Italian Poetry

Today we read Sia pace ai frati , by Vittorio Alfieri. This short and punchy epigram by Vittorio Alfieri embodies the Enlightenment attitude towards religion and state: peaceful coexistence in separate domains. Priests should be few and not overly loquacious in the public arena; cardinals should not take away the lights (here Alfieri uses the term “lume”, and “età dei lumi” is an expression for “E...

Today we read Il lampo , by Giovanni Pascoli. In this very short ballad Pascoli paints an impressionistic picture of the moment right before the start of a torrential storm, at night. Everything is black and silent, but suddenly a flash of lightning lights up the landscape, and reveals a sky about to burst into rain, and the ground heaving as if waiting for the outpour. A house also appears briefl...

Today we read Bella ch’invecchia , by Anton Giulio Brignole Sale. This short epigram was composed by a member of the elite of the Republic of Genoa, when it was at the apex of its commercial and banking power in Europe. Part of his surname, Brignole, is well-known to all the travellers that today stop at, or pass by, the second most important station of the city. But nothing grandiose here....

Today we read Chi sono , by Aldo Palazzeschi. The modern departure from the themes and connotations of classical poetry can be done in several way: in anger, or with a strong condemnation of the past, or touting the moral superiority of the new way of doing things, for example. In the case of Palazzeschi, the approach is through irony, levity and a sense of humour that suffuses most of his poems....

Today we read Paolo e Francesca , by Dante Alighieri. I can’t delay anymore: it’s time for some Dante, and in particular for some Comedy (the adjective divina , or “Divine,” is a later attribution). This work is very different from anything I have presented so far: it is a long poem, divided in three books ( Inferno , Purgatorio and Paradiso ), each consisting of 33 canti (though Inferno has an ad...

Today we read Era ’l giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro , by Girolamo Malipiero. The influence of Petrarch on Italian poetry can only be understated, and yet it still surprising sometimes to see the lengths to which some later poets went in their dialogue with him. In the early 1500s a Venetian friar, Girolamo Malipiero, decided that his poetic master had been in error to dedicate so much of his art to...

Today we read Tutti in maschera , by Emilio Praga. It might come as a surprise that the author of the sonnet about God’s implied approval and forgiveness of free love that we have previously published would also write religious poetry. And yet here we are. Praga vehemently reprimands those who complain that God doesn’t show himself directly: do they expect to be able to see him naked, as if he wer...

Today we read Per lei , by Giorgio Caproni. Giorgio Caproni’s mother, Anna (or rather Annina, as he fondly calls her), died in 1950, when he was 38. The collection “ Il seme del piangere ” ( The seed of crying ), published nine years later, is not only dedicated to her, but puts her at the center as a protagonist. This poem is both a reflection on Anna’s personality, and a declaration of poetics:...

Today we read Care selve, a voi ritorno , by Apostolo Zeno. The heroine of the last story of Boccaccio’s Decameron (and of Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale ) is put through quite the ordeal. Her husband, in order to test her, first asks her to give up their two children so they can be put to death. Then, even though she complied, she is told that he obtained Papal dispensation to divorce her, and is sen...

Today we read Funere mersit acerbo , by Giosuè Carducci. Carducci’s brother, Dante, committed suicide in 1857 — although some say he was actually killed by their father during a particularly violent fight. When his son was born, some twenty years later, the poet called him Dante, certainly in memory of his uncle, but likely also as an homage to the divin poeta , Dante Alighieri. This sonnet was wr...

Today we read Didone abbandonata , by Pietro Metastasio. In perhaps the most famous episode of the Aeneid, the titular hero and his companions, stranded, are rescued by Dido. She falls in love with Aeneas, who reciprocates but subsequently abandons her in order to fulfill his destiny and eventually found Rome. There are plenty of musical renditions of the episode. This brief extract is from Metast...

Today we read Sdegna Clorinda a i femminili uffici , by Petronilla Paolini Massimi. This sonnet belongs to the long tradition of poems by outspoken women that have no qualms in claiming their complete equality with men. Petronilla Paolini Massimi uses two literary examples to support her stance. The first quatrain is dedicated to Clorinda , a heroine-warrior in the super-famous poem La Gerusalemme...

Today we read Sventatezza , by Antonia Pozzi. War would seem to be mentioned only offhand in this bittersweet poem about a daughter’s memory of a hike with her father, when she was still a young child. But the two landmarks evoked here, the Montello Hill and the Piave River, were the setting of some of the worst fighting endured by Italy during War World I. Her father is telling her about it...

Today we read Eri dritta e felice , by Leonardo Sinisgalli. In general I prefer poems that have a clear metrical structure, but sometimes one comes along that will catch my attention even without. Such is the case with these verses by Leonardo Sinisgalli. The poem opens with the verb “to be”, in the past tense. This is a poem of memory. Of childhood, as we learn later, or at least one assumes so,...

Today we read Sogni e favole io fingo e pure in carte , by Pietro Metastasio. We are told that while writing an aria for his opera L’Olimpiade , Metastasio was so moved by what he himself had written that, apparently, he started crying. After such a display of emotion caused by pure fiction, and his fiction at that, he felt silly, and not a little impious. This sonnet was his way to put thin...

Today we read Assoluzione , by Emilio Praga. I remember watching a late night talk show decades ago, likely when I was in high school and wasn’t really supposed to. The host, Maurizio Costanzo, introduced a lady who was apparently known for having had sexual dalliances with many well known personages. To keep the thing classy, he put it this way: è una donna che ha molto amato (“a woman who loved...

Today we read Fine del ‘68 , by Eugenio Montale. I was hoping to find something a little more cheerful to welcome the New Year, but I’m afraid it was either another nursery rhyme or Montale. And Montale is better. Sometimes one hears the advice to look at worldly matters and problems “from the perspective of an alien,” so that we can take a point of view that is not enmeshed in the presuppos...

Today we read Nella notte di Natale , by Umberto Saba. Umberto Saba struggled for most of his life with depression. He fought it by working at his poetry, which was initially not well received; with psychoanalysis, being treated by a student of Freud himself; and later on with opium, to which he became addicted. His wife’s infidelities, and being on the run to avoid Nazi deportation, certainly did...

Today we read Il pellerossa nel Presepe , by Gianni Rodari. Gianni Rodari is a celebrated author of children stories and poetry. In this poem he tackles themes of diversity and inclusion in a way that might appear questionable to contemporary sensitivities, but was very much intended in the most ecumenic and liberal way possible. He imagines a statuette of a native american ending up inside a nati...

Today we read Cerchi chi vuol le pompe e gli alti onori , by Lorenzo de Medici. Florence in the second half of the 1400s is one of those places where people would be tempted go, should time travel become available. You could take a stroll around town and meet the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano: the quintessence of Itali...

Today we read Interno , by Sandro Penna. Sandro Penna had a gift to turn the commonplace, and sometimes the straight-up vulgar, into sublime. This poem opens in the run-down scenery of a dilapidated hotel, often described with terms rendered in their pejorative forms (the -accio endings). But then a boy appears, asleep. He is introduced by a verse that describes him with one such pejorative; but t...

Today we read A una zanzara , by Gianfrancesco Maia Materdona. This light, little poem was likely intended as a Baroque exercise in extravagance. The author, about whom we know basically nothing, talks for fourteen verses about, of all thing, a mosquito. And without ever saying the word “mosquito”. It is variously described as a wandering trumpet, a flying murmur, and in general someth...

Today we read Lavandare , by Giovanni Pascoli. When Virgil, at the beginning of the fourth Eclogue, announces that he is going to sing of “bigger things,” he justifies this by saying that not everybody likes “ humiles myricae ”: humble tamarisks. Pascoli, on the other hand, chose the Latin name of this humble shrub for the title of his most celebrated collection of poems, thus declaring his intent...

Today we read S’i’ fosse foco , by Cecco Angiolieri. Francesco Angiolieri (and to this day Francescos are sometimes nicknamed Cecco) is an early example of the archetype of the rich, spoiled young man about town, generally up to no good. Or at least that’s the character he created in his poetry. He is always complaining that his father is stingy with money; he glorifies wine and women;...

Today we read Deh non insuperbir per tuo belleza , by Poliziano. In this very short poem, Poliziano reminds a beautiful lady that her beauty is transitory. She should not, then, grow haughty or vain. Rather, she should enjoy it while it lasts — or, as he puts it, … pluck the flower. The original: Deh non insuperbir per tuo’ bellezza, donna, ch’un breve tempo te la fura: ca...