The Italian Language

Learn about the Italian language, grammar, vocabulary and culture

Updated 21 July 2008

Writers

Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950), best known for his coat and dagger novels, Scaramouche, Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, was the son of an Italian father and an English mother, both opera singers. He was born in Jesi, near Ancona, but the he and his family lived in different countries over the years, such as Portugal, Switzerland and, eventually, the United Kingdom.

Mario Puzo (1920-1999), born in New York, was the son of Neapolitan immigrants. Even though he never had any contact with the Mafia, he is best known for his novel The Godfather, Which was made into a film trilogy by Francis Ford Coppola. The subject is the Mafia in both Sicily and the United States. He also wrote the screenplay for Superman, the Movie.

Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), the celebrated Venetian playwright, moved to Paris in 1761, where he was in charge of the Théatre Italien, a theatre where only Italian plays and operas were represented. He was a favourite of the Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, retiring to Versailles, where he died.

Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland as Captain Blood and
Arabella Bishop in Michael Curtiz's 1935 film version of
Sabatini's novel Captain Blood

The Booker Prize winning Canadian novelist Michael Oudaatje (1943) sets his novel The English Patient in Italy. It was also made into a famous film directed by Anthony Minghella (1943), a director of partly Italian descent born in the Isle of Whight.

Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) sets two of his early novels in Tuscany: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room With a View (1908). The latter was made into a film by the Merchant team (James Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala).

Geoffrey Chaucer (ca 1343-1400), the author of The Canterbury Tales, is considered as the father of English literature. Besides being a poet, he was a courtier and a diplomat. In this last capacity he travelled twice to Italy. He was in Florence in 1373, where he came into contact with Boccaccio, and again in 1378 in Milan, where he was on a secret mission to the Visconti.

John Milton (1608 -1674) travelled to Italy, where a plaque celebrates his passage.

Sir Horace Walpole 1717-1797, though he never actually lived in Italy, sets his classic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) in Southern Italy.

Robert Browning (1812-1889) and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) settled in Florence. She is buried there in the Cimitero degli Inglesi.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) went at first to Pisa, before settling in Lerici. Percy died at sea, near Leghorn at 29. Mary, besides being the author of Frankenstein, was a ceaseless promoter of her late husband's work.

George Gordon Byron, 6th Lord Byron (1788–1824), before dying in Greece, the martyr of Greek independence, lived in Italy, being especially close to the Shelleys. Some of his narrative poems take place there, like Harold in Italy. Incidentally this work inspired Berlioz (see The Prix de Rome) to write a work for viola and orchestra, commissioned by Niccolò Paganini: Harold in Italy.

John Keats (1795–1821), the English Romantic poet, moved to Rome on medical grounds, as he suffered from tuberculosis. He died and is buried in there.

John Ruskin (1819–1900) was the main force responsible for the reassessment of the work of artists of the first Renaissance, such as Botticelli, and the inclusion of Florence in the guidebooks, together with Rome and Venice.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the poet and painter Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (1828-1882), better known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti or Dante Gabriele Rossetti (see Painting) was the son of an Neapolitan political exile and a half-Italian mother and grew up fluent in both English and Italian, though all his greatest poetry, like The Blessèd Damosel, is written in English. His sister, Christina Gerogina Rossetti (1830-1894) (see Painting), was also an influential poet, writing exclusively in English.

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) left England Ca 1814, going at first to France, then to Italy. He finally settled in Florence in 1821. He is buried in the Cimitero degli Inglesi, in Florence.

Frances Trollope (1780–1863), the mother or Anthony Trollope and a novelist in her own right, lived for her last 20 years in Florence, where she died and is buried.

Fjodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), the Russian novelist, reputedly wrote the The Idiot in Florence, or so the Florentines like to think, as Russian scholars deny the truth of this.

The plaque in Florence celebrating Dostoyevsky's passage

Metastasio (Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi) (1698-1782) the Italian writer and poet, is now remembered chiefly as a librettist. He began his career in Rome and Naples, first as a lawyer, then as a poet with many musical contacts. In 1729 he accepted the post of court poet at vienna, where he lived for the rest of his life. His work was intended mainly for use as opera libretti and were extremely popular in their time.

Dame Muriel Spark (1918-2006), the Scottish author of The Prime of Miss Jeane Brodie (1961), after living in Rhodesia and New York, settled in the 1970s in the Tuscan town of Civitella della Chiana, of which she was made an honorary citizen.

Axel Martin Fredrik Munthe (1857-1949) the Swedish author of The Story of San Michele, lived and worked in Paris and Rome. Enchanted by a villa in the island of Capri, opposite Naples, he bought it and hade it refurbished. The Villa San Michele, in Anacapri (the hilly centre of the island) may still be visited and is well-worth the trip.

Other writers who have been to Florence and have plaques commemorating their presence are Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) and Romain Rolland (1866-1944).

Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy (1913 - 1994) The English art historian, after a career serving as the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1967 and 1973 and of the British Museum from 1974 until 1976, concerned that scholarship on Renaissance sculpture was lagging behind that of Renaissance painting, decided to study the subject himself. He is the author of Donatello: Sculptor. He settled and the house where he lived and passed away carries a commemorative plaque.

Several of the plays of William Shakespeare (Ca. 1564-1616) take place in Italy, among which The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Verona) , The Merchant of Venice (Venice) , The Winter's Tale (Sicily), The Taming of the Shrew (Padua) Much Ado About Nothing (messina), Romeo and Juliet (Verona) and Othello (Venice).