Antonio Fogazzaro

Antonio Fogazzaro (Vicenza, 1842 – Vicenza, 1911) was an Italian novelist and poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Liberal Catholic, he wrote in Italian, and his fiction is known for trying to reconcile faith, reason and passion in a country newly unified. He is remembered today above all for his novel The Little World of the Past.

Born into a wealthy, devout family of industrialists, Fogazzaro grew up in a household shaped by Catholicism and Italian patriotism. His father was forced into exile in Turin in 1860, and the young Antonio, who was pushed by his father to study law, read widely in German and English as well as Italian, admiring Heinrich Heine in particular. He practised law, but his real ambition was literary. After a religious crisis, he returned to Catholicism around 1873, the same period in which his literary career began with the verse romance Miranda (1874).

His first novel, Malombra (1881), was a late romantic story of gothic atmosphere, with a morbid tone and a fragile aesthete at its centre, a figure many readers saw as a self-portrait. Later novels turned to a more realistic manner, such as Daniele Cortis (1885), which deals with politics and Catholic morality, and Il mistero del poeta (1888), on love and the impossibility of its full realisation in this world. His masterpiece, The Little World of the Past (1895), is set in Valsolda on the shores of Lake Lugano. It pits a religious, dreamy man against a morally strong woman with little faith, and shows his skill at evoking landscape and inner life.

In his later years he was drawn to evolutionary theory, which he tried to reconcile with Catholicism. This brought him into conflict with the Church: Il Santo (1905) was placed on the Index in 1907, and his last novel, Leila (1910), was condemned by the Holy Office soon after publication. His reputation declined in the first half of the twentieth century, when he was often classed among the decadents. Later critics have returned to the psychological depth of his work, which many regarded as the most distinguished Italian novel since Manzoni.