Giosue Carducci

Giosuè Carducci [dʒozuˈɛ karˈduttʃi] (Valdicastello, Tuscany, 27 July 1835 - Bologna, February 16, 1907) was an Italian poet and writer.

He was the son of a country doctor. He spent his childhood in the Maremma region before moving to Pisa in 1853, where he studied Philosophy and Letters at the University. After teaching at different educational centers, from 1860 to 1904 he was Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna., a chair he held for 42 years.

Before his definitive conversion to the Catholic religion, he was a fervent opponent of the papacy, the monarchy and the sentimentality that dominated Italian literature of his time, he was the first poet to successfully adapt the classical Latin meters to poetry modern Italian, something that Rubén Darío would also try to do in the Spanish-speaking world. In all of his work, his affirmation of his personality, his rebelliousness and nonconformity —especially in his youthful days— and his militant anti-clericalism are notorious.

His first collection of verses was Juvenilia (1856–1860), which would be followed by Levia Gravia (1861–1871), the Inno to Satana (1863), Giambi ed epodi (1867–1879), Rime nuove (1871), Odi barbare (1877–1889), Rime e ritmi (1890–1897), Intermezzo (1874–1886), La canzone di Legnano (1879), Ça ira (1883) and Primizie e reliquie, published posthumously in 1928.

The Inno a Satana was printed in 1865 in Pistoia under the pseudonym Enotrio romano. With this, Carducci rejected the proposal to have a professorship on Dante Alighieri, that a law of July 3, 1877 had established in the University of Rome.

In its time it was translated into Spanish by the poet José Jurado de la Parra.

He was awarded the sixth Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906, the first Italian to receive the award.

He is a poet quoted repeatedly in The Finzi-Contini Garden by Giorgio Bassani, a novel made into a film by Vittorio de Sica (Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1971) and in his honor a crater on the planet Mercury has been named after him, the Carducci crater.