Count Gabriele Baldini (1860–1916), his father, was a minor aristocrat, originally from Santarcangelo in Romagna,[4] and employed for many years by the Ministry for Public Works, notably in connection with the administration of contracts for railway development.

During the early years of the twentieth century these men, together, formed the nucleus of a cultural revival, mainly centred around various avant-garde magazines and journals, of which probably the best known was and is "La Voce*, published in Florence between 1908 and 1916.

[1][8][9] Baldini's first published work appeared in 1912 in another literary journal, "Lirica", founded earlier that same year by Arturo Onofri and Umberto Fracchia.

[1][11][12] In 1915 Baldini became a regular contributor to the Italian right-of-centre irridentist newspaper L'Idea Nazionale which had recently switched from weekly to daily publication.

His contributions consisted of a series of "passeggiate" (literally, "gentle recreational walks, seldom undertaken alone, and generally involving mutually agreeable conversation) or "vedute romane" ("vistas of Rome").

[14] After Italy entered World War I in May 1915, Baldini joined the army during the summer of 1915, initially as a private soldier, but he was quickly promoted to the rank of an infantry officer.

[16] For L'Illustrazione Italiana he also sent back from the frontline a series of "dialoghetti" and "storielle" (short dialogues and stories) under the pseudonym "Gatto Lupesco" (loosely, "Wolf-Cat") which enabled him to pull together, in 1918, another book, "Nostro purgatorio", using his experiences as a war correspondent.

[1] Baldini teamed up in 1919 with a number of other journalist-critics, most of whom had been his university contemporaries, to found a new monthly literary review magazine, La Ronda, which was published in Rome between 1919 and 1923.

Baldini's contributions also appeared, as they had before Italy became engaged in the war-time fighting, in L'Idea Nazionale, consisting of reviews, critical profiles and literary moralisings in varying proportions, but always crisp and razor sharp in their syntax and arguments.

[1][18] Between 1920 and 1922 Baldini was abroad for much of the time, employed as private secretary to General De Marinis, who had been sent to command the Inter-allied governance and plebiscite commission in Upper Silesia.

His writing passed the so-called Elzeviro test, at once erudite, sharply to the point, rich and free in its use of vocabulary, at once elegant and derogatory, and yet never deviating very far from a conversational genre.

"Nuova Antologia" had been founded in 1866, and while it retained much of its reputation, there was a widespread view among a younger generation of scholars that it had failed to recover its momentum during the confused years following the end of World War I, carefully distancing itself from the lively political debate that was a feature of the early 1920s.

He also resurrected "Melafumo", using his alter ego to reprise a series of commentaries and confessions for radio audiences, switching back and forth between melancholy memories and contemporary ironies.

[24] In 1954 he was involved, along with Enrico Gianeri, Mario Sertoli and Tem Agostini, in the launch of another review magazine, "Cronache d'altri tempi" ("Chronicles of former times").

Other early works, including "Maestro Pastoso", show the writer struggling to find his own voice, or more precisely trying to reconcile the tension between his lyrical-autobiographical leadings and the objective narrative form to which both critical convention and his own classical education drew him.

To some extent it was the cold externally imposed realities of World War I, and his participation in it, that enforced some level of synthesis, and he learned to adapt his style more seamlessly than in his early works to the differing requirements of the subject matter.

The critic Giacinto Spagnoletti describes "Michelaccio" as the fruit of an effervescent fantasy, reflecting the good natured approach associated with Baldini's overall outlook on life.

He sees the protagonist as a character drawn straight out of the Commedia dell'arte, but then filtered through Baldini's linguistic pastiche, redolent of the author's ancestral provenance in Romagna to the north, and of his Roman upbringing.

In his writing he displays rare harmonious blends of classical and modern prose, of the elevated and the robustly popular, of elegant and rudely unkempt: neologisms and dialect words are incorporated seamlessly and in most cases unnoticed by the reader.

His use of full stops / periods reduced over the years, and the prose remained unfashionably light on other forms of punctuation, airy and whimsical but tightly connected in terms of underlying syntactical structure.