Giovanni Pascoli

Poet, Academic, professor of Greek and Latin Grammar and Italian Literature (San Mauro di Romagna [now San Mauro Pascoli], 1855 – Bologna 1912).

A life spent seeking a refuge where he could take shelter and rediscover the little boy who had not been able to enjoy much of a childhood, marked as it was by tragedy and mourning. It seems that Giovanni Pascoli was never able to cut his ties with that painful past, in which, however, he found the meaning of his life, just as it seems that he was never able to separate his story from that of Bologna, a city that hosted him during his uneasy youth, where he took his degree and which called him not once but twice to teach at its university.

GIOVANNI PASCOLI

Giovanni Pascoli was born in 1855 in San Mauro (now San Mauro Pascoli, in his honour), in the Province of Forlì-Cesena. His father Ruggero, the well-off administrator of the ‘La Torre’ estate owned by the Torlonia princes, was murdered in 1867, leaving his large family in grave difficulty and bewildered by a case that never led to the punishment of those behind the crime.

Pascoli’s numerous siblings were studying in Urbino at the Collegio degli Scolopi at the time.  They remained there until 1871, when, their mother also having died as well as their older sister, and having lost the widow’s pension for the death of their father, had to move to Rimini.

It was there that Giovanni first came into contact with the anarchy movement, which he remained involved with throughout his youth.

After attending secondary school at the Liceo Classico Giulio Cesare in Bologna and then the Liceo Classico Scolopi in Florence, he finally completed his diploma in Cesena in 1873.

That same year, the University of Bologna announced a competition for six scholarships for the Faculty of Literature, enrolment for which had been languishing for years (there had only been one student for the academic year 1866-67 and after that never more than five).

Giovanni entered and won, moving to Bologna, where he stayed at the home of a house painter in via Borgo di San Pietro and immediately formed a bond of friendship and mutual esteem with his professor, Carducci, and some of his fellow students, most importantly Severino Ferrari.

His financial straits led him to feel an acute need for social improvement, finding the right outlet in the anarchic/socialist movement led by Andrea Costa, a fellow literature student.

Soon, what had been at first mere interest bloomed into a true mission, engrossing Pascoli in committees and writing for revolutionary publications, like the periodic ‘Il Martello’ (often using pseudonyms like Dione or Zoc), eventually leading to the loss of his scholarship and his abandonment of university for nearly five years (1875-80).

In the meantime, he began to devote himself to literary activity, publishing the first poems that would later be collected in the volume Myricae in the literary magazine ‘Pagine sparse’ in 1877.

His work was well received, but he refused the publication offers from Nicola Zanichelli and Carducci, condemning himself to a long period of fasting and alms.

Carducci did not give up, however, and, showing his proverbial attention to his best students, managed to get Pascoli a temporary teaching job at the Ginnasio Guinizzelli, but he left with an appalling record of frequent absences and unavailability (he was living in via Petroni at the time).

When the Federazione Internazionale anarchica bolognese (International Anarchy Federation of Bologna) was founded in 1878, the young rebel immediately became a prominent member, even going so far as to publicly praise the attempt to assassinate the king of Italy, Umberto I – although the truth of this is unclear. The apex of his involvement in socialist movements came the following year (1879), when, along with other young people, he demonstrated outside the San Giovanni in Monte prisons (now the department of History, Culture and Civilisation), protesting the arrest of a few internationalists from Imola, ending up behind bars himself for more than three months.

What followed was a period of further despair, and he even considered suicide, but he took increasing refuge in the memory of his mother, as expressed in the poem La voce.

Moving to via Mazzini, he resumed his studies and finally, in 1882, managed to take his degree with a thesis on Alceo, supervised by the professor of Greek Literature Gaetano Pelliccioni.

That same year, by this point having distanced himself from the anarchy movements, he was initiated into the nascent Loggia ‘Rizzoli’, linked to the Società Operaia, where he found many of his professors and friends from school (Carducci, Filopanti, Saffi, Magni, Ceneri).

Thanks to the intervention of the always generous Carducci, he was immediately offered a post at the Liceo Duni di Matera, where he stayed until 1884, when he was transferred by ministerial decree to the Liceo Rossi in Massa.

Giovanni brought his sisters Ida and Maria, with whom he had an ambiguous, often obsessive, relationship, to live with him in the Tuscan city.

Again by ministerial decree, he was sent to teach at the Liceo Nicolini in Livorno in 1887, remaining until 1895.

The young teacher also started to make a name for himself through the poems that would later be collected in Myricae but were first published in 1891 in the magazine ‘Vita nuova’ (the collection was then expanded in five editions, the last of which was published in 1903) and thanks to winning the Certamen hoeufftianum competition in Amsterdam (1892), followed by twelve other triumphs.

His fame was now such that he was called to Rome to work with the Ministry of Education, positioning him to meet his fellow poets Gabriele D’Annunzio and Adolfo de Bosis, with whom he worked on the latter’s magazine Poemetti Conviviali, the first complete edition of which did not come out, however, until 1904.

The idyllic life that he had created with his small family fell apart in 1895, when Ida abandoned her siblings, “yielding” to marriage. Giovanni and Maria, “betrayed” and alone, sought a new, even smaller and more isolated refuge in Castelvecchio, a mountain village in the Province of Lucca.

A new appointment by ministerial decree in 1895 soon tore him from this idyll as well, catapulting him back to Bologna as untenured professor of Greek and Latin Grammar. In the city of his youth, anarchic leanings and instability, Pascoli and his sister moved to a house in via Belle Arti where, in spite of his reticence, his seems to have found a degree of relief.

In 1896, he participated in the celebration of Carducci’s thirty-five years of teaching, which was held in the university’s Sala dello Stabat Mater and included homages to the great writer by his former students.

Even the possibility of marriage opened up, when he got engaged to his cousin from Rimini, Imelde Morri, but his sister Maria, driven by jealousy, persuaded him against it.

When his alcoholic, troublemaker brother Giuseppe also came to Bologna, Pascoli found himself with a plausible, if criticised excuse to leave his post and return to Castelvecchio. 

His escape from Bologna, from the world, even from reason, led him to dig out an interior refuge, a place where he could rediscover the essence of his poetry. A regression that led him to the poetics of the boy, as he himself aptly put it in an article published in the magazine ‘Il Marzocco’ in 1897.

Pascoli was opening up a new literary path in Italy, an intimist, intuitive path made up of sonority and sentiment, where the child poet loses his way, leaving the main road of the supermen, the “super poets”, like Carducci and D’Annunzio.

The result was the Canti di Castelvecchio, the first edition of which was published in 1903: a collection of intimate, melancholic poems dedicated to his beloved mother.

His stay in the little Tuscan village was once again interrupted by a ministerial decree. In 1898, the two siblings left for Messina where Pascoli had been given the tenured chair in Latin Literature.

During his long period in Sicily, broken up by constant travel, Pascoli published several volumes on Dante: Minerva oscura in 1898, Sotto il velame in 1900 and La mirabile visione in 1902.

Finally, in 1903, he succeeded in securing a post in Tuscany, as professor of Latin and Greek at the University of Pisa. He remained there until 1905, when he was called back to the University of Bologna, this time by royal decree, to inherit the prestigious chair in Italian literature from Carducci. The post was originally supposed to go to his friend Severino Ferrari, who unfortunately died that same year in a psychiatric hospital.

This was an offer that Pascoli felt he could not refuse and indeed, moving in early 1906 into his new home in the quiet via dell’Osservanza, in the Bologna hills, he saw it as an opportunity for redemption. 

“And my old Bologna spoke to my heart, and seemed to be saying: ‘Don’t you see? I’m Bologna. Don’t you remember? Your youth is here. Your poor youth that you didn’t truly live – I’ve saved it for you. It’s here. There are bits of it everywhere, here, in the streets and in the squares, in houses and churches, on the old university grounds, even in [your prison cell in] San Giovanni in Monte. It’s here. You were right to come back and reclaim what you left. Take heart!’ O! were it true, young boys and girls, that I could find what I lost! I would give it to you; and I would be happy, about the gift more suitable for you, that I could give you again!”

(Odes, preface, 1906)

In his final years, Pascoli devoted himself to publishing writings from the 1890s and beyond, including Odi e Inni (1906) and Pensieri e discorsi (1907), and also published the first three parts of his historical poem Le Canzoni di Re Enzo (La canzone dell’Olifante, Il Carroccio and Il Paradiso), celebrating the glorious town resistance to the aims of Frederick II.

In 1907, Pascoli and Carducci created a new course at Bologna’s renowned Science Academy: Moral Sciences, of which Pascoli was one of the greatest exponents.

When the Italo-Turkish War broke out in Libya in 1911, he caused a stir with his talk La grande proletaria si è mossa, in which he supported the interventionist and nationalist cause (this was also the year of the three Poemetti italici), without, however, betraying his erstwhile socialist ideals of liberation of the people and the creation of a united, free population.

He was often criticised among the students, however, since a complete programme seemed to escape him and because he was unable to conjure up the passion that had been so appreciated in his predecessor. “His teaching was more moral than literary”, as if he wanted “to teach his human religion, the apostles and fathers of which were the authors studied” (Antonio Scolari).

Life had led him to melancholy and an excess of alcohol, which in turn led to his early death in 1912, when he was just fifty-six. He was protected until the end by his sister Maria, who forcefully denied that his fatal collapse was caused by cirrhosis.

Giovanni Pascoli finally found peace in his beloved refuge in Castelvecchio, where his body was brought immediately after his death.

The University of Bologna tried to bring in Gabriele D’Annunzio to take his place, but he declined the invitation, famously answering in a telegram: “The honour is great, but my love of liberty is even greater”.