Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) survived a famously tragic childhood, including his father’s unsolved murder, to become arguably the most important Italian poet writing at the dawn of the twentieth century. While certainly not a modernist, his almost imagistic focus on “piccole cose” (small things) and his scaling back of the era’s often overblown rhetoric both contributed enormously to the modernization of Italian poetry.
He cut it from a hedge—the breaking day sad but not cold—and turning, he began to […]
