Documents for "Italian Literature: Biographies":

• Alamanni, Luigi 1495-1556, Italian poet and patriot. He was a friend of Macchiavelli, who may have encouraged his conspiracy (1522) against Cardinal Giulio de' Medici (later Pope Clement VII). Its failure forced...

• Alemanni, Luigi see Alamanni, Luigi.

• Alfieri, Vittorio, Conte 1749-1803, Italian tragic poet. A Piedmontese, born to wealth and social position, he spent his youth in dissipation and adventure. From 1767 to 1772 he traveled over much of Europe but returned...

• Annunzio, Gabriele D' see D'Annunzio, Gabriele.

• Aretino, Pietro 1492-1556, Italian satirist. He led a life of adventure and wrote abusive works for hire. His derisive wit was so feared that the gifts of those who sought either to buy him or buy him off made...

• Ariosto, Ludovico 1474-1533, Italian epic and lyric poet. As a youth he was a favorite at the court of Ferrara; later he was in the service of Ippolito I, Cardinal d'Este, and from 1517 until his death served...

• Bandello, Matteo 1485-1561, Italian storywriter, a Dominican priest. He is famous for his novellas, short tales in imitation of Boccaccio, that provided themes for several 17th-century plays. Often coarse, they...

• Baretti, Giuseppe Marc'Antonio 1719-89, Italian writer and lexicographer. Baretti held various official positions in several Italian cities while making regular contributions to periodicals. In 1751 he went to London, where he...

• Basile, Giovanni Battista 1575-1632, Italian writer. Basile held several important official positions, devoting his spare time to the study of folklore. He is known for his Lu Cunta de li cunti [the tale of tales] (1634-36), a collection of folk and fairy tales written in the Neopolitan dialect in a vigorous, exuberant style. The collection, usually referred to as Il Pentamerone because its framework is similar to Boccaccio's Decameron, recounts 50 tales told to a prince and his bride by ten women during a five-day period. Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, and many other fairy-tale characters make their first appearance in its...

• Bassani, Giorgio 1916-2000, Italian novelist. The recurrent background for his complex, analytic narratives about Jewish bourgeois life in Italy was the growth of fascism and anti-Semitism. A major theme is the...

• Beatrice Portinari 1266-90, Florentine woman believed to be the Beatrice of Dante Alighieri 's Divine Comedy and Vita nuova. He first saw Beatrice when he was nine years old, and she remained his ideal and inspiration...

• Belli, Giuseppe Gioacchino 1791-1863, Italian poet. Born in Rome into poverty, Belli earned his living as a government clerk. He drew from his knowledge of plebeian life in writing more than two thousand humorous and...

• Beolco, Angelo 1502-42, Italian actor and playwright. While managing farms belonging to his family, Beolco had much contact with Paduan peasants, with whom he was deeply sympathetic. Their way of life formed the...

• Berchet, Giovanni 1783-1851, Italian patriot and poet. He conspired to free Lombardy from Austria and was exiled. He wrote stirring patriotic ballads of a romantic type and rhymed romances, such as Giulia and Matilde....

• Berni, Francesco 1497?-1535, Italian humorous poet, a priest. He was noted for his burlesque capitoli, light, often ribald verses in terza rima. He revised Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, adding humorous touches and what he considered stylistic improvements. For many years Berni's rendering of Boiardo was the standard version; it has been generally discarded. For refusing to help...

• Betti, Ugo 1892-1953, Italian dramatist and poet. He was a judge by profession. His earliest published works were two volumes of poetry (1922 and 1932), but he is remembered for his dramas. He wrote 27...

• Boccaccio, Giovanni 1313-75, Italian poet and storyteller, author of the Decameron. Born in Paris, the illegitimate son of a Tuscan merchant and a French woman, he was educated at Certaldo and Naples by his father, who wanted him to take up commerce and law. In Naples he met...

• Boiardo, Matteo Maria 1441?-1494, Italian poet, count of Scandiano. A favorite at the Este court in Ferrara, he served on diplomatic missions and became ducal captain of Modena and later of Reggio. He wrote Latin...

• Bojardo, Matteo Maria see Boiardo.

• Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio 1882-1952, Italian-American author, b. near Palermo, Ph.D. Univ. of Florence, 1903. From 1910 to 1931 he taught at the universities of Rome and Milan. An anti-Fascist, he emigrated to the United...

• Calvino, Italo 1923-85, Italian novelist. Calvino was one of the most popular novelists of the 20th cent. Although loneliness is an essential condition in his writings, he imbues his stories with passion and...

• Capuana, Luigi 1839-1915, Italian critic and novelist. His activities included teaching, scientific study, and politics. He wrote in almost every genre, but his reputation rests upon his naturalistic novels and...

• Carducci, Giosuè 1835-1907, Italian poet and teacher. He was professor of literature at the Univ. of Bologna from 1860 to 1904. He was a scholar, an editor, an orator, a critic, and a patriot, although his...

• Caro, Annibale 1507-66, Italian poet, friend of Cellini, Varchi, and Bembo. He is best known for his translation of the Aeneid; for his poems in praise of opposing royal houses; and for his letters, which were among...

• Casa, Giovanni della 1503-56, Italian cleric and poet. He was archbishop of Benevento and papal nuncio to Venice. He wrote lyric verse, a life of Bembo, and a treatise on etiquette, the Galateo (1560, tr. 1576). His verse...

• Casanova de Seingalt, Giovanni Giacomo 1725-98, Venetian adventurer and author. He studied for the church but was expelled from school for immorality. A life of adventure took him all over Europe. He supported himself by gambling,...

• Castiglione, Baldassare, Conte 1478-1529, Italian soldier, author, and statesman attached to the court of the duke of Milan and later in the service of the duke of Urbino. His famous Libro del cortegiano (1528, tr. The Courtier, 1561), a treatise on etiquette, social problems, and intellectual accomplishments, is one of the great books of its time. Written at a time when the author served as envoy to Pope Leo X, it gives a...

• Cavalcanti, Guido c.1255-1300, Italian poet; friend of Dante, whose work was greatly influenced by Cavalcanti's style. He belonged to the White faction in the struggle of the Guelphs in Florence and was exiled to...

• Cecco d'Ascoli 1269?-1327, Italian astrologer, mathematician, poet, and physician, whose real name was Francesco degli Stabili, b. Ascoli. A teacher of astrology at several institutions in Italy, he was...

• Chiabrera, Gabriello 1552-1638?, Italian poet. He adapted classical forms to Italian verse and wrote graceful lyrics in the manner of Anacreon. Wordsworth translated some of his verse.

• Cino da Pistoia 1270-1337?, Italian jurist and poet, whose full name was Guittoncino dei Sinibaldi, or Sighibuldi. A friend of Dante and Petrarch, he wrote treatises on jurisprudence as well as numerous lyrics...

• Cinthio see Giraldi, Giovanni Battista.

• Cinzio see Giraldi, Giovanni Battista.

• Collodi, Carlo pseud. of Carlo Lorenzini , 1826-90, Italian author. A prolific journalist, he also wrote didactic tales for children, the most famous of which is Pinocchio: The Story of a Puppet. First written (1880) for the Giornale dei bambini, the story appeared in book form in 1883 and soon became one of the most widely read juvenile classics. Collodi, however, received little for it. The first English translation (1892) was followed by...

• Colonna, Vittoria, marchesa di Pescara 1492-1547, Italian poet; daughter of Fabrizio Colonna. Her love for her husband, Ferrante d'Avalos, is the subject of part of her lamenting verse. After his death (1525) she lived in convents,...

• Cyntius see Giraldi, Giovanni Battista.

• Da Ponte, Lorenzo 1749-1838, Italian librettist and teacher, b. Ceneda as Emmanuele Conegliano. Born Jewish, he converted to Catholicism at 14 and became (1773) a priest. A freethinking liberal and sometime...

• D'Annunzio, Gabriele 1863-1938, Italian poet, novelist, dramatist and soldier, b. Pescara. He went to Rome in 1881 and there began his literary career. The richly sensuous imagery of even his early poetry— Le primavere della mala pianta [the springtime of the evil plant] (1880) and Canto nuovo [new song] (1882)—displayed his unrivaled literary craftsmanship. His novels— Il piacere (1889, tr. The Child of Pleasure, 1898), L'innocente (1892, tr. The Intruder, 1898, and The Victim, 1914), Giovanni Episcopo (1892, tr. Episcopo & Company, 1896), and Il trionfo della morte (1894, tr. The Triumph of Death, 1896)—show the same creative handling of the Italian language, but the works are shallow and theatrical. The outbreak of World War I found him in France, where he had lived since 1910. He returned...

• Dante Alighieri 1265-1321, Italian poet, b. Florence. Dante was the author of the Divine Comedy, one of the greatest of literary classics.

• De Filippo, Eduardo 1900-1984, Neapolitan playwright and actor. In his scores of plays he combined pathos and farce. Napoli milionaria (1946) depicts postwar Naples, riddled with ruins and black-market corruption; Filumena...

• De Sanctis, Francesco 1817-83, Italian historian and literary critic. He was one of the founders of modern Italian literary criticism. He suffered imprisonment for his political views and was exiled to Malta. He was...

• Deledda, Grazia 1875-1936, Italian novelist, b. Sardinia. Her first work, a collection of short stories, was published when she was 19. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1926. Deledda's work is lyric and in part...

• Della Casa, Giovanni see Casa.

• Eco, Umberto 1932-, Italian novelist, essayist, and scholar. His first novel, The Name of the Rose (tr. 1983), is a medieval mystery. A pastiche of detective fiction, medieval philosophy, and moral reflection, it encapsulates his semiotic theory, which describes how signs are produced and...

• Fogazzaro, Antonio 1842-1911, Italian novelist and poet. His first work was a verse romance, Miranda (1874). Primarily concerned with moral issues, he was particularly adept at depicting character. His famous novel...

• Folengo, Teofilo 1496-1544, Italian burlesque poet, who used the pseudonym Merlinus Cocaius or Merlino Cocajo. A Benedictine monk, he left (c.1515) his monastery to become a wandering poet, returning in 1534...

• Folgore da San Geminiano fl. 1308-16, Italian poet. Mesi, his cycle of sonnets on the seasons and their appropriate pleasures, is interspersed with zestful descriptions of the manners of his day.

• Foscolo, Ugo 1778-1827, Italian poet and patriot. His name was originally Niccolò Foscolo. A devoted Venetian, he pinned his hope of a restored republic on Napoleon and fought under him against the Austrians,...

• Francesca da Rimini fl. 13th cent., Italian beauty, daughter of Guido da Polenta of Ravenna. She was married by proxy to the hunchbacked lord of Rimini, Gianciotto Malatesta; the proxy, Gianciotto's young and...

• Gadda, Carlo Emilio 1893-1973, Italian novelist. Although trained as an electrical engineer, Gadda devoted his energies to writing. His difficult style, deliberately obscure, precludes a wide audience. A fascination...

• Giacosa, Giuseppe 1847-1906, Italian dramatic poet. After Una partita a scacchi [a game of chess] (1873) won him his first success, he devoted himself to playwriting. His plays, which deal largely with life in Piedmont and reflect the bourgeois attitudes of his day, are...

• Ginzburg, Natalia Levi 1916-91, Italian novelist. Because she and her husband Leone Ginzburg were Jewish, they were confined to a small village from 1940 to 1943; her husband later died in prison. Strongly affected by...

• Giraldi, Giovanni Battista 1504-73, Italian author, known also as Cinthio, Cintio, Cinzio, or Cyntius. He wrote tragedies, lyric verse, and tales. Some of the stories in his Ecatommiti [one hundred tales] (1565) were translated...

• Giusti, Giuseppe 1809-50, Italian satirical poet. He directed his original and ironic polemics against Austrian rule and also attacked demagoguery and graft. The idiomatic Tuscan of his verse and its contemporary...

• Goldoni, Carlo 1707-93, Italian dramatist. He was enamored of comedy from childhood, having sketched his first comic drama at eight. He took a degree in law at Padua but thereafter devoted himself to the...

• Gozzi, Carlo, Conte 1720-1806, Italian dramatist. A defender of traditional Italian culture, he wrote comedies based on the old commedia dell'arte. To show the potential of the old forms and to ridicule Goldoni,...

• Gozzi, Gasparo 1713-86, Italian critic and poet; brother of Carlo Gozzi. Struggling to support a large family, he wrote plays, stories, articles, and poems. He founded the literary journals Gazzetta veneta (1760)...

• Grazzini, Antonio Francesco 1503-84, Italian author, one of the founders of the Accademia della Crusca (1550). He was an apothecary by trade. As a founder of the Accademia degli Umidi, each of whose members had to assume the...

• Grossi, Tommaso 1791-1853, Italian novelist and poet. Imitating his friend Manzoni , he wrote romantic historical novels, among them Marco Visconti (1834, tr. 1836). Other works include lyrics in the Milanese dialect....

• Guareschi, Giovanni 1908-68, Italian journalist and novelist. Guareschi edited a humorous weekly before World War II and in 1945 helped to found the popular weekly Candido. A master of warm but satirical humor, he is...

• Guinicelli, Guido c.1230-1276?, Italian poet. In his best verse he wrote of love as an inner spirituality or nobility, disassociated from courtly connotations. For this, and for his style—delicate, intelligent, and...

• Il Ruzzante see Beolco, Angelo.

• Jacopone da Todi 1230?-1306, Italian religious poet, whose name was originally Jacopo Benedetti. After the sudden death of his wife, he renounced (c.1268) his career as an advocate, gave his goods to the poor, and...

• Lampedusa, Giuseppe di 1896-1957, Italian novelist. A wealthy Sicilian prince, Lampedusa drew on his family's history for his internationally acclaimed work, Il gattopardo, published posthumously in 1958 (tr. The Leopard, 1960). In urbane, elegant style, Lampedusa depicts the demise of an old, aristocratic society that came about with the unification of Italy. Lampedusa based much of his novel on Sicilian history as...

• Lasca, Il see Grazzini, Antonio Francesco.

• Latini, Brunetto d. 1294?, Italian man of letters, a diplomat. He introduced French literature to Italy and wrote, in French, Li livres dou tresor, the first vernacular encyclopedia. It was an immediate success. Dante...

• Leopardi, Giacomo 1798-1837, Italian poet and scholar. Devoted to the study of the classics and philosophy from early childhood, although plagued by illness and physical and spiritual frustration, Leopardi became...

• Levi, Carlo 1902-75, Italian writer and painter, noted as an anti-Fascist leader. After taking a medical degree, Levi devoted himself to painting, gaining international acclaim. His political activity in the...

• Levi, Primo 1919-87, Italian writer. A chemist of Jewish descent, Levi was sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz during World War II. Levi's first novel, If This Is a Man (1947), is a restrained yet poignant testimony of the atrocities he witnessed. His dry and sober narrative is devoid of rancor or protest. In The Truce (1963) and The Drowned and the Saved (1986), he relates how physical torture and annihilation were accompanied by a process of moral degradation. He stresses that survival was as much a spiritual quest to maintain human dignity as a...

• Lorenzini, Carlo see Collodi, Carlo.

• Manzoni, Alessandro 1785-1873, Italian novelist and poet. Taken in his youth to Paris by his mother in 1805, Manzoni embraced the deism that he was later to discard for an ardent Roman Catholicism. He returned to...

• Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 1876-1944, Italian poet, novelist, and critic. He is best known as the founder of futurism (1909), on which he wrote and lectured, and as an advocate of Fascism; he was one of the first members of...

• Marino, Giambattista 1569-1625, Italian poet. His florid, highly elaborated style, called Marinismo, which was akin to euphuism, was much admired and imitated in his time. He had a strong influence on writing in all European...

• Metastasio, Pietro 1698-1782, Italian poet and librettist, whose original name was Antonio Bonaventura Trapassi. A prodigy at poetic improvisation, he became court poet at Vienna in 1729. He wrote melodious lyric...

• Montale, Eugenio 1896-1981, Italian poet, critic, and translator. After working as an editor, Montale became chief librarian of the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence. His complex poetry expresses the tensions and...

• Monti, Vincenzo 1754-1828, Italian poet and dramatist. Under French rule he became official historiographer of the Italian kingdom and later accommodated himself to Austrian rule as well. Among his many works the...

• Morante, Elsa 1918-85, Italian novelist and poet; wife of Alberto Moravia. Her prose style, which is indebted to surrealism and magic realism , is characterized by the clear presentation of unreal events and always stresses the power of the imagination. The themes of solitude and loneliness are central to House of Liars (tr. 1951), Arthur's Island (tr. 1959), and the poems in Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (1968). Morante's most important work, La storia (tr. 1977), which recounts Italy's wartime history through the eyes of a poor Roman family living in the ghetto, shows history to have violent and pitiless effects on the lives of common people...

• Moravia, Alberto 1907-90, Italian novelist born as Alberto Pincherle; husband of Elsa Morante. Moravia is considered one of the foremost 20th-century Italian novelists. He employs taut prose in realist narratives that shed light on such disturbing issues as the relation of the individual to...

• Negri, Ada 1870-1945, Italian writer. Her first poems, Fatalità (1892, tr. Fate and Other Poems, 1898) voiced bitter protest against the state of the poor. Her passionate lyrics, developed in Maternità...

• Panzini, Alfredo 1863-1939, Italian novelist and lexicographer; pupil of Giosuè Carducci. He taught in secondary schools. His genial, popular novels include Libro dei morti [book of the dead] (1893), Santippe...

• Parini, Giuseppe 1729-99, Italian poet, a priest and teacher. He was a professor and a superintendent of schools in Milan; a liberal, Parini became (1796) a government official in the Napoleonic occupation. Best...

• Pascoli, Giovanni 1855-1912, Italian poet. Pascoli's childhood was marked by a series of tragedies: the deaths of his parents and of five of his brothers and sisters. A radical in his student days at the Univ. of...

• Pasolini, Pier Paolo 1922-75, Italian writer and film director. A former Roman Catholic and a Marxist, Pasolini brought to his work a combination of religious and social consciousness. His early works, including the...

• Pavese, Cesare 1908-50, Italian novelist, poet, and translator. A major literary figure in postwar Italy, Pavese brought American influence to Italian literature through his translations. He himself was strongly...

• Pellico, Silvio 1789-1854, Italian dramatic poet. His principal work is Francesca da Rimini (1815, tr. 1856). Imprisoned for eight years by the Austrians as a Carbonarist (see Carbonari ), he wrote a candid and...

• Petrarch or Francesco Petrarca , 1304-74, Italian poet and humanist, one of the great figures of Italian literature. He spent his youth in Tuscany and Avignon and at Bologna. He returned to Avignon in 1326, may have taken lesser...

• Pirandello, Luigi 1867-1936, Italian author, b. Sicily. One of the great figures in 20th-century European theater, Pirandello was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature. After an extensive education, he began...

• Politian see Poliziano, Angelo.

• Poliziano, Angelo or Politian , 1454-94, Italian poet, philologist, and humanist. Of middle-class origin, he was given a classical education, completed under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici. He became Lorenzo's companion and...

• Pontano, Giovanni 1426-1503, Italian poet, historian, and statesman, who used also the Latin form Jovianus Pontanus. He was protected by Alfonso of Aragón, who made him his chancellor of Naples (1447) and later his...

• Pulci, Luigi 1432-84, Italian poet. Of an impoverished literary family, he became a protégé of Lorenzo de' Medici and a friend of Poliziano. The most noted work of his large literary production is Morgante Maggiore (1483). A hodgepodge of comic incidents, scientific digressions, and lofty passages, it recounts the adventures of Orlando and the giant Morgante in the land of the infidel. The first canto was...

• Quasimodo, Salvatore 1901-68, Italian poet and translator, b. Sicily. Quasimodo worked first as a technical designer and civil engineer. His five volumes of verse published between 1930 and 1938, including Acque e terra (1930), established him as leader of Italy's "hermetic" poets, whose verbal complexity, derived from the French symbolists, was used in discreet opposition to Mussolini. His anti-Fascist activities during World War II led to his imprisonment...

• Rossetti, Gabriele 1783-1854, Italian poet and critic; father of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and of Christina Rossetti. Exiled in 1821, he fled first to Malta, where he stayed for three years, and then to England, where...

• Rosso di San Secondo, Piermaria 1887-1956, Italian writer, b. Sicily. His sophisticated plays include Marionette, che passione! (1918) and La bella addormentata [sleeping beauty] (1919). His novel La fuga [flight] appeared in...

• Rustico di Filippo 13th cent. Italian poet. He was perhaps one of the first to use the Tuscan dialect in literature. Some 60 of his sonnets, most of them in a burlesque vein, are extant. He was a friend of Brunetto Latini...

• Sacchetti, Franco c.1330-1400, Italian author. He held a number of public offices in Florence and wrote lyric verse and moral discourses. He is best remembered for his Novelle (c.1378-c.1395), a collection of tales...

• Sanctis, Francesco de see De Sanctis, Francesco.

• Sannazaro, Jacopo 1456?-1530, Italian humanist. He lived briefly (1501-4) in France, a follower of the exiled Frederick III of Naples. On Frederick's death, he returned to Naples and a life of study and literary...

• Schmitz, Ettore see Svevo, Italo.

• Silone, Ignazio 1900-1978, Italian novelist and journalist, whose original name was Secondo Tranquilli. A Socialist and for a time a Communist, he has devoted his writings to attacking Fascism and promoting...

• Sordello c.1180-1269?, Italian troubadour. A life of brawling and intrigue took him to Provence, where he served at court. Like other Italian troubadours before him, he wrote in Provençal (see Italian...

• Stampa, Gaspara c.1523-1554, Italian poet. Plunged at an early age into the dissipated life of Venetian society, she became renowned for her brilliance and beauty. Her verse, which recounts an unhappy love...

• Straparola, Giovanni Francesco d. c.1557, Italian writer. His lyric verse was not of lasting merit, but he excelled as a storyteller. He was perhaps the first to use popular folklore as a basis for fiction. His Piacevoli notti...

• Svevo, Italo 1861-1928, Italian novelist, whose real name was Ettore Schmitz, b. Trieste. A businessman, he wrote several works of fiction, but remained practically unknown until discovered by James Joyce. His...

• Tasso, Torquato 1544-95, Italian poet, one of the foremost writers and a tragic figure of the Renaissance. Educated in Naples by Jesuits, he later studied law and philosophy (1560-1562) at the Univ. of Padua. Rinaldo (1562), a chivalric poem, brought him fame when he was 18; after completing his studies at the Univ. of Bologna, he received an invitation (1565) to join the brilliant court of the Este at Ferrara,...

• Tassoni, Alessandro 1565-1635, Italian poet. He spent much of his life in the service of Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy and Francesco I of Modena. His sharp letter (1602) of defense against accusations by the Italian...

• Todi, Jacopone da see Jacopone da Todi.

• Tommaseo, Niccolò 1802-74, Italian poet and critic, b. Sibenik, Dalmatia. In addition to poetry, novels, and literary criticism, he wrote well in history, philosophy, lexicography, and philology. He was perhaps...

• Tozzi, Federigo 1883-1920, Italian novelist. He was a follower of Verga and D'Annunzio but, unlike D'Annunzio, became concerned with moral problems. His novels, bitter and dispassionate, are powerfully written;...

• Trissino, Gian Giorgio 1478-1550, Italian poet and philologist. His play Sofonisba (written 1515, produced 1557) introduced classical Greek dramatic techniques to Italian drama. Also well known is his epic poem Italia...

• Ungaretti, Giuseppe 1888-1970, Italian poet, critic, and translator, b. Alexandria, Egypt. Ungaretti spent his youth in North Africa, where he was greatly influenced by nomadic culture. In Paris, where he studied, he...

• Verga, Giovanni 1840-1922, Italian novelist, b. Sicily. He abandoned the study of law for literature and wrote several novels of passion in the style of the French realists. His later works, written in a...

• Vida, Marco Girolamo c.1490-1566, Italian poet, b. Cremona. After joining the humanist court of Pope Leo X, he was given a priory at Frascati and was commissioned by Leo to compose a Christian epic, which took form as...

• Visconti, Ennio Quirino 1751-1818, Italian archaeologist. He was conservator of the Capitoline Museum, Rome, and one of the consuls of the brief Roman republic (1798). A political refugee in Paris from 1799, he became...

• Vittorini, Elio 1908-66, Italian novelist, b. Syracuse, Sicily. Between 1934 and 1941 Vittorini translated the works of D. H. Lawrence, Poe, Faulkner, Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and others. His first...