The Laureate of Love and Solitude ItalyStories.com Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, was born in Arezzo in 1304 and became one of the decisive figures in the transition from the medieval world to Renaissance humanism. Poet, scholar, collector…
ItalyStories.com Salvatore Quasimodo stands among the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century, a writer whose voice changed profoundly as Europe itself changed around him. Born in Modica, Sicily, in 1901, he grew up in a landscape of stone…
ItalyStories.com Alda Merini occupies a singular place in modern Italian literature. Poet, memoirist, performer, public personality, and survivor of long periods of psychiatric hospitalization, she transformed suffering into a language at once lyrical, ironic, sensual, religious, and fiercely personal. Her…
Giuseppe Ungaretti changed Italian poetry by learning how much could be said with very little. His lines are often short, sometimes reduced to a few words suspended in white space, yet within that apparent simplicity lies an extraordinary density of…