LITERARY ITALY
(CONTINUED)
Among the interesting literary figures of the old school still living is
Renato Fucini, whose pen-name is Neri Tanfucio. He is now nearly eighty
years old, and for some years has been living in a small town not far
from Florence, writing his recollections. In college he studied civil
engineering, but he soon forsook it and secured employment in the office
of the Municipal Art Direction in Florence. Later he taught Italian in
the technical school at Pistoia and after that was several years an
inspector of rural schools. It was during these years of wandering
through Tuscany that he got the intimate knowledge of its simple,
industrial, pleasure-loving people, peasant and poacher, landlord and
inspector, teacher and pupil, that he has embodied in his stories and in
his burlesque, tragic, and sentimental verses.
His fame rests on his dialect poetry ("Poesie"), chiefly in sonnet form,
in which he depicts the virtues and vices, the licenses and inhibitions,
the hopes and the despairs, of his fellow Tuscans, at the same time
embodying delightful descriptions of their charming, romantic land; and
a few small volumes of prose, all little masterpieces--"Napoli a occhio
nudo" ("Naples to the Naked Eye," letters written to a friend about that
enchanting city two generations ago when it was still plunged in the
misery of its protracted predatory misrule and the majority of its
inhabitants were reduced to a deplorable state); "All' Aria Aperta" ("In
the Open Air"), scenes and incidents of life among the common people of
Tuscany; and "Le Veglie di Neri" ("Fireside Evenings of Neri"), which
showed him a man of heart and of mind supremely capable of transforming
the messages of the former by the latter in such a way as to make great
appeal to his fellow beings. His books can be read to-day with the same
pleasure that they were read half a century ago, and the pictures which
are painted, particularly in the former, are as vivid as the day they
were first put on the canvas.
Fucini is a type that is indigenous to central Italy, by nature a lover
of the fields, the forest, the brooks, he was compelled from earliest
infancy to earn his living, and he seemed to be content with a bare
sustenance, getting pleasure from his wanderings and from books. He did
on foot and more intimately what Signore Panzini has done on a bicycle
or on way trains. As an inspector of country schools he was obliged to
visit countless villages and hamlets, and there he found in the habits,
customs, and conduct of their inhabitants material for comment and
reflections such as most people find in new countries and large cities.
His descriptions of them found sympathetic response in the hearts of
many who see in the lives of these simple yet sophisticated people the
romance of bygone days.
Fucini has not cut a great figure in Italian letters, but any one who
would get a familiarity with the literature of the early days of Italian
unity, or who is in search of diversion and delight should not neglect
him. He is a sympathetic figure, whether wandering through Tuscany,
bending over a table in the Riccardi Library, or awaiting his cue at
Empoli.
A writer of this period to whom posterity is likely to give a high
rating is Alfredo Oriani, who died in 1907. His fame will finally rest
on his fiction rather than on his historical contributions. Though "La
lotta politica in Italia" ("The Political Struggle in Italy"), from 486
to 1877 in three volumes, is a creditable performance, it is not based
on personal research. Malignant-minded critics have occupied themselves
with proving him a pilferer, but the work is done with such consummate
literary skill that he has put the reading world under obligations to
him.
His first books, "Memorie inutili" ("Useless Memories"), "Sullo Scoglio"
("On the Reefs"), and "Al di la, no" ("The Next World, No"), revealed
such unbridled license of morbid tendencies that even Italians could not
stomach them. He appeared to them a romanticist after the manner of
Guerrazzi, addicted to the Macabre, subject to satanic inspiration,
bombastic, and rhetorical.
When Oriani took up a second phase of his writing in the period from
1880 to 1890 the reading public still continued to mistrust him.
Although he brought his spirit to a more stable equilibrium, he carried
upon himself the stigma that clung to him in consequence of his previous
books, and such productions as "Il Nemico" ("The Enemy"), "Incenso e
Mirra" ("Incense and Myrrh"), "Fino a Dogali" ("Up to Dogal"),
"Matrimonio e divorzio" ("Marriage and Divorce"), did not absolve him
from previous sins.
His turgid style was more objected to than his taints and his themes,
and his aggressiveness and political arrogances found greater opposition
than his early decadent manner and his late negations in religious
matters. He was accused of being a plagiarist. His greatest work "Lotta
Politica" was characterized by a critic, L. Ambrosina, to be wholly
devoid of originality. His "Momo" was called an imitation of
Turgénieff's "A Neighbor's Bread." His "L'Invincibile" was derived from
"Andrea Cornelis" of Paul Bourget, and the "Ultimi Barbari" ("The Last
Barbarians") from Verga's "Pagliacci" and the "Cavalleria Rusticana."
Thus beset, Oriani, despairing of recognition, gathered his strength for
a final flight and strove to reach heights never reached before, and he
wrote "The Political Struggle," "Holocaust," and "Ideal Revolts."
"The Holocaust" is a study of mother and daughter. The mother has, from
leading a wayward life, been able to keep body and soul together until
middle age has effaced her charms. Reduced to hunger and rags, she
decides to sacrifice her fifteen-year-old daughter and offers her to the
first stranger whom she encounters walking beside the Arno one evening;
she takes him to her contemptible rooms where the emaciated and ragged
child awaits, in ignorance of her mission, the mother.
The young man of the self-made and aggressive type primed with animal
spirits hesitates to be the instrument of the mother's monstrous
designs, and hurls himself from the house when he realizes the
situation, leaving the contents of his purse with the crushed little
flower. The inhuman mother and a friend even more saturated in iniquity
spend the money in an improvised banquet and plan how they shall take
the child to the home of a well-known procuress. Their object is
realized when this is accomplished and the mother receives a small sum
of money, but the child, not having been cut out for the life, soon
escapes. A narrative of her experiences, a picture of her suffering, the
conflict between filial love and justifiable resentment, is set forth in
page after page of psychological analysis. From the violence of the
encounter flow simultaneously mortal disease and pregnancy. The former
gives the author an opportunity to depict the child mind in rebellion
against both bodily and spiritual salvation. The ministrations of the
church are done with great finesse, kindliness, and skill, and give much
satisfaction to believers. This may be the author's votive offering to
the church, or it may reflect a new illumination of his soul. When the
heroine dies the mother realizes her sin in having borne the child and
in having betrayed her.
It would be difficult to imagine anything more disagreeable than the
story. The only thing that can be said is that it is well told, but what
does it advantage one to read it? As Henry James said, no one is
compelled to admire any particular sort of writing, but surely there
must be compulsion to make one write them. And as Flaubert, whom Oriani
probably called master, wrote: "Such books are false; nature is not like
that."
Oriani lived a singularly isolated life, having little contact with his
fellow workers and little recognition. But he was a thinker and
idealist, and it is unfortunate that he did not choose more attractive
media to present his thought and project his aspirations. Only after his
death did he begin to get any measure of appreciation. The four wars
against Austria, the final charge against the Alps, foreseen and invoked
by Oriani, were the conditions of his recognition by the Italian people.
The most widely read of all Italian writers of this period was Edmondo
de Amicis (1846-1908). His books, "Bozzetti Militari" ("Military Life"),
which appeared shortly after his period of service in the army, and the
book for boys entitled "Cuore" ("Heart"), had a tremendous sale and
still have. They were also widely read outside of Italy. He wrote many
books of travel, some poetry, literary portraits, and short stories.
However, he made no particular impression upon the literary period of
his time.
Guido Mazzoni, born in 1859, was, and perhaps still is, professor at the
University of Florence. He has been for many years secretary of the
Crusca and senator of the realm. His critical work is "L'Ottocento." His
poetry is of the familiar variety. "Sewing-machine" is one of them. He
is an excellent example of the culture of the Italians, but he has made
no lasting impression upon Italian letters. He is best known in this
country from Papini's gibes at him and at the Crusca. His recent
contributions, "The Lament of Achilles" and "Con Gli Alpini" ("With the
Alpini"), are of the eminently respectable, commendable, poet-laureate
variety, called forth by valorous deeds of Italy's soldier sons.
Nothing shows the flight from romanticism to realism that took place at
the end of the nineteenth century so clearly as its stage literature.
The dominating figure of that period was Giuseppe Giacosa. He was not
alone the most prolific contributor to the literature of the theatre,
but a man who early excited and kept the admiration and affection of
fellow artists. He can truthfully be called the literary mirror of that
period in Italy.
The lamp of enthusiasm was flickering when he first put secure steps
upon the literary road, but it lighted him to a great success in "Una
Partita a Scacchi" ("A Game of Chess"). Then the car of realism came
along with a rush, as if it would carry everything in its wake, and he
threw a great bouquet into the tonneau in the shape of "Surrender at
Discretion." But his ear was always to the ground, and, when he sensed
the advent of a new literary period and learned of the existence of
readers that did not know just what they wanted but thought they would
like to have the truth, the naked truth of life as depicted in fiction,
he wrote "Sad Loves." But the Veristic period did not last long, and
Giacosa took leave of it without a tear. Pascoli and D'Annunzio had not
only entered idealistic realism in the literary race, but they were
shouting in the most vociferous way for the latter especially to win.
When Giacosa became fully cognizant of the favorite colors he was quick
to make his entry with "As the Leaves" and "Il Più Forte" ("The
Stronger").
The play to which he owed his first success, "A Game of Chess," had a
remarkable career in Italy, and it still makes leading appeal to
extravagant youth and romantic maturity, who see, in the lovely Iolande
or in the dashing Fernando, prototypes who solve perplexing problems of
life with an ease and readiness that is soul-satisfying. They also see
in their experiences the smouldering or dying embers of their own
passions, whose articulate breathings cause them to glow consumingly and
pleasantly.
Its success turned the author from law, which he despised, to
literature, which he adored.
His next play, "Il Trionfe d'Amore" ("The Triumph of Love"), was along
the same lines: life without sorrow or strife save such as make
pleasure--which bulks large in life--sweeter. Within a few years Giacosa
began to depict life as it really was, is, or should be, and the first
indication of it was "Il Conte rosso" ("The Red Count"), and for a
decade he gave himself to the production of historical plays none of
which can be used to-day as a wreath on the monument to his memory. It
was not until he wrote "Resa a Discrezione" ("Surrender at Discretion"),
that he came into the field which he finally tilled so profitably,
holding up to the contemptuous, scornful gaze of the people the useless,
iniquitous, pernicious existences of a certain class, the noble. In this
he did the same thing that he had done in his masterpiece, "As the
Leaves." But here he portrayed flesh and blood confronted with problems
conditioned by life, called chance. Instead of desperation and whetted
appetite for sensuous appeasement, we see latent character budding and
flowering under the stimulus of adversity; virtue which does not lose
its aroma from enforced tarry in putrid milieu; the deadly sins, rooted
in ancestral emotions and nurtured by environment displayed in the
conduct of human beings of our acquaintance and our intimacy; we see the
exaltation and the deprecation of viciousness just as we see it and
accomplish it in real life. The literary features of the lines, the
crispness and naturalness of the dialogue, the fidelity with which he
reflected the handling of problems likely to confront any one show the
finished artist.
Giacosa was a conspicuous literary figure of yesterday's Italy, friend
of poets and philosopher, journalist, essayist, lecturer, man of the
world, mirror of one side of its mental and emotional activity.
Next to Verga the Verists found their chief exponent in Luigi Capuana, a
Sicilian born in 1839 and still living. He wrote romances, short
stories, plays, and criticisms, none of which save the latter had great
vogue, though one of his plays, "Malia" ("Enchantment"), gave such
offense to Mrs. Grundy that it had great popularity. Like Verga he knows
his countrymen and women, particularly their emotional reactions and the
conduct conditioned by it, by their inheritancy, and by their
environment. Many of his short stories are gems of construction and of
narrative. For instance, "Passa l'Amore," in "Il buon Pastore" ("The
Good Pastor"), is a masterly delineation of the struggle between what is
usually called good and evil in the person of a saintly old priest. Love
had been an abstract conception for the good pastor until he essayed to
reclaim a lamb who had been driven from the fold by the efforts of a
cruel father intensively to prepare her for sacrifice at the hands of
Cavalier Ferro. Perhaps if Capuana had not been content with merely
interesting and diverting the public, as he counselled Bracco to be, and
had tried to teach them and lead them he would have greater renown. As
it is he is one of the best short-story writers of Italy, a discerning,
trustworthy critic, who has written an interesting volume of studies in
contemporary literature, and several plays, the last of which, "Il
Paraninfo" ("The Best-man"), has recently been published. Nevertheless
he must be considered a writer whose potentialities were but partially
realized.
Two realistic writers of the end of the nineteenth century must be
mentioned, though their work scarcely merits discussion and to do so may
be unjust to others. They are Gerolamo Rovetta and Marco Praga. Although
the former wrote criticisms, interpretations, and romances, some of
which had much success, the contributions by which he is best known are
his plays. Rovetta studied contemporary life and depicted it for the
stage. His first success, the one upon which his reputation as a man of
letters most solidly rests, "La Trilogia di Dorina" ("Dorina's
Trilogy"), presents the public pie, upper and lower crust and middle,
quite as Zola might have made it. His favorite theme was that man is but
a reaction to his environment, expounded particularly in "I Disonesti"
("Dishonest Men"), though his greatest popular success was
"Romanticismo" ("Romanticism"), which was a contribution to "idealistic
reaction" which would turn us from ugly verities of life. It has been
said by competent authorities to be a faithful presentation of public
and private sentiment existing in northern Italy previous to her
deliverance from tyrannical Austria.
Marco Praga is the son of Emilio Praga, who was the best-known Bohemian
poet of Italy in his day (1839-1875), but who abandoned writing to teach
dramatic literature in the Conservatory of Music in Milan. He professes
to be the dramatic mirror held up to life and to tell the truth as he
sees it, that he cannot be persuaded to camouflage it, and that when it
is depicted on the stage it shall amuse rather than distress. That is
what makes his most successful plays, such as "Le Vergini" ("The
Virgins") and "La Moglie Ideale" ("The Ideal Wife"), depressing reading.
Such conduct as they depict and such exchange of thought and sentiment
as they report undoubtedly exist, but the less one knows of it and comes
in contact with it the happier he or she is likely to be. If adultery
could only be made a virtue for a few years, it would lose its
attractiveness and many writers would have to earn their living.
At the end of the nineteenth century Italy had three women poets of much
distinction, one of whom, Ada Negri, had and still has great popularity.
Her last book of poems, "Il libro Di Mara" ("The Book of Mara"), has
shown that she still has the capacity to put into verse dramatically and
lyrically the most delicate and the most dominant notes of love as she
or as those she has loved has experienced it. She was born in a little
village of Lombardy in 1870. Her mother worked in a factory, and she
herself was for some years a teacher in the elementary schools; so she
had first-hand knowledge of the shut-in life of those whose repressions
and aspirations she sung and published in _L'Illustrazione Popolare_ of
Milan. In these she set forth with great sincerity and with stirring
lyric quality the sordid sufferings and sorrows of the toiling masses.
These poems and others were published under the titles of "Fatality" and
"The Tempest" in 1892 and 1894. Two years later a radical change in her
social and spiritual environment was brought about by her marriage to
Signor Garlanda, and soon she sang of it in a volume called "Maternity,"
which does for that state what her previous volumes had done for human
pain and human poverty. "Dal Profondo" ("From the Depths") was but a
continuation of these sentiments, tinctured with philosophical and
socialistic knowledge that had been displayed for other purpose in "The
Tempest." After this came a volume entitled "Esilio" ("Exile"), which
reflected the same thoughts and sentiments in Swiss light. She has
written two prose works, a series of short stories entitled "Le
Solitarie" and "Orazioni" ("Orisons"). She glorifies purity, idealizes
it, and sings its adoration.
In the closing years of the century there was published in Milan a
volume of lyrics by one Annie Vivanti, which was praised intemperately
by Carducci and by the _Nuova Antologia_. She had some fiction to her
credit which dealt chiefly with the life of the stage, but her advent
into the world of letters was like a shooting star; nothing was known of
her origin save that she was said to have been born in London, and there
was some mystery about her career. In her poetry there was a true lyric
wail, especially in "Destino" ("Destiny"), "Non Sarà mai" ("It Can Never
Be"), that appealed tremendously to the public mind. Had she been
productive she might have been compared to Ella Wheeler Wilcox. After
her marriage to Mr. Chartres, a London journalist, she became better
known as the mother of a child-wonder violinist. Amongst her romances
the one which had greatest popularity was entitled "I Divoratori" ("The
Devourers"). It is obviously the story of her life and of her daughter's
career, the record of filial shortcomings steeped in wormwood.
The third of these interesting writers, half Armenian, half Italian, was
Vittoria Aganoor, who was born in Padua in 1855. In 1900 she published a
volume called "Leggenda Eterna" ("Eternal Legend"), which showed her to
be a sincere, impassioned artist with a pronounced leaning toward the
sentimental. She died in London in the spring of 1910, after a surgical
operation, and a few hours later her husband, Guido Pompili, killed
himself. Her best-known poems are "Il Canto dell' Ironia" ("The Song of
Irony"), "La vecchia Anima sogna ... " ("The Old Soul Dreams"), "Mamà,
sei tu?" ("Mother, Is It Thou?"). A complete volume of her poetry was
published in 1912.
Italians are astonished when women make a great stir in the world. They
have had no Jeanne d'Arc or Florence Nightingale. Their historic women
have been mostly mystics who would punish the flesh that they might
become spiritually pure, but the generation that is now passing has had
five women, four at least of whom will have to be discussed by any
historian of the intellectual movement in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. They are Matilde Serao, Grazia Deledda, Maria
Montessori, Eusapia Palladino, and Eleanora Duse, and most space will be
given to Duse.
Matilde Serao is the Marie Corelli of Italy with one important
qualification. She has not been obliged to subscribe to the rigors of
convention. She has spoken with great frankness about whole sides of
life which Miss Corelli knows, but about which she has been compelled to
be silent. Not that the romances of Matilde Serao are in any sense
pornographic, but she has painted her subjects so vividly and registered
her sensations and impressions so sumptuously that they are considered
very improper by Mrs. Grundy. She was in turn school-teacher,
telegraphist, journalist, publisher, author, but throughout her writings
she has kept the note of the journalist who has made a careful study of
Zola and of Flaubert. Her thought is spontaneous, her expression facile,
as she depicts the emotions and "feelings" of her Neapolitan characters,
clad in rags or royal raiment, living in hovel or in palace.
Her most successful books were "La Storia di un Monaco," "Il Ventre di
Napoli" ("The Belly of Naples"), "Il Paese della Cuccagna" ("The Land of
the Cockaigne"), and "Terno secco" in which the social, economic, and
political world of Naples is revealed. With the third of those
enumerated she tried to do for lottery-gambling in Naples what Charles
Dickens did for the private schools of England. Regrettably her efforts
did not have a similar result.
In her Neapolitan stories the local color is not a mere background, but
the very marrow of their being, with the result that it is almost
impossible to reproduce it adequately in translation. Her later books
were always pictures of the professional lover in different
environments. He loves with fury and usually for a short time only. His
amatory conduct has no ancillæ of Anglo-Saxon love-making. It is taurine
and satyric. He does not always kill after the embrace, but one gathers
from his conduct that he would like to do so. Time has tempered Matilde
Serao's erotic literary coefficient and her last books are cool, more
serene, and less interesting. One of her last books, "Ella non rispose,"
has recently been translated into English under the title of "Souls
Divided."
Grazia Deledda has done for her native island of Sardinia that which
Signora Serao did for Naples, but to a great extent she kept lubricity
out of her writings. In her "Il Vecchio della Montagna" ("The Old Man of
the Mountain"), "La Via del Male" ("Road to Evil"), "Cenere" ("Ashes"),
"Nostalgia," "L'Incendio nell' Uliveto" ("The Burning in the Olive
Grove"), and many others, she depicted with wondrous accuracy the life,
feelings, struggles, ambitions, infirmities of the Sardinians, and
painted their sordid surroundings and glorious scenery. She did for that
wonderful island, so strangely neglected by the mother country, what
Mary Wilkins did for New England. Her imagination was never so vivid nor
was her eye so penetrating as that of her Neapolitan sister, nor has she
known the voluptuous side of life, seamy or embroidered, but she has
known how to put down in a way that engrosses the reader's attention the
pitiable and pathetic plights that circumstance and passion force upon
the people with whom she lives. The display of their passions and
sorrows are apparently as familiar to her as the landscapes.
Unfortunately, however, she does for them that which she does for the
latter. She idealizes them or, better said, she strains them through her
imagination. In other words, instead of recording them as they are she
records them as they should be. Her novels give the impression of being
photographic until you read Verga. Not that the breath of insincerity
which Croce said was the curse of Italy's modern writers comes from her.
She is most sincere, but her characters are sandman manikins into whose
nostrils she has breathed the breath of life. She makes her characters
do what she might do if she were one of them.
Whether she is tugging at the end of her intellectual tether or not
remains to be seen, but her recent work has not the spontaneity and
imaginativeness of her earlier books and she is almost obsessed with
describing landscapes, the advent and departure of the sun, and
stage-settings generally. Her last story, "The Burning in the Olive
Grove," is a conflict between the present and the past, and turns upon a
marriage of convention. It gives the author the opportunity to depict
the imperious eighty-three-year-old grandmother, her useless brother,
the farm lassie whose worldly success in marrying into a family above
her station she owes to her beauty, and a pillar of feminine virtue who
would live her own life in her own way despite the schemings of the
grandmother of feudalistic behavior. The scene is filled with character
studies which she likes so well: the old soldier of Garibaldi's legion,
his lame son whom the heroine loves, and virtuous heroic peasantry.
Several of Grazia Deledda's novels have been translated into English,
but they have not had great success. She is one of the last of the
realistic idealizers. The most her admirers can hope that the future
will do for her is that it will suggest to those in search of Sardinian
color that they should consult her writings. Neither the psychologist
nor the literary craftsman will disturb her literary remains.
The most promising successor of these women novelists is Clarice
Tartufari, whose "Rete d'Acciaio" ("Nets of Steel") is a powerful though
painful study of the Sicilian brand of jealousy.
Arturo Graf (1848-1918), for many years a professor in the University of
Turin, was a materialistic poet whose productions during his lifetime
were received with some favor and are now being given high rating.
Fifteen years ago a very flattering review of his dramatic poems,
especially "Medusa," appeared in the _Nuova Antologia_, and recently
Signor Vittorio Gian has published in _Gazetta di Torino_ an analysis of
his mental processes and an estimate of the merit and significance of
his poetical productions which, should they find general acceptance, may
give Graf the most important position in the poetic field since Pascoli.
Neither his intellectual reactions nor his point of view, however, is
Italian. They show both his Teutonic origin and inclinations. His last
verses, "Nuove Rime della Selva" ("New Rhymes of the Forest"), are full
of delightful imagery, delicate fantasy, and gentle sentiment and they
do not display the materialism, pessimism, or the figurative symbolism
of his early works. In 1900 he published a psychological romance
entitled "Riscatto" ("Redemption"), admittedly a spiritual autobiography
which heralded and prepared his after-faith, which was thus also a
battle for a faith against materialistic pessimism, against arid
positivism which had seduced him and against which he reacted. "He who
seeks God laboriously may become more religious than he who coddles Him
in the firm belief of having found Him." His book of poems published in
1895 is the poet's voicings of his struggle to this end. His fame is
greater as a dramatist and litterateur than as a poet. Nevertheless some
of his poetical writings show a rare imagery, a facile capacity for
description and versification, though a pessimistic psychology. His
best-known poems are entitled "Venezie" ("Venices"), "Le Rose sono
sfiorite" ("Faded Roses"), "Silenzio" ("Silence"), "Anelito"
("Longings"). Gian says of him: "He did not attain in his career as
teacher, writer, and poet that outward recognition that fame and fortune
usually bestow on their favorites," but as a recompense "he was honored
with such hatreds as are never the lot of mediocrities and which for
this very reason are the sanction and almost the guaranty of true
worth."
Much of the interesting literature of the past generation has appeared
in dialect, especially the poetic literature.
Salvatore di Giacomo must be put at the head of all dialectical poets of
Italy. He is very little known to English readers, because he has been
so little translated, save into German. He is the librarian of the
National Library of the Naples Museum. The subjects of his poems are
drawn from Naples and its people, its beauty and their ardency; the
realism of his verse is sober, its sentiments are healthy and true to
human nature but to the human nature of a voluptuous, passionate people.
He writes of love in all its aspects, and of death, physical, emotional,
and mental. He knows the hopes, aspirations, sympathies, longings,
customs of his fellow Neapolitans; he knows them when they are ill, when
they are happy, and when they are depressed, when they are fortunate and
when they are seeped in misfortune, and he puts them into lyrics that
they understand and that poetasters praise.
His lyrics have been collected into one volume called "Poesie." He has
been called the Robert Burns of Italy, and it is likely that he deserves
it. It is to be regretted that no one has attempted to render him in
English.
An Italian poet neglected and almost unknown during his lifetime
(1872-1919), whose literary output was very small, is slowly coming to
his estate and it is not unlikely that the coming generation will hail
Ceccardo Roccatagliata-Ceccardi as one of Italy's greatest modern poets.
"Sonetti e Poemi" contains practically all of his verse save a small
collection published when he was twenty.