[3] He was educated at the Marco Foscarini Lyceum in Venice and at the University of Bologna, where his teacher was the great poet Giosuè Carducci.

[4] In 1897 he was called by Senator Francesco Brioschi to teach Italian literature in the preparatory school of the Polytechnic University of Milan.

In 1918 Panzini moved to Rome, where he taught at the Istituto Leonardo da Vinci until 1924 and then at the Liceo Terenzio Mamiani.

[4] A prolific writer, Panzini published some forty-six volumes of narrative, belles-lettres, and literary, historical, and linguistic studies.

His style, however influenced by contemporary decadentism, is delicate and lyrical, at the opposite extreme from the poetic and rhetorical complexities of D'Annunzio.

His reverence for Homer, Catullus, Hesiod, Vergil, Boiardo, and Ariosto (to mention a few of his favorite authors) is reflected in the pages of the numerous books he wrote during his life.

[9] His style, often worked with a proverbial fine artist's file, was carefully chiseled so as to translate into literature the idyllic and pastoral world he longed for.

[9] His sentimental and ironic sketches, stories and travel impressions (La lanterna di Diogene, 1909; Santippe, 1914; Novelle d'ambo i sessi, 1918; Viaggio di un povero letterato, 1919; Il Mondo è Rotondo, 1926), and various novels and tales were widely circulated after World War I and during the first years of the Fascist regime.

[11] Panzini also penned several historical works, including a famous biography of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour.