18 Facts About Giovanni Pascoli

Giovanni Pascoli was born at San Mauro di Romagna in 1855.

In 1867, when Giovanni Pascoli was 12, his father Ruggero Pascoli was shot and killed by an assassin hiding in a ditch by the road.

Ruggero Giovanni Pascoli was returning home from the market at Cesena in a carriage drawn by a black-and-white mare.

Giovanni Pascoli studied at the University of Bologna, where his teacher and mentor was Giosue Carducci.

Giovanni Pascoli lived next to his sisters Ida and Maria, in an attempt to renew the original family, building a "nest" for the sisters and himself.

In 1894 Giovanni Pascoli was called to Rome to work for the Ministry of Public Instruction, and there he published the first version of Poemi conviviali.

When Carducci retired, Giovanni Pascoli replaced him as professor of Italian literature at the University of Bologna.

In 1912, already ill of cirrhosis, Giovanni Pascoli died of liver cancer at the age of 56 in Bologna.

In 2002, a curator discovered Giovanni Pascoli's autographed Masonic will, in the shape of a triangle, the triangle being a Masonic symbol.

However, even in that period of Positivism and scientism, Giovanni Pascoli believed that life is a mystery; only symbolic associations discovered in the humble things of nature can lead man to catch a glimpse of the truth behind mere appearances.

Giovanni Pascoli abandoned the previous era's grandiose language and rhetoric, including that of his mentor Giosue Carducci, for poetry that was simple and inspired by day-to-day life and objects.

Giovanni Pascoli wrote in both Italian and Latin; he translated English poetry.

In 1897 Giovanni Pascoli issued a detailed definition of his poetical stance, which he called poetica del fanciullino and which showed the influence of Sully and von Hartmann.

Poetry, according to Giovanni Pascoli, would be the unceasing capability to get stunned by the world, typical of childhood, secondarily connected to the expressive capabilities of the aged.

Giovanni Pascoli was known as a prose essayist and for his Dante studies.

For Giovanni Pascoli, poetry has an irrational nature and through it one can arrive at the truth of everything; the poet must be a poet-child who arrives at this truth through irrationality and intuition.

Giovanni Pascoli therefore rejects reason and, consequently, rejects Positivism, which was the exaltation of reason itself and of progress, thus arriving at decadentism.

On 21 September 1924, Giovanni Pascoli was honoured in the first visit of Benito Mussolini to Rimini as Italy's fascist dictator.