Giosuè Carducci

Giosuè Carducci was born in 1835 at Valdicastello, near Pietrasanta in Tuscany, the son of a country doctor whose revolutionary sympathies kept the family on the move. His father taught him Latin, and the boy devoured Virgil and Roman history while remaining cold to the Romanticism of Manzoni. He won a scholarship to the Scuola Normale in Pisa and, after years of poverty, private tutoring and family grief, including his brother’s suicide and his father’s death, was appointed in 1860 to the chair of Italian eloquence at the University of Bologna, which he held for more than four decades.

With friends he formed the Amici Pedanti, a combative anti-Romantic circle, and his early verse, later gathered in Juvenilia and Levia Gravia, is steeped in Dante, Petrarch, Foscolo and Leopardi. The deliberately provocative Hymn to Satan, published in 1865, cast Satan as the spirit of reason and revolt against clerical power. His mature achievement lies in the Rime nuove and above all the Barbarian Odes (from 1877), which recreated Latin and Greek metres in accentual Italian verse, metres that, he reasoned, would have sounded barbarous to ancient ears. He was equally prolific as a critic, as an editor of the Italian classics and as a translator of Heine and Goethe.

Once an ardent republican, Carducci came to accept the constitutional monarchy, was made a senator in 1890 and was revered as the poet of the united nation. Illness shadowed his last years: a stroke in 1899 left him partly paralysed, and in 1904 he ceded his chair to his disciple Giovanni Pascoli. In 1906 he became the first Italian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Bologna in February 1907; the house where he lived now holds a museum.