19 Facts About Giovanni Papini

Giovanni Papini was an Italian journalist, essayist, novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher.

Giovanni Papini felt a strong aversion to all beliefs, to all churches, as well as to any form of servitude ; he became enchanted with the idea of writing an encyclopedia wherein all cultures would be summarized.

Giovanni Papini met William James and Henri Bergson, who greatly influenced his early works.

Giovanni Papini started publishing short stories and essays: in 1906, "Il Tragico Quotidiano", in 1907 "Il Pilota Cieco" and Il crepuscolo dei filosofi.

Giovanni Papini proclaimed the death of philosophy and the demolition of thinking itself.

Giovanni Papini briefly flirted with Futurism and other violent and liberating forms of Modernism.

In 1907 Giovanni Papini married Giacinta Giovagnoli; the couple had two daughters.

For three years Giovanni Papini was a correspondent for the Mercure de France and later literary critic for La Nazione.

Furthermore, Giovanni Papini sought to create a scandal by speculating that Jesus and John the Apostle had a homosexual relationship.

Giovanni Papini is an excellent representative of modernity's restless search for truth, and his work exhibits a refreshing independence founded, not like so much so-called independence, upon ignorance of the past, but upon a study and understanding of it.

Giovanni Papini published verse in 1917, grouped under the title Opera Prima.

In 1921, Giovanni Papini announced his newly found Roman Catholicism, publishing his Storia di Cristo, a book which has been translated into twenty-three languages and has had worldwide success.

Giovanni Papini became a teacher at the University of Bologna in 1935 when the Fascist authorities confirmed Papini's "impeccable reputation" through the appointment.

In 1937, Giovanni Papini published the only volume of his History of Italian Literature, which he dedicated to Benito Mussolini: "to Il Duce, friend of poetry and of the poets", being awarded top positions in academia, especially in the study of Italian Renaissance.

Largely discredited at the end of World War II, Giovanni Papini was defended by the Catholic political right.

Giovanni Papini's work concentrated on different subjects, including a biography of Michelangelo, while he continued to publish dark and tragic essays.

Giovanni Papini collaborated with Corriere della Sera, contributing articles that were published as a volume after his death.

Giovanni Papini had been suffering from progressive paralysis and was blind during the last years of his life.

Giovanni Papini was admired by Bruno de Finetti, founder of a subjective theory of probability, and Jorge Luis Borges, who remarked that Papini had been "unjustly forgotten" and included some of his stories in the Library of Babel.