Quietude and calm settled on the island - Ivan Bunin's "Death on Capri"

“The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1915) is Ivan Bunin’s most famous story at this point, I think, although I do not remember ever seeing it anthologized anywhere.  The title character, never named “– no one really learned his name in Naples or Capri –” is taking his wife and adult daughter on a long tour of Europe.  Grown rich on the back of Chinese labor, “he decided it was time to rest.”

The first seven pages of the nineteen page story are set on the ocean liner and in Naples.  It takes another six pages to move the characters from Naples to Capri, and to get them settled in at their hotel.  The tone throughout is lightly ironic, mildly satirical, and observant:

During one of the stops he rose up on the couch, and saw a wretched mass of little stone houses with mildewed walls stacked on top of one another at the water’s edge below a rocky slope, saw boats and piles of rags, tin cans, brown nets – and fell into despair, remembering that this was the authentic Italy to which he’d come in order to enjoy himself.

In the gentleman’s defense, the sea between Naples and Capri is rough and he is seasick.  Even Italy loses its savor when seasick.  They land: “The earth smells sweet in Italy after rain, and the scent of every island is distinct.”  That’s more like it.

Let me add up those pages.  Bunin has six pages to go.  What is this story going to be about?  Will the gentleman learn a lesson about what it means to live, toe really live (“He hadn’t lived before – he had only existed”)?  Will he have an epiphany of some kind?

Not exactly.  Reading the newspaper before dinner (“a few sentences about the endless Balkan War”) he instead has a stroke, and dies.  Most of the remaining pages are about what happens in a nice Italian hotel when a guest dies.  The family members appear, but as problems to be managed.  Soon enough, they are all, alive or dead, back on the ocean liner, bound for home.  “Quietude and calm settled on the island in its wake.”  Then comes a paragraph as startling as any in the story:

Two thousand years ago that island was inhabited by a man who somehow held power over millions of people.  He gratified his lust in ways that are repugnant beyond words, and carried out immeasurable atrocities against his subjects.

Why the change of scale?  Why has Emperor Tiberius appeared in the story?  Because tourist to Capri visit “the ruins of his stone house on one of the island’s highest peaks.”  The trip is arduous enough to require a good night’s sleep, and now that “the dead old man from San Francisco – who’d planned to make the trip with all the others, but wound up only frightening them with an unpleasant reminded about mortality – had now been sent away to Naples, the guests slept very soundly.”

The long last paragraph is like something out of Kipling, with a lot of detail – well, not a Kipling level of detail – about the ocean liner’s engines and driveshafts, and about the dancing in the ballroom, where no one thinks or knows about “what lay deep, deep below them, in the blackness of the hold.”

The only hint that the story is written by a Russian is the appearance on Capri of “a few disheveled, bearded Russian who had settled on the island, all of them wearing glasses and looking absent-minded, the collars raised on their threadbare coats.”  One of these Capri Russians is presumably the author.  I mean of course the only hint in the English version, translated by Graham Hettlinger.

Why not earlier? Why at such cost? - Goethe's Italian study abroad

For all of Goethe’s status, for all of his writing, all of his learning, Italian Journey is a chronicle of firsts.  His first view of the sea, for example, which occurs in Venice:

Now, at last, I have seen the sea with my own eyes and walked upon the beautiful threshing floor of the sand which it leaves behind when it ebbs. (96)

He collects shells and watches, “for hours” the “bizarre and graceful performance of” of the crabs as they try and fail to hunt limpets (100).

Goethe has his first encounter with a Roman ruin, and with a Palladio building, and with any number of other things he had only read about.

I have spent the day looking and looking.  It is the same in art as in life.   The deeper one penetrate, the broader grows the view.  (109)

The trip really is something like Goethe’s college study abroad in Italy, a German major with a minor in art history, except that he is a highly non-traditional student.

How different all this is from our saints, squatting on their stone brackets and piled one above the other in the Gothic style of decoration, or our pillars which look like tobacco pipes, our spiky little towers and our cast-iron flowers.  Thank God, I am done with all that junk for good and all.  (95)

And Goethe has only reached, at this point, Venice!  Italian Journey has a great deal of interest as a pure travel book, especially its middle third covering Naples and Sicily, but the intellectual core of the book is in the fifty pages about Goethe’s first visit to Rome.  Everything about the classical world, Renaissance art, and to some degree living Catholicism creates a tumult.  Every idea is shaken.

Everything in me is suddenly beginning to merge clearly.  Why not earlier?  Why at such a cost?  (173)

Goethe is described a crisis point in his own development, his Bildung.  “I am not here simply to have a good time, but to devote myself to the noble objects about me, to educate myself before I reach forty” (137).  In his own work, the ideas from Italian Journey are most clearly expressed in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-6), where Italy is given enormous symbolic power as the nearly mythical “land of flowering lemon trees,” as Christopher Middleton translates the “Mignon” poem – go to p. 28 of Italian Journey to see Goethe meet Mignon and the harpist in the flesh – the land of fulfilment, aesthetic, intellectual, and sexual.  German readers thus knew about all this twenty years before Italian Journey itself was published; thus we see versions of the idea appear in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir (1815-6), for example.

The Goethean juxtaposition of Italy and the repressed north recurs many times, and not just in German literature.  It is amusing to read E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) in this context, with the heroine finally able to cast off her Victorian chains via the influence of lively Italian murders and violets.  It took longer for Goethe to free himself, and the result was replacing a pursuit of fulfillment with an embrace of renunciation – classicism in place of romanticism, realism in place of idealism, and on like that.  German literature would never be the same.

Introducing Goethe's Italian Journey by means of a throat-clearing introduction to the whole Goethe thing

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had had two previous opportunities to visit Italy.  He swerved away, though.  Italy was too symbolically powerful.  One of those opportunities was replaced with Goethe’s installation as the friend and right-hand man of the Duke of Weimar when Goethe was twenty-six and perhaps the most famous writer in Europe.  The Duke had recognized, through Goethe’s celebrity, his enormous cognitive abilities.  Sometimes I think he must have been the smartest person in literary history.  In literature, smarts only gets ya so far.

After his thirty-seventh birthday party in 1786, Goethe sneaks away to Italy, informing only the Duke.  He stays for a year and a half – a little more.  His account is in Italian Journey, published thirty years later in 1816 as a strange hybrid book of letters, diaries, memories, alterations, and elisions.  Why thirty years later?  Because, in the last twenty years of his life, Goethe was kind of emptying his desk into books.  Plus, he had been publishing his memoirs.

Goethe financed his extended leave of absence through the advance on an eight-volume collected edition of his works.  His published works, at this point, amounted to four volumes.  Four volumes would contain new work.  This is how enormous Goethe’s stature was – four volumes, unwritten, no problem.  Of course eventually Green Henry spends forty days reading a fifty-volume set of Goethe.  Long way to go.

I had been able to send the first four volumes to the publisher and was intending to send the last four.  Some of their contents were only outlines of works and even fragments, because to tell the truth, my naughty habit of beginning works, then losing interest and laying them aside, had grown worse with the years and all the other things I had to do. (Sep. 8, 1786, p. 34)

Thus Faust, Part I, which is mentioned in Italian Journey as something Goethe will finish up any minute now, does not appear in print for another twenty years.  Part II is published twenty-five years after that!

One irony is that the Italian journey kills Goethe’s literary production for almost a decade, until he meets Friedrich Schiller.  It takes him that long to absorb everything.  Goethe’s life often feels like he planned it with the knowledge that he would live to eighty-two.  Take a decade off of literature – no big deal.  There will still be fifty volumes by the end.  Skip two chances at Italy – no worry, he’ll go when the time is exactly right.

What is Goethe absorbing?  Classical and Renaissance art history.  The fact that art has a history, even.  Architecture, Christianity, the sea, a long growing season for plants, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.  Sex – the great omission from Italian Journey is Goethe’s Roman girlfriend, a waitress and widow.  But he had written about her in the warm Roman Elegies (1795).

It is such a pain dealing with Goethe.  In the years before Wuthering Expectations, when I spent my time in the 18th century, I read maybe ten volumes of Green Henry’s fifty, and I have trouble writing about any given work of Goethe’s without addressing the enormous phenomenon of Goethe.

Tomorrow, then, I’ll just dive into the book.  Goethe’s study abroad in Italy.

Quotations are and will be from the Penguin Classics edition, translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer – mostly the latter, I think.

Sing of the needs / Of this our century; sing our ripe hope. - questions, scraps, oddities, and more books - an Italian hodgepodge

The title is ironically misappropriated from Leopardi’s Canto XXXII, “Palinode to the Marchese Gino Capponi,” in the J. G. Nichols version.  This final post on Italian literature will be un guazzabuglio.  More questions than answers.  I plan to, as the year goes on, drop in random Italian words that I have looked up on the internet, to add sapore and give l'impressione that I know some Italian, which I do not.

Would it be worthwhile to do something with opera?  Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, composers for the popular musical theater, were better known and are arguably greater artists than any of the writers I will be reading.  Yet their librettists are obscurities, even the one whose name I know, Arrigo Boito, author of librettos for several of Verdi’s late works.  If there a literary approach to the operas, which are, among other things, plays?  Do I know what I am doing?  Is it worth the effort?

A couple of writers are puzzling to me, too.  Gabriele D’Annunzio was for a time a giant, rich and famous and wild, author of a huge number of books in numerous styles and forms.  He was, at least in his later life, a fascist loon.  He and his followers, for example, seized a Croatian city in 1919 in order to do who knows what – the Italian Regency of Carnaro, with D’Annunzio as Il Duce.  “The charter designated ‘music’ to be one of the fundamental principles of the Fiume State,” (from previous link).  This sort of thing damages a writer’s reputation, it turns out, but the bad result for me is not that I have anything against reading the works of crazy people with bad ideas – oh no, quite the contrary – but rather that I have no idea which books are thought to be good (and are available in English, and are available to me).

Another fascist, the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, presents a similar problem, but in his case I suspect a little more that his writings have become more interesting as intellectual history than as art.  Ford Madox Ford says I should read King Bombance and Mafarka the Futurist, which have better titles than D’Annunzio novels like The Flame of Life and The Triumph of Death.

Does anybody remember me mentioning the series of adventure novels about a Malaysian pirate by Emilio Salgari, “without whom there would be no Italian, French, Spanish, or Latin American Literature” says Carlos Fuentes.  An unlikely claim, but how could I not be curious?

A friendly reader has emailed to suggest I try Edmondo De Amici’s Cuore (1886), a hugely popular novel about a schoolboy; Ford Ford likes it, too.  Another De Amici novella available in English is titled Love and Gymnastics (1892).  Its library catalog classifications are “Women Gymnasts – Fiction” and “Love Stories,” so the title might be accurate.  This does not sound promising, but it has a foreword by Italo Calvino!

Also recommended by this thoughtful reader: more Sicilian fiction, including The Viceroys (1894) by Federico De Roberto, a Sicilian epic, and stories by Maria Messina, an adept of Giovanni Verga who specialized in tales about Sicilian women.  Verga, De Roberto, Messina, and then Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), which is set during the same period – that could be an interesting chain of books.  Cuore and The Viceroys seem to follow that gigantic Nievo novel.  There are lots of stories to tell with books.

There is no way I will read all of this, everything I have mentioned over the past few days, not this year and not ever, but I have a lot to play with.  Please feel free to give me more, more titles and writers and paths.  The ideal solution is that someone else reads Emilio Salgari and King Bombance and so on and writes them up for me.  Thanks in advance.

Finally, I have been clear enough, I hope, about what I am not reading, an important limit because as usual I want to invite you to join me on a book if something seems to fit into whatever path you are following, if you just moments ago were thinking “I have been meaning to read Love and Gymnastics!”  Let me know; we will find a time; it will all work out somehow.

Now every heart is glad, and far and wide / Rises once more the rumour / of work as it once did - when Italian literature acquired an Italy

I have switched to the J. G. Nichols translation of Leopardi.  The title is from Canto XXIV, “The Calm after the Storm.”  I have finally gotten to the point where there is a united Italy.  And Italian literature expands.

Giovanni Verga – I want to revisit and read more of his stories of hard times in Sicily, like those in Little Novels of Sicily (1883), and I also want to try at least one of his novels, either The House by the Medlar Tree (1881) or Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889) or both.

Luigi Pirandello was also from Sicily.  The major plays for which he is best known are from the 1920s and 1930s, too late for me – as  usual I want to choke off my reading somewhere around World War I – but The Late Mattia Pascal, a novel, is early, from 1904.  Somebody will have to tell me what else is especially good.  I like the sound of Shoot: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1915).  Pirandello is the first Nobelist I will mention in this post.

Grazia Deledda (she’s the second) is Sardinian.  I would likely enjoy her novels just for their unusual setting, but I assume they have more to offer than that.  After the Divorce (1902) and Elias Portulu (1903) are in my local library, which is encouraging.  Deledda is another reason my attention had turned to Italy.

Matilde Serao is associated with Rome and Naples – I’m back on the boot – where she was a journalist and novelist.  The fairly recent short story collection Unmarried Women looks most promising to me, but there are a large number of novels in English published a hundred years ago.  Ford Madox Ford, whose taste is eccentric but who seems to have read everything, recommends Conquest of Rome, Desire of Life, and In the Country of Jesus (see The March of Literature. p. 859).  Unlikely, but life is full of surprises.

I think of Italo Svevo as a 20th century writer because of Zeno’s Conscience (1923), but his first two novels, A Life (1892) and As a Man Grows Older (1898), are much earlier.  I have read the latter but remember nothing more than that I thought it was pretty good.  I would appreciate advice on the former.  Svevo at this point was not actually in Italy, since Trieste was part of Austria.  Another marginal region raising its voice.

Back to Tuscany, the old center of Italy, to remind anyone interested of the Pinocchio (1883) readalong at Simpler Pastimes scheduled for later this month.  Just 200 pages, including illustrations, written for tiny little children.  So easy to join in.

The poets are more of a problem.  20th century Italian poetry strikes me as very strong – Italian fiction, too – but the period before the war is either weaker or poorly represented in English.

The great figure is Giosuè Carducci (Nobel #3), but even in Italian he seems to have lost some of his status, as if squeezed between the great 20th century poets and Leopardi.  The 1994 Selected Poems shows off Carducci well.  It includes his long ode Hymn to Satan (1865), which is not what the title suggests.  One of Carducci’s major collections, The Barbarian Odes (1877-89), is also available in English, but it is one of the worst translations I have ever come across.

A number of poets began publishing during or just after the war.  I hope to read Dino Campana, who wrote just one wild visionary book, Orphic Songs (1914), then, sadly, spent the rest of his life in mental hospitals.  I have my eye on Umberto Saba, too.  Move the cutoff just a bit later and lots of interesting writers pop up.

Look how efficient I was today.  Tomorrow I will end with the hard cases.  If you have advice on Gabrielle D’Annunzio or Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, let’s save it for a day – I do want it.  Then I will browse through some books I won’t read and take a glance at the 20th century.

Five days for all of this.  In my defense, it is an exciting literature.  Even in the 19th century, exciting.

Now that Italian valor lies uprooted, one huge ruin - Leopardi, Belli, Manzoni, Nievo

I went to a different Leopardi poem, Canto VI, “Bruto Minore, ” p. 57 in Galassi.  Giacomo Leopardi is the great poet and essayist of pessimism.  I am tempted to go on and on about him, but I should save that for a longer treatment.

One inspiration for turning to Italian literature was to take a crack at the 2010 Jonathan Galassi translation of Leopardi’s Canti (1818-35), which is proving to be ideal as a study guide.  The translation is on the literal side, and not so poetic.  The J. G. Nichols translations from 1994 are more poetic.  Nichols matches each poem to a prose selection from elsewhere in Leopardi’s gigantic corpus, from his brilliantly ironic essays and dialogues or his enormous ragbag book Zibaldone.

The latter appeared in English last year, almost 2,600 pages by a team of translators, quite a feat.  A sane reader will want to start with the selections assembled by Leopardi in the (short) book Pensieri, and to the Canti, and the Moral Essays, and then will want to return to them again and again, until he decides to write a monograph on Leopardi, and only then will he want to read Zibaldone, although in Italian, obviously.

You give Zibaldone a try and tell me how it goes.  I’m not going to read it.

Giuseppe Belli was a contemporary of Leopardi’s, but otherwise a polar opposite.  He wrote satirical sonnets, most profane, obscene, or both, in Romanish, the Roman dialect.  You may have noticed that every writer I have mentioned so far has been from northern Italy.  Belli stretches Italian literature to Rome for me.  The rough, crackly Harold Norse translation is a great treat – he moves the dialect into Brooklynese to good effect – but these five poems recently done up by Charles Martin give the flavor of Belli.

Two early novels, both candidates for Greatest Italian Novel.  I have read Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827 / 1842) twice and do not plan to revisit it now – someday, I hope – but I recommend it highly.  It is a strange book, a mix of sentimentalism and grit, Catholic apologetics and action.  It’s structure is odd, its characterization is odd.  It is a historical novel, set during a 17th century Austrian invasion of northern Italy.  The plague scenes are horrifying.  With Decameron, this means two of the greatest prose fictions in Italian are about plague epidemics.

The other novel.  I was poking around on the internet trying to find a novel I had looked through in a library.  Success!  The Castle of Fratta by Ippolito Nievo, which I was surprised to discover was only an abridgment of a much longer novel, Confessions of an Italian (1867), which I was even more surprised to see will be published in a complete 928 page translation in the United States in three weeks.  Which I took as a sign that I should take a swing at it.  No idea what I am getting into.  The novel has maps and a timeline and a list of characters.  The list of characters includes a dog.  Is it an Italian War and Peace?  Or an Italian The Count of Monte Cristo?  Or, like The Betrothed, something unique.  Italo Calvino loves the book, but he is not to be trusted, since he, like me, likes everything.

Aside from writing a thousand page novel when he was 27, Nievo was a revolutionary and follower of Garibaldi, a real adventurer, who sadly drowned in a shipwreck, age 29, before he had found a publisher.  There’s some Italian valor.

one man unworthy of his cowardly age - Alfieri, Goldoni, and Foscolo - 700 words and I can only cover three writers

What is Italian literature?  I ignored the question; it is an important one for this literature.  These judgments are always retrospective: Italian literature is what people interested in the subject treat as Italian literature.  But I am not only working with a conventional contemporary idea, but a central question going back to Dante, at the least.  What is the Italian language?  What is Italy?

Yesterday I glanced at some of the highlights of almost three hundred years of arguing about these questions, the extraordinary run from Dante Alighieri to the visionary poet Tommaso Campanella, who gets us into the 17th century.  Something happens to the literature then; the life sputters out of it.  My glib explanation is the Counter-Reformation.  But around 1609, Claudio Monteverdi perfected and popularized the form of musical theater we for some reason call opera, and if anything the cultural prestige of Italian music only increased.  There was no obvious lack of, to use a dubious metaphor, cultural energy in northern Italian kingdoms and cities.

I don’t know what happened to Italian literature.  Spanish literature caught the same flu about fifty years later and took two hundred years to recover.

My next Italian landmark is the Venetian comic playwright Carlo Goldoni in the mid-18th century, author of The Servant of Two Masters (1743) and dozens of other comedies.  I read a couple over the weekend, including the recent adaptation by Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) that was such a big hit in London.  That is one funny play.  I’ll write about these soon.

Then there is the proto-Romantic Count Vittorio Alfieri, founder of Italian tragedy, possibly the only Italian tragedian of consequence.  He is a giant in Italian but not in English, and I can guess why – first, English barely has room for its own tragedies, and second, Alfieri’s almost singular dramatic theme was the overthrow of tyrants, which may have more juice in Italy and France than in England or the United States.

I’ve read his best known  play, Saul (1782), about the overthrow of a tyrant, and am now reading his posthumous (1806) Autobiography, about the triumph of a tyrant.  I have gotten to some good stuff, but not to the good stuff, e.g.:

… claiming to be a democrat because he never struck his servants with anything but his open hand, yet stretching out his valet with a bronze candlestick because the valet pulled his hair slightly while combing it…  and then sleeping – or claiming to sleep – with his bedroom door always open so that the valet might come in and, in revenge, murder him in his sleep.  (Ford Madox Ford on p. 655 of The March of Literature, first ellipses mine, second his)

A big personality.  It might make similar sense to read a couple more autobiographies contemporary with Alfieri, the Memoirs of Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte or more temptingly the massive Story of My Life of Giacomo Casanova, but I doubt that will happen.

Finally, the 19th century.  I plan to revisit to major figures from Italian Romanticism.  One is Ugo Foscolo, a genuine revolutionary and  fine poet although with a lyrical gift that has perhaps defeated his translators.  I remember many years ago running across a website with some lovely versions of Foscolo’s Graces (1803-1822) but I cannot find it now.  Foscolo also wrote The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802), a novella that is a conceptual politicized Italianization of The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I hope to revisit it and see if it is as clever as I remember.  Or impassioned, or propagandistic, or whatever it is.

And then there is Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi.  The title quotation is again from Leopardi, from the same poem I used yesterday (p. 39), and is a description of Alfieri.

                                           He was the first to go
down into the ring alone, and no one followed,
for idleness and brutal silence now own us most of all.

The idea that Leopardi can be described as idle or silent is hilarious.  But look how long I have gone on.  I will start with Leopardi tomorrow.  I gotta pick up the pace.  At this rate – well, pretty soon I’ll get to books I haven’t read.  My ignorance should constrain the babble.

The strength and valor of Italianness - early modern Italian literature, a reading list

In 2015, I am concentrating on Italian literature.  Unlike some other reading projects I have pursued here – Yiddish, Scottish, and Austrian, and to some arguable extent Portuguese and Scandinavian – there is a substantial and, why deny it, superior early modern literature available in English that I have already explored and do not plan to reread right now.

I decided to make a list of the Italian books I think of as the best, or most instructive, from the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, when Italian literature was the glory of Europe, the literature that writers in other languages imitated.  I have made a vague resolution to make more lists.  I love lists.

1.  Dante Alighieri, Inferno (c. 1320).  I have read this book several times in several translations, but the entire Divine Comedy only once.  Inferno is so rich, in characters, imagination, and ideas.

2.  Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere (complete by Petrarch’s death in 1374), a selection, not necessarily a long one.  Many of Europe’s greatest poets will spend the next three hundred years modifying Petrarch.  It is hard to imagine what English, French, or Spanish poetry would have been like in his absence.  Perhaps this is a bad thing, but it is what happened.

3.  Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (c. 1353 – 14th century dating is an aggravation).  My Musa and Bondanella translation has a page describing possible abridgments, but I say read it all.  A hundred little stories, plus that extraordinary prologue about the Black Plague.

4.  Ludivico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1532 for the final version).  A crazy fantasy epic in eight-line stanzas, “a poem that refuses to begin and refuses to end” as Italo Calvino wrote*, but despite its length who would want less of it?

5.  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (c. 1532).  A great piece of satire, the foundation of political science, and more.  The Norton Critical Edition put together by Robert M. Adams is the greatest critical edition I have ever come across.  Stated so baldly, that sounds like a silly thing about which to have an opinion.

6.  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Mandrake (1524).  A play, a comedy, not the sort of thing associated with Machiavelli now, but a little masterpiece.

7.  Gaspara Stampa, Poems (complete by 1554).  The greatest woman poet in Italian, perhaps; a Petrarchan; in her best poems as good as Petrarch.

8.  Michelangelo Buonnaroti, Poems (complete by 1564), a selection.  In a handful of poems, another rival of Petrarch (and Stampa); in bulk, rough and repetitive, although he does have the advantage of original subject matter, since who else could write a credible poem about painting the Sistine Chapel?  The ideal translation of Michelangelo’s poems would be an anthology by many different translators.

9.  Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters (1568), some reasonable selection of the best parts, which by chance or design would include the most famous artists.  I believe Penguin Classics publishes a good one.

10.  Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography (1558-63).  A crazy genius tells his crazy adventures.  Astounding, funny, ridiculous, irritating.  I’m not sure why this book is not more commonly encountered on book blogs.  I understand that for many readers, poetry is akin to poison, and half of this list is poetry.  That I get.  But Cellini’s book is so much fun.

It is by chance that this list has ten entries.  The next set of books I would list (Castiglione, Tasso, more Dante, etc.) are more – not more advanced – more work, or are helped by more context.  I have not read all that many more Italian books from the Renaissance than I am listing – another dozen – which makes this list absurd.  But that’s all right.

As usual, I plan to invite those interested to read along with me, but, honestly anyone who has not read the above should read the above, which I am not planning to read, and not, with a couple of exceptions, what I do plan to read, lists of which are forthcoming.

The post’s title is from “To Angelo Mai on His Finding the Manuscript of Cicero’s De re publica,” the third poem of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti, lines 24 and 25 of Jonathan Galassi’s 2010 translation.  Leopardi is one of the exceptions.

*  “The Structure of Orlando Furioso” in The Uses of Literature (1980), tr. Patrick Creagh, p. 162.