[1][2] Alberto Spaini was born and, till shortly after his eighteenth birthday, grew up in Trieste, the multi-ethnic bi-lingual administrative and commercial capital of the so-called "Austrian Littoral".
He quickly became a member of a circle of friends that included Giani and (a couple of years later) Carlo Stuparich, Scipio Slataper, Italo Tavolato and Guido Devescovi.
Alongside his degree studies, the "real schooling" Spaini received in Florence came from the opportunity Prezzolini gave him to write for La Voce.
Although conventionally classified as a literary magazine, La Voce never held back from sharing insights from its contributors into the social and political challenges of the day.
[5][6] After approximately a year he transferred to Rome where he attended the university courses in German literature conducted by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese.
Fellow participants, identified by name in his letters back to Italy, included leading figures from Germany's younger generation of (mainly expressionist) writers, such as Else Lasker-Schüler, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka (who met Felice Bauer in Berlin in September 1912), Franz Werfel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke.
[2][5] Having cut his teeth in journalism between 1910 and 1913 with his contributions to La Voce as a literary critic, political columnist and writer of short stories, and with the active backing of Prezzolini, Spaini accepted a complementary position as a foreign correspondent for Il Resto del Carlino, a daily newspaper based in Bologna and at that time produced under the direction of Mario Missiroli.
[5][6] In a self-portrait piece, written half a lifetime later, Spaini would marvel at the "serenity of youth" he had displayed, aged just 20 and then 21, sailing into the project with very little appreciation of the scale of the task.
[12] The target of their indignation was an aging librarian and authority of Slavic culture called Domenico Ciampoli who had recently republished an old translation of the same Goethe novel.
In the aftermath of the literary attacks on Ciampoli's application of it to an important work by Goethe himself, the use of an intermediate language for translations into Italian - at least when the original text had been printed in German - was no longer considered acceptable.
Some were of the eighteenth and nineteenth century German classics, including several more works of Goethe, such as the novel known in English as "The Sorrows of Young Werther", the reminiscences "Italian Journey" and the "Letters to the Lady von Stein".
The fantastical fairy-tale spirit of these last two clearly found its way into three of the novels that Spaini authored on his own account during the later 1920s and early 1930s: "Bertoldo's Travels", "The Bishop's Wife" and "Malintesi".
[5] When the great powers launched the First World War in the summer of 1914 the Italian government resisted international pressure to join in with the fighting.
However, following an accident later that same year he was withdrawn from the frontline and moved to Switzerland where he lived, apparently with Rosina whom he had married in 1915, in the hill country between Bern and Zürich.
He worked closely with Anton Giulio Bragaglia's "Teatro Sperimentale degli Indipendenti" ("Independents' Experimental Theatre") in Rome after it opened in 1922, both producing theatrical texts and translating stage plays from younger generations of avant-garde German dramatists.
His Italian language translation of Wedekind's "Dance of death" ("Totentanz" / "Danza macabra") was staged in 1923, followed a couple of years later by "Wetterstein Castle".
[5][17][b] Despite his increasing predilection for translation, through the 1920s Spaini pursued his journalism career with energy, frequently credited in his contributions as a "foreign correspondent".
During the first part of the decade he was based for a time in Katowice, reporting on the Upper Silesia plebiscite and the contentious partition of the ethnically divided region that ensued.
[5] In Italy he became increasingly friendly with a number of (cautiously) independently minded journalist-intellectuals and writers such as Antonio Baldini, Massimo Bontempelli, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Emilio Cecchi and Silvio D'Amico.
It stops abruptly early in 1933, the point at which Adolf Hitler, at the end of his first week in power, appointed Hanns Johst to take over as director at the Berlin State Theatre (as it was known at that time), following the enforced resignation on 18 January 1033 of the Jewish socialist Leopold Jessner.
Later in 1944 Spaini accepted an appointment as co-director and political correspondent at "Il Giornale", a newspaper published at that time in Naples under the directorship of Carlo Zaghi.
He continued to write for a number of daily newspapers, and in 1964 released "La moglie di Noè" ("Noah's wife"), a collection of animal stories.