literary
style. The character of Don Fabrizio is one of the most
striking in 20th-century Italian literature, and the book,
despite the ideological controversies it stimulated, is
widely recognized as a masterpiece.
Lampedusa’s posthumously
published Racconti (1961; “Stories”) includes the first
chapter of an unfinished novel as well as a brief memoir. It
was translated into English in part as Two Stories and a
Memory (1962). The Siren, and Selected Writings (1995)
corrects and expands material published in Two Stories and a
Memory and also includes several essays by Lampedusa on
literature.
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Carlo Cassola
Carlo Cassola, (b. March
17, 1917, Rome, Italy—d. Jan. 29, 1987, Monte Carlo,
Monaco), Italian Neorealist novelist who portrayed the
landscapes and the ordinary people of rural Tuscany in
simple prose. The lack of action and the emphasis on detail
in his books caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of
the French nouveau roman, or antinovel.
After studying at the
University of Rome, Cassola fought with the Resistance
during World War II. The period formed the background of
some of his best-known works, among them the short-story
collection Il taglio del bosco (1955; “Timber Cutting”) and
the novel Fausto e Anna (1952; Fausto and Anna), both
semiautobiographical. In 1960 Cassola won the Strega Prize
for La ragazza di Bube (Bebo’s Girl; film, 1964). These
austere novels portray with sympathy and restraint
individuals—especially women—whose lives are bleak and
unfulfilled. Cassola’s later concern with the environment
and the threat of nuclear war was reflected in essays and in
the novel Il paradiso degli animali (1979; “Animals’
Paradise”).
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Giorgio Bassani
Giorgio Bassani, (b. March
4, 1916, Bologna, Italy—d. April 13, 2000, Rome), Italian
author and editor noted for his novels and stories examining
individual lives played out against the background of modern
history. The author’s Jewish heritage and the life of the
Jewish community in Ferrara, where he lived most of his
life, are among his recurrent themes.
In 1938 Bassani was
studying literature in Bologna when racial laws were passed
in Italy that restricted the activities of Jews, including
banning them from universities. Bassani, who had to publish
his early works under a pseudonym (Giacomo Marchi), became
involved in the antifascist movement in the early 1940s and
was briefly arrested in 1943. After World War II he settled
in Rome, where he continued his writing career. In addition
to writing novels, poetry, screenplays, and essays, he also
edited several literary journals, including Bottega Oscura.
The collection Cinque
storie ferraresi (1956; U.K. title, Prospect of Ferrara,
U.S. title, Five Stories of Ferrara; reissued as Dentro le
mura, 1973; “Inside the Wall”), five novellas that describe
the growth of fascism and anti-Semitism, brought Bassani his
first commercial success and the Strega Prize (offered
annually for the best Italian literary work). The Ferrara
setting recurs in Bassani’s best-known book, the
semiautobiographical Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962;
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis; film, 1971). The narrator
of this work contrasts his own middle-class Jewish family
with the aristocratic, decadent Finzi-Continis, also Jewish,
whose sheltered lives end in annihilation by the Nazis.
Bassani’s later novels
include L’airone (1968; The Heron), a portrait of a lonely
Ferrarese landowner during a hunt. This novel received the
Campiello Prize for best Italian prose work. Bassani also
wrote L’odore del fieno (1972; The Smell of Hay). His
collections of poetry include Rolls Royce and Other Poems
(1982), which contains selections in English and Italian
from earlier collections. Bassani’s elegiac tone has
frequently elicited comparison with those of Henry James and
Marcel Proust, his acknowledged models.
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ltalo Calvino
Italo Calvino, (b. Oct. 15,
1923, Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba—d. Sept. 19, 1985, Siena,
Italy), Italian journalist, short-story writer, and
novelist, whose whimsical and imaginative fables made him
one of the most important Italian fiction writers in the
20th century.
Calvino left Cuba for Italy
in his youth. He joined the Italian Resistance during World
War II and after the war settled in Turin, obtaining his
degree in literature while working for the Communist
periodical L’Unità and for the publishing house of Einaudi.
From 1959 to 1966 he edited, with Elio Vittorini, the
left-wing magazine Il Menabò di letteratura.
Two of Calvino’s first
fictional works were inspired by his participation in the
Italian Resistance: the Neorealistic novel Il sentiero dei
nidi di ragno (1947; The Path to the Nest of Spiders), which
views the Resistance through the experiences of an
adolescent as helpless in the midst of events as the adults
around him; and the collection of stories entitled Ultimo
viene il corvo (1949; Adam, One Afternoon, and Other
Stories).
Calvino turned decisively
to fantasy and allegory in the 1950s, producing the three
fantastic tales that brought him international acclaim. The
first of these fantasies, Il visconte dimezzato (1952; “The
Cloven Viscount,” in The Nonexistent Knight & the Cloven
Viscount), is an allegorical story of a man split in two—a
good half and an evil half—by a cannon shot; he becomes
whole through his love for a peasant girl. The second and
most highly praised fantasy, Il barone rampante (1957; The
Baron in the Trees), is a whimsical tale of a 19th-century
nobleman who one day decides to climb into the trees and who
never sets foot on the ground again. From the trees he does,
however, participate fully in the affairs of his fellow men
below. The tale wittily explores the interaction and tension
between reality and imagination. The third fantasy, Il
cavaliere inesistente (1959; “The Nonexistent Knight,” in
The Nonexistent Knight & the Cloven Viscount), is a mock
epic chivalric tale.
Among Calvino’s later works
of fantasy is Le cosmicomiche (1965; Cosmicomics), a
stream-of-consciousness narrative that treats the creation
and evolution of the universe. In the later novels Le città
invisibili (1972; Invisible Cities), Il castello dei destini
incrociate (1973; The Castle of Crossed Destinies), and Se
una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979; If on a Winter’s
Night a Traveler), Calvino uses playfully innovative
structures and shifting viewpoints in order to examine the
nature of chance, coincidence, and change. Una pietra sopra:
Discorsi di letteratura e società (1980; The Uses of
Literature) is a collection of essays he wrote for Il Menabò.
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Leonardo Sciascia
Leonardo Sciascia, (b. Jan.
8, 1921, Racalmuto, near Agrigento, Italy—d. Nov. 20, 1989,
Palermo), Italian writer noted for his metaphysical
examinations of political corruption and arbitrary power.
Sciascia studied at the
Magistrale Institute in Caltanissetta. He held either
clerical or teaching positions for much of his career,
retiring to write full-time in 1968. His political career
began in 1976, when he was a Communist Party member in the
Palermo city council. Later Sciascia served as a member of
the Radical Party in the Italian Parliament; he was elected
to the European Parliament in 1979.
Sciascia’s first published
work was Favole della dittatura (1950; “Fables of the
Dictatorship”), a satire on fascism. He also wrote two early
collections of poetry. His first significant novel, Le
parrocchie di Regalpetra (1956; Salt in the Wound),
chronicles the history of a small Sicilian town and the
effect of politics on the lives of the townspeople. He
further examined what he termed sicilitudine (“Sicilian-ness”)
in the four stories of Gli zii di Sicilia (1958; Sicilian
Uncles). Although Sicilian life and attitudes remained the
chief subject of his writing, Sciascia did not discover his
favourite vehicle, the mystery novel, until the publication
in 1961 of Il giorno della civetta (“The Day of the Owl,”
first Eng. trans. Mafia Vendetta), a study of the Mafia.
Other mystery novels followed, among them A ciascuno il suo
(1966; A Man’s Blessing), Il contesto (1971; Equal Danger),
and Todo modo (1974; One Way or Another). Sciascia also
wrote historical analyses, plays, short stories, and essays
on Sicily and other subjects, and he edited a series of rare
and unpublished works by Sicilian writers for the Sellario
publishing house.
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The end of the century
Poetry after World War II
Paradoxically, of all the forms of writing, poetry seems to be the form
that was most vibrant during the second half of the 20th century,
although one late 20th-century critic remarked that there might have
been more poets in Italy than readers of poetry. An authoritative
1,200-page anthology by two experts in the field, poet Maurizio Cucchi
and critic of contemporary literature Stefano Giovanardi, Poeti italiani
del secondo Novecento, 1945–1995 (1996; “Italian Poets of the Second
Half of the 20th Century, 1945–1995”), introduced a useful taxonomy.
Cucchi and Giovanardi recognized that, in talking about the new poetry,
they had to take into account the older, established poets who continued
to write and publish verse in their mature years and who inevitably
influenced the emerging poets. Included among these prewar “masters”
were Attilio Bertolucci, an autobiographical narrative poet from the
countryside near Parma and the father of the movie director Bernardo;
Mario Luzi, a pillar of ivory-tower Hermeticism before the war who in
the politically committed 1960s turned to more existential and
ultimately religious themes; the delicate and deceptively facile Giorgio
Caproni, whose simplicity, psychological introspection, and nostalgia
for a hidden God may remind the reader at times of Umberto Saba;
Vittorio Sereni, a sensitive intellectual who dramatized the sympathies
and hesitations of the nondoctrinaire reformer; the mercurial
nonconformist Pier Paolo Pasolini; the Brechtian Franco Fortini, who was
the conscience of a generation; and the ironical social observer Roberto
Roversi. All of these poets, and a few of those mentioned below, were
already represented in Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo’s standard anthology of
20th-century poetry, Poeti italiani del Novecento (1978; “Italian Poets
of the 20th Century”).
Attilio Bertolucci
Attilio Bertolucci, (b.
Nov. 18, 1911, San Lazzaro Parmense, near Parma, Italy—d.
June 14, 2000, Rome), Italian poet, literary critic, and
translator. His verse is noted for its lyric accessibility,
which was a departure from the Hermetic tradition.
At age 18 Bertolucci
published Sirio (1929; “Sirius”), a volume of 27 poems set
in his native region of Italy. After attending the
University of Parma (1931–35), where he studied law, and the
University of Bologna (1935–38), he began teaching art
history and contributing to such journals as Circoli,
Letteratura, and Corrente. In 1951 Bertolucci moved to Rome
and published La capanna indiana (1951; revised and
enlarged, 1955, 1973; “The Indian Hut”), which discusses his
struggle for peace and privacy in a turbulent world. The
work earned Bertolucci the Premio Viareggio, one of Italy’s
most prestigious literary awards, in 1951. La camera da
letto (1984; enlarged, 1988; “The Bedroom”) is a long
autobiographical poem about his family history, a subject
that inspired much of his work. Bertolucci’s other books of
poetry include Fuochi in novembre (1934; “Fires in
November”), Viaggio d’inverno (1971; “Winter Voyage”), and
the bilingual collection Selected Poems (1993). He also
translated works by Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire,
Thomas Love Peacock, D.H. Lawrence, and Thomas Hardy.
Bertolucci’s sons, Bernardo and Giuseppe, are noted
filmmakers.
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Poets of the so-called Fourth Generation—from the title of a 1954
anthology of postwar verse edited by Pietro Chiara and Luciano
Erba—include Erba himself and the poet and filmmaker Nelo Risi, both of
them Milanese, as well as the Italian Swiss Giorgio Orelli. All three
are from northern Italy and, along with Roberto Rebora and others, have
been seen as the continuers of a hypothetical linea lombarda (“Lombard
line”) of sober moral realism that, according to critic Luciano
Anceschi, originated with Giuseppe Parini. Other Fourth Generation poets
of note are epigrammatist Bartolo Cattafi; Rocco Scotellaro, poet of the
southern peasant and the most convincing practitioner of Neorealism in
verse; the eloquent soliloquist and elegant metricist Maria Luisa
Spaziani; Umberto Bellintani, who, though he continued to write, quit
publishing in 1963; and the hypersensitive Alda Merini, for whose work
critics find the oxymoron (Christian paganism, joyful grief, religious
eroticism, mortal liveliness) a useful figure.
Both the linguistically inventive Andrea Zanzotto (see below
Experimentalism and the new avant-garde) and the wry confessional
autobiographer (or “autobiologist”) and macabre humorist Giovanni
Giudici had an impact, as did colloquialist Giovanni Raboni, who was
also linked with the sobriety and moral concerns of the linea lombarda;
Giancarlo Majorino, who progressed from Neorealism to Sperimentalismo
(“Experimentalism”); Giampiero Neri (pseudonym of Giampiero Pontiggia),
influenced in his descriptive narratives by Vittorio Sereni; Giorgio
Cesarano, another poetic narrator who abandoned poetry in 1969, before
his subsequent suicide (1975); and Tiziano Rossi, whose dominant moral
concern led to comparisons with the expressionist poets of the pre-World
War I periodical La Voce.
Four notable mavericks whose isolated and idiosyncratic poetic
activity claimed allegiance to no movement, generation, or school are
the Sicilian aristocrat Lucio Piccolo, cousin of novelist Giuseppe
Tomasi di Lampedusa, who in 1954 forwarded Piccolo’s then unpublished
poems to an appreciative Eugenio Montale; the Calabrian
Symbolist
Lorenzo Calogero, who has been compared to
Stéphane Mallarmé,
Rainer
Marie Rilke, Dino Campana, and
Friedrich Hölderlin; experimentalist
Fernando Bandini, who was equally at home in Italian and Latin, to say
nothing of his ancestral Veneto dialect; and Michele Ranchetti, who
between 1938 and 1986 produced a single book of philosophic poetry, La mente musicale (1988; “The Musical Mind”).
During the 1970s several younger poets began publishing. Among them
were the scandal-seeking “Roman” poets Dario Bellezza and Valentino
Zeichen. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Cesare Viviani made a Dadaist
debut, but he went on to express in his later work an almost mystical
impulse toward the transcendent. Patrizia Cavalli’s work suggests the
self-deprecating irony of Crepuscolarismo. Maurizio Cucchi was another
Milanese poet and critic assimilable to the linea lombarda; when faced
with the collapse of the greater constructs, he found solace in little
things. Other poets of the era include the “neo-Orphic” (or
“neo-Hermetic”) Milo De Angelis and Giuseppe Conte; Gregorio Scalise, a
paradoxical rationalizer of the irrational who has been compared to
Woody Allen; the mysteriously apodictic and enigmatic Giuseppe Piccoli;
antilyrical self-ironist Paolo Ruffilli; and Vivian Lamarque, whose
childlike fairy-tale tone occasionally makes way for a mischievous home
truth. Also notable are Mario Santagostini, whose early work described
the drab outskirts of his native Milan but who moved on to more
metaphysical monologues, and Biancamaria Frabotta, who combined militant
feminism with an elevated lyric diction tending toward the sublime.
Of the poets born after 1950, mention should be made of the
precocious Valerio Magrelli; Patrizia Valduga, whose poems take
advantage of the rigidity of traditional metres to control otherwise
rebelliously sensual subject matter; Roberto Mussapi, the melancholy
meditator of transcendent mythologies; and, finally, Gianni D’Elia,
whose antecedents have been traced to poets as remote from each other as
the rapt and timeless Sandro Penna and the “realists” Pasolini and
Roversi, the latter poets and their urgent and timely literary program
associated with the periodical Officina.
Experimentalism and the new avant-garde
In 1961 there appeared the important anthology-manifesto I Novissimi:
poesie per gli anni ’60 (“The Newest Poets: Poems for the ’60s”), edited
by Alfredo Giuliani. In addition to the editor, the poets represented
were Elio Pagliarani, author of La ragazza Carla (1960; “The Girl
Carla”), a longish poem incorporating found materials and dramatizing
the alienation of a working woman in the modern industrial world; the
poet-critic Edoardo Sanguineti, author of disconcertingly
noncommunicative works such as Laborintus (1956) and Erotopaegnia (1960)
and thereafter a prolifically undeterred creative experimentalist; Nanni
Balestrini, who would subsequently publish the left-wing political
collage Vogliamo tutto (1971; “We Want It All”); and Antonio Porta
(pseudonym of Leo Paolazzi), whose untimely death at age 54 cut short
the career of one of the less abstractly theoretical of these poets. At
a subsequent meeting held near Palermo in 1963 this group was joined by,
among others, aesthetic philosopher Luciano Anceschi, founder of the
periodical Il Verri; literary and art critic Renato Barilli; semiotician
Umberto Eco, destined for later worldwide fame as a best-selling
novelist and Italy’s intellectual voice; manneristic prose stylist
Giorgio Manganelli; cultural critic, antinovelist, and vitriolic
essayist Alberto Arbasino, whose Fratelli d’Italia (the title, meaning
“Brothers of Italy,” alludes ironically, not to say derisively, to the
Italian national anthem), first published in 1963, had a second,
amplified edition in 1976 and a third, running to 1,371 pages, in 1993;
and Luigi Malerba, an original and linguistically inventive writer with
a taste for satire, whose first work of fiction, the witty and
paradoxical La scoperta dell’alfabeto (1963; “The Discovery of the
Alphabet”), was published in the same year as the Palermo encounter.
Malerba after a time distanced himself from the group’s more extremist
positions, and he proved to be one of the most interesting writers of
his generation.
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Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco, (b. Jan. 5,
1932, Alessandria, Italy), Italian literary critic,
novelist, and semiotician (student of signs and symbols) who
became internationally known for his novel Il nome della
rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose).
After receiving a Ph.D.
from the University of Turin (1954), Eco worked as a
cultural editor for Italian Radio-Television and also
lectured at the University of Turin (1956–64). He then
taught in Florence and Milan and finally, in 1971, assumed a
professorial post at the University of Bologna. His initial
studies and researches were in aesthetics, his principal
work in this area being Opera aperta (1962; rev. ed. 1972,
1976; The Open Work), which suggests that in much modern
music, Symbolist verse, and literature of controlled
disorder (Franz Kafka, James Joyce) the messages are
fundamentally ambiguous and invite the audience to
participate more actively in the interpretive and creative
process. From this work he went on to explore other areas of
communication and semiotics in such volumes as A Theory of
Semiotics (1976) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of
Language (1984), both written in English. Many of his
prolific writings in criticism, history, and communication
have been translated into various foreign languages,
including La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura
europea (1993; The Search for the Perfect Language) and Kant
e l’ornitorinco (1997; Kant and the Platypus). He edited the
illustrated companion volumes Storia della bellezza (2004;
History of Beauty) and Storia della bruttezza (2007; On
Ugliness), and he wrote another pictorial book, Vertigine
della lista (2009; The Vertigo of Lists), produced in
conjunction with an exhibition he organized at the Louvre
Museum, in which he investigated the Western passion for
list-making and accumulation.
The Name of the Rose—in
story, a murder mystery set in a 14th-century Italian
monastery but, in essence, a questioning of “truth” from
theological, philosophical, scholarly, and historical
perspectives—became an international best-seller. A film
version, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, appeared in 1986.
Eco continued to explore the connections between fantasy and
reality in another best-selling novel, Il pendolo di
Foucault (1988; Foucault’s Pendulum). His subsequent
fictional works include L’isola del giorno prima (1995; The
Island of the Day Before) and the illustrated novel La
misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (2004; The Mysterious
Flame of Queen Loana).
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As with previous avant-garde movements, starting with Futurism, the
members of the enlarged Gruppo 63, who insisted on the inseparability of
literature and politics, proposed to subvert the inertia of a repressive
tradition through a revolution in language. The traditional literary
language, they claimed, was the medium of bourgeois hegemony, and a
radical change in the language of literature would somehow shake off the
oppression of the military-industrial complex and lead to a general
social and political liberation. This does not seem to have happened,
and with the passage of time the members of the group dispersed, going
off in different individual directions as their concerns became less
public and more personal. Although his link to Gruppo 63 is tenuous, the
above-mentioned Andrea Zanzotto shared their suspicion of the “language
of the tribe.” His poetry, from Dietro il paesaggio (1951; “Behind the
Landscape”) to La Beltà (1968; “Beauty”) to Idioma (1986; “Idiom”), may
suggest the automatic writing of the Surrealists (see automatism), but
it reveals itself on close study to be a subtle combination of
inspiration and calculation. The search for an authentic language led
Zanzotto, a student of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, to
compose the verse collected in Filò (1976) and Mistieroi (1979) in
petèl, the regressive dialect baby talk in which peasant mothers in the
Veneto imitate their infants’ first attempts to speak. He first
experimented in this direction when he was invited by Federico Fellini
to collaborate on the screenplay of Casanova (1976).
Another isolated experimental poet was polyglot Amelia Rosselli, who
was born in Paris and was a resident of London and New York City before
living in Rome. A musician who developed a complex metrical theory based
on notions derived from musical theory, Rosselli published a volume of
poetry in English (Sleep [1992]) in addition to her work in Italian.
After her suicide in 1996, the reputation of this troubled poet
continued to grow. Poets who achieved prominence at the end of the 20th
century include Alba Donati (La repubblica contadina [1997; “The Peasant
Republic”]), the sculptor Massimo Lippi (Passi il mondo e venga la
grazia [1999; “Let the World Pass Away and Let Grace Come”]), Franco
Marcoaldi (L’isola celeste [2000; “The Sky-Blue Island”]), Paolo
Febbraro (Il secondo fine [1998; “Ulterior Purpose”]), Alessandro Fo
(Giorni di scuola [2000; “School Days”]), and Riccardo Held (Il guizzo
irriverente dell’azzurro [1995; “The Irreverent Flicker of Blue”]). Poet
and fiction writer Tommaso Ottonieri (Elegia sanremese [1998; “San Remo
Elegy”]) was one of the sponsors of a symposium that announced (with a
year’s advance notice) the birth of yet another literary group; its
papers were collected as Gruppo 93 (1992).
Dialect poetry
A remarkable aspect of 20th-century poetry composed in Italy was the
proliferation of cultivated poets who rejected what they saw as the
pollution, inauthenticity, and debased currency of the national
language. They chose to express an up-to-the-minute nonfolkloristic
content, not in supraregional standard Italian but in a local dialect,
seen as purer or closer to reality. Italy has always had a tradition of
dialect poetry. The first “school” of poetry in Italy wrote in a
polished form of Sicilian. For another, paradoxical example, one might
point to the vernacular Florentine of the “plurilinguistic”
Dante, far
from the “illustrious vernacular” prescribed by his linguistic theories.
During the 19th century two of the greatest writers of the period of
romantic realism, Carlo Porta and Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, made the
oppressed common people of Milan and of Rome, respectively, the
protagonists of their works. Early 20th-century precursors of the modern
boom in dialect poetry were the melancholy Salvatore Di Giacomo, who
composed the words of many popular Neapolitan songs; the Milanese
expressionist Delio Tessa; the Triestine Virgilio Giotti (pseudonym of
Virgilio Schönbeck), a musical poet who evoked simple, everyday events
and relationships; and two Veneto poets, the elegiac Biagio Marin and
the antifascist Giacomo Noventa (pseudonym of Giacomo Ca’ Zorzi), who
expressed in a literary variant of the Venetian dialect a virile
nostalgia for the values of the world of the past.
The modern reevaluation of the dialect tradition owes everything to
the indefatigable and multitalented Pier Paolo Pasolini who—after making
his own literary debut at age 20 with Poesie a Casarsa (1942; “Poems at
Casarsa”), written in his mother’s Friulian dialect—edited in 1952 (with
Mario Dell’Arco) a groundbreaking anthology of poetry in dialect with an
important historical and critical introduction. Other major dialect
poets are Albino Pierro, a native of Tursi in the far southern region of
Basilicata, who wrote intense lyric verse in an archaic, previously
unrecorded language; Tonino Guerra, a screenwriter and collaborator of
Fellini’s who wrote down-to-earth poems in the dialect of Santarcangelo
di Romagna; Franco Loi, a native of Genoa, who put a personal imprint on
his adopted Milanese dialect; Franco Scataglini, from Ancona in the
Marches, whose verse, though contemporary in its sensibility, harks back
to medieval models; and Raffaello Baldini, another poet from Romagna,
whose poetry shows narrative verve and a gift for characterization.
Remarkable among later dialect poets is Amedeo Giacomini, whose
Antologia privata (1997) is composed, like Pasolini’s maiden volume, in
the dialect of the northeastern Friuli region.
Theatre
Actor-playwright Eduardo De Filippo was a prolific author who came into
his own after World War II with a series of plays, which included Napoli
milionaria! (1945, film 1950; "Naples Millionaire!"; Eng. trans. Napoli
Milionaria) and Filumena Marturano (1946, film 1951; Eng. trans.
Filumena), which, though written in his native Neapolitan dialect,
paradoxically achieved international success. Among the last champions
of the primacy of the written theatrical text were Pasolini and the
Milanese expressionist Giovanni Testori, an uncompromising extremist who
progressed from narrative fiction to the theatre and from subproletarian
Neorealism to violent Roman Catholic mysticism. Otherwise, late
20th-century Italian theatre was dominated more by innovative directors
and performers than by noteworthy new plays. Outstanding directors
included Giorgio Strehler, animator of Italy’s first repertory theatre,
the Piccolo Teatro di Milano (founded 1947); Luchino Visconti,
internationally known for his films; Luigi Squarzina; and Luca Ronconi,
who in 1968 memorably staged Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso in an
adaptation by Edoardo Sanguineti. Among the performers was radical
political satirist and reviver of the spirit of the commedia dell’arte
Dario Fo, whose 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature knocked the conservative
Italian literary world on its ear. Those with the necessary stamina can
admire the intense presence of Carmelo Bene (who died prematurely in
2002) in the episodic tableaux and declamatory voice-over of the
antinarrative film version of his Nostra signora dei Turchi (1966; “Our
Lady of the Turks”). Bene, Fo, and Fo’s talented wife, Franca Rame, are
examples of the phenomenon of the author-performer.
Eduardo De Filippo
Eduardo De Filippo
(24 May 1900 - 31 October 1984) was an Italian actor,
playwright, screenwriter, author and poet, best known for
his Neapolitan works Filumena Marturano and Napoli
Milionaria.
De Filippo was born in Naples to playwright Eduardo
Scarpetta and theatre seamstress and costumier Luisa De
Filippo. He began acting at the age of five and in 1932
formed a theater company with his brother Peppino and sister
Titina. Peppino left the troupe in 1944 and Titina departed
by the early 1950s. De Filippo starred in De Sica's L'oro di
Napoli with Totò and Sophia Loren in 1954. His translation
of Shakespeare's The Tempest into Neapolitan was published
in 1982.
In 1981, De Filippo was
appointed life senator of the Italian Republic. He died four
years later in Rome. His artistic legacy has been carried
over by his son.
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Women writers
The feminine condition (both contemporary and historical),
autobiography, female psychology, and family history and relationships
are among the insistent themes of the remarkable number of accomplished
women writers active in Italy throughout the 20th century. Among those
whose writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries laid the
groundwork for subsequent women writers were Milanese popular novelist
Neera (pseudonym of Anna Zuccari); Neapolitan journalist Matilde Serao,
the best of whose 16 social novels is Il paese di cuccagna (1891; The
Land of Cockayne); humanitarian socialist poet and fiction writer Ada
Negri; and anticonformist feminist activist Sibilla Aleramo (pseudonym
of Rina Faccio), best known for her autobiographical novel Una donna
(1906; A Woman). Their successors include Florentine Anna Banti
(pseudonym of Lucia Lopresti), whose Artemisia (1947) is based on the
life of the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi; Fausta Cialente,
several of whose novels were inspired by her lengthy stay in the
Egyptian city of Alexandria but whose best works, Le quattro ragazze
Wieselberger (1976; “The Four Wieselberger Girls”) and Interno con
figure (1976; “Figures in an Interior”), are existential in nature;
fastidious stylist Gianna Manzini, an admirer of
Virginia Woolf who is
at her best in the autobiographical Ritratto in piedi (1971;
“Full-Length Portrait”); and Alba De Céspedes, whose Nessuno torna
indietro (1938; “There’s No Turning Back”) was banned by fascist
censors.
Until her death in 2001, the dean of women writers was the precise
and evocative stylist Lalla Romano, a painter by training, whose
autobiographical explorations include La penombra che abbiamo
attraversato (1964; The Penumbra) and the poetic analyses of her
father’s family photographs, Romanzo di figure (1986; “Novel of
Figures”). Anna Maria Ortese, after a Neorealist debut with Il mare non
bagna Napoli (1953; The Bay Is Not Naples), proceeded to create a
mysterious fantasy world of suffering beings in such novels as L’Iguana
(1965; The Iguana) and the extraordinary Il cardillo addolorato (1993;
The Lament of the Linnet). Antifascist Natalia Levi wrote under the last
name of her husband, the critic Leone Ginzburg, who died in a fascist
jail not long after they were married. Her fiction, best exemplified by
Lessico famigliare (1963; Family Sayings), explores the memories of
childhood and middle-class family relationships. Francesca Sanvitale won
acclaim for her apparently autobiographical novels, such as Madre e
figlia (1980; “Mother and Daughter”), though her Il figlio dell’impero
(1993; “The Son of the Empire”) is a historical novel set in
19th-century France. Rosetta Loy, who had evoked a collective memory of
the past in Le strade di polvere (1987; The Dust Roads of Monferrato),
combined autobiography and social history in the memoir La parola ebreo
(1997; “The Word ‘Jew’ ”; Eng. trans. First Words: A Childhood in
Fascist Italy). Francesca Duranti writes about a male character’s
recollections of a house in La casa sul lago della luna (1984; The House
on Moon Lake). Fabrizia Ramondino, in such novels as Althénopis (1981;
Eng. trans. Althenopis) and L’isola riflessa (1998; “The Inward-Looking
Island”), is also concerned with memory and its vagaries as well as with
the cultural loss brought about by so-called social progress.
The international success of the first novel, L’età del malessere
(1963; The Age of Malaise), of Florentine feminist Dacia Maraini was
confirmed by the translation of several subsequent works, notably La
lunga vita de Marianna Ucría (1990; The Silent Duchess). In such later
novels as Voci (1994; Voices) and Buio (1999; Darkness) she turned to
the popular genre of detective fiction to explore the problem of
violence against women. In 1973 in Rome, Maraini founded the feminist
theatre collective La Maddalena, for which she subsequently composed
more than 60 plays. Triestine Giuliana Morandini set her first novel, I
cristalli di Vienna (1978; Bloodstains), in the time of the German
occupation of Vienna, and in La prima estasi (1985; “The First Ecstasy”)
Elisabetta Rasy, moving on from criticism to fiction, endeavoured to
re-create the mystic and ascetic consciousness of St. Thérèse of
Lisieux. The spirit of
Edgar Allan Poe lives on in the precisely related
but arcane and enigmatic tales of La grande Eulalia (1988; “The Great
Eulalia”), the first of many successful books by Paola Capriolo.
Best-selling and widely translated author Susanna Tamaro achieved
overnight commercial success with the sentimental Va’ dove ti porta il
cuore (1994; Follow Your Heart), which she adapted for a film of the
same name directed by Cristina Comencini.
Fiction at the turn of the 21st century
The competitive world of the media- and market-driven culture of the
late 20th century thrived on self-promotion, provocation, “discoveries,”
and “revelations.” Publishers and their talent scouts were eager to add
“new voices.” The Sardinian Salvatore Satta, for example, was a
professor of law whose considerable literary production—his best-known
novel is Il giorno del giudizio (1979; The Day of Judgement)—was not
revealed until after his death. Meanwhile, Stefano D’Arrigo was being
supported by publisher Arnoldo Mondadori to compose his ambitious modern
epic, Horcynus Orca (1975), 20 years in the making, which narrates the
1943 homecoming through the Strait of Messina (site of the mythical
Scylla and Charybdis) of a Sicilian fisherman to an ogre-plagued Sicily.
The whole narrative is couched in a language that combines precious
hyperliterary Italian, Sicilian dialect, and nonce words à la
James
Joyce.
The case of Gesualdo Bufalino is not dissimilar to that of Satta.
Bufalino’s first novel, Diceria dell’untore (1981; The Plague-Sower),
which he published after a lifelong career in teaching, won the 1981
Campiello Prize for fiction awarded by the industrialists of the Veneto
region. He went on to publish several other novels. Il sorriso
dell’ignoto marinaio (1976; The Smile of the Unknown Mariner)
consolidated the reputation of Vincenzo Consolo, who has been compared
to authors as different as fellow Sicilian Leonardo Sciascia (for his
rational lucidity) and Carlo Emilio Gadda (for his stylistic
experiments).
A truly postmodern phenomenon is that of
Umberto Eco, a University of
Bologna professor, philosopher, and semiotician who progressed from
analyzing genres and deconstructing texts composed by others to
synthesizing and constructing his own. His medieval detective story Il
nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose), which was widely
translated and also made into a movie (1986), has probably been read by
more willing readers than Dante’s The Divine Comedy. It no doubt tickled
Eco’s lively sense of humour that the film version of his book starred
Sean Connery, an actor identified with the role of James Bond, a
fictional character on whom Eco had written one of his more famous
semiological essays.
Eco’s later novels include Baudolino (2000; Eng.
trans. Baudolino) and La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (2004; The
Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana).
Eco’s nearest literary heirs are four
former students of the University of Bologna who wrote under the
collective pseudonym Luther Blissett. Their novel Q (1999; Eng. trans.
Q) narrates the clash between Roman Catholic and Protestant religious
extremists (and opportunists) in 16th-century Reformation Europe.
Among younger voices, two extremely professional authors—cosmopolitan
minimalist Andrea De Carlo and painstaking observer and stylist Daniele
Del Giudice—were “discovered” in the early 1980s by
ltalo Calvino. In
novels such as Macno (1984; Eng. trans. Macno) and Yucatan (1986; Eng.
trans. Yucatan), De Carlo, a cinematographic recorder of surfaces,
deliberately created and manipulated characters without depth, while Del
Giudice, in Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983; “Wimbledon Stadium”), Atlante
occidentale (1985; Lines of Light), and Staccando l’ombra da terra
(1994; Takeoff: The Pilot’s Lore), described speculative intellectual
encounters against a background of hyperrealistically observed
technology.
Other successes include the hilarious comic novels of Stefano Benni
and of AIDS-generation author Pier Vittorio Tondelli, who burst upon the
literary scene with the “on the road” stories of Altri libertini (1980;
“Other Libertines”). Tondelli’s demotic language and characters caused
the book to be briefly banned. His career culminated with the
reflections on grief, sickness, and death of Camere separate (1989;
Separate Rooms). Also notable are the short stories and short novels of
Antonio Tabucchi—for example, Notturno indiano (1984; Indian Nocturne)
and Piccoli equivoci senza importanza (1985; Little Misunderstandings of
No Importance). His Sostiene Pereira (1994; Pereira Declares: A
Testimony) is the story of the 1938 crisis of conscience of a Lisbon
journalist under the regime of António Oliviera de Salazar.
Conscientiously constructed are Roberto Pazzi’s pseudo-historical novels
Cercando l’imperatore (1985; Searching for the Emperor) and La
principessa e il drago (1986; The Princess and the Dragon).
One of the funniest, if not the most tasteful, of the younger writers
of the last decades of the 20th century was the outrageous Aldo Busi,
author of Seminario sulla gioventù (1984; Seminar on Youth) and the
pertly titled Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant
(1985; Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman). Two of the most
disinterested and earnestly reflective of the younger writers were
Sebastiano Vassalli and especially Gianni Celati. Vassalli gradually
distanced himself from the more radical experimentalism of Gruppo 63 so
as to better exploit his gift for storytelling. La notte della cometa
(1984; The Night of the Comet) is a fictionalized biography of the early
20th-century Orphic poet Dino Campana, while in the Strega Prize-winning
La chimera (1990; The Chimera), perhaps taking a cue from historian
Carlo Ginzburg as well as from Alessandro Manzoni, he reconstructs a
17th-century witch trial. Celati’s early works paradoxically (for a
writer so concerned with orality) took as their model the silent-film
comedies of Buster Keaton, though in the minimalist stories of Narratori
delle pianure (1985; Voices from the Plains) and Quattro novelle sulle
apparenze (1987; Appearances) and in his later melancholic, evocative
nonfiction Celati strikes a more pensive, lyrical note. The work of
antic surrealists Ermanno Cavazzoni and Daniele Benati, who collaborated
with Celati on the periodical Il semplice, combines Keaton,
Franz Kafka,
and echoes of the fantastic world of the romances of Ariosto and Matteo
Boiardo and the macaronic parodies written by Teofilo Folengo. Fellini’s
last film, La voce della luna (1990; The Voice of the Moon), was
inspired by the picaresque Il poema dei lunatici (1987; “The Poems of
the Lunatics”) of Cavazzoni. (As if to underline the predominance of
visual media over the written word, the title of the novel’s English
translation is that of the movie version.) In the 21st century Benati
would go on to write the novel Cani dell’inferno (2004; “Hounds of
Hell”), set in a mysterious American city that doubles as the
Netherworld and is inhabited by a series of deported Italians, all of
whose names happen to begin with the letter P.
With the late 20th century’s global questioning of the literary canon
and of inherited literary prejudices came a realignment of genres.
Previously marginal genres such as the giallo (literally,
“thrilling”)—detective fiction—moved to centre stage. Crime, seen from
the point of view of the perpetrator, the victim, the avenger, or the
investigator, formed the backbone of much Italian narrative at the turn
of the 21st century. So popular was the formerly spurned giallo that
many “serious” authors began to adapt its mechanisms to their heuristic
purposes. Delitti di carta (“Paper Crimes”), an important literary
periodical devoted wholly to the detective story, was founded in 1998.
An English and American invention, the genre was, however, not without
its classical Italian practitioners. But the distinction made by
Graham
Greene between his “novels” and his “entertainments” reflected the
general view in Italy that the thriller belonged to a minor genre. The
movie Pulp Fiction (1994) by American director Quentin Tarantino
provided a conspicuous rallying point for a surprisingly large group of
antiestablishment writers, though it cannot be said to have sparked the
formation of this group; among Tarantino’s own influences was classic
Italian horror film director Dario Argento. Generically referred to as
pulpisti, these writers preferred to be known as the Giovani Cannibali
(“Young Cannibals”), a name borrowed from the title of a collection of
stories edited by Daniele Brolli (1996). The volumes of abstract
theorization subsequently produced by defenders of the new style often
reflected the fact that in Italian the loanword pulp does not bring with
it the English connotations of the facile, shoddy, and cheap potboiler.
Among the authors who made their debut in the stylized,
blood-splattered, sadomasochistic world of the Cannibali—several of whom
later curbed their early excesses (without, one hopes, compromising
their principles) for the tamer successes of the market—are Niccolò
Ammaniti, Tiziano Scarpa, Isabella Santacroce, Aldo Nove (pseudonym of
Antonello Satta Centanin), Simona Vinci, Daniele Luttazzi, Silvia
Ballestra, Luisa Brancaccio, Francesca Mazzucato, Matteo Galiazzo, and
Carlo Lucarelli. Ammaniti’s Io non ho paura (2001, film 2003; I’m Not
Scared) chronicles a young boy’s loss of innocence after he encounters
the brutality of the adult world. No evidence of innocence exists in the
microcosm described by Simona Vinci. Her Dei bambini non si sa niente
(1997; Eng. trans. What We Don’t Know About Children, or A Game We Play)
opens a disturbing window onto the perverse and ultimately deadly
private world of a group of children abandoned by their families to
their own devices. Carlo Lucarelli’s thriller Almost Blue (1997; the
original and the English translation carried the same English-language
title) was made into a film by Alex Infascelli in 2000. Its
soundtrack—the music of Miles Davis, Chet Baker, and Coleman Hawkins—was
already implicit in the book’s title. The novel is set in Bologna, where
police inspector Grazia Negro tracks a serial murderer who,
chameleon-like, takes on the characteristics of his victims. She is
aided in her investigation by the blind Simone Martini (his name is that
of an early Italian painter) who with his ham radio is able to tune into
the frequencies of the killer’s thoughts.
Facing the new millennium
The year 2000 came and went without apocalypse. The “Millennium Bug”—the
threat that computers would be unable to recognize the year 2000—turned
out to be just another urban legend, a media-generated nonevent; those
in charge of the world’s fragile economic superstructures congratulated
themselves on their foresight and know-how. Meanwhile, in Italy a
chain—the great chain, so to speak, of the centuries of civilization—had
been broken. The sequence of designations for the centuries—Duecento,
Trecento, Quattrocento, and so on—that had accompanied and defined the
phases of classical Italian culture since its late medieval stirrings
reached its terminus with the close of the Novecento, or 20th century.
The first century of the new millennium would have no such convenient
and reassuring label. Literary and artistic historians, as they snipped
100-year lengths from the chain and displayed their common
characteristics, were always careful to stress the seamless continuity
that actually underlay this segmenting and the artificiality of these
convenient chronological divisions, which had been introduced, they were
at pains to point out, for purely didactic purposes.
In the eyes of a number of cultural commentators at the beginning of
the 21st century, however, the new millennium promised to give these
reassurances the lie. There would be no continuity between the 20th and
21st centuries. Many concurred with the sentiments of
William Butler Yeats’s poem The Second Coming (1921): “Things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold.” One such catastrophist was the critic and novelist Franco
Ferrucci. His intelligent essay La fine delle letterature nazionali
(“The End of National Literatures”)—which caps the first of two
supplemental volumes (Scenari di fine secolo [2001; “End-of-Century
Scenarios”]) of the monumental Storia della letteratura italiana
(“History of Italian Literature”), begun in 1965 by editors Emilio
Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno—is an acerbically witty and nostalgic
farewell to literature and criticism as it was known in the 20th
century.
Anthony Oldcorn
Ed.
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