Emanuel Carnevali

His body of work includes poetry, literary criticism, autobiography, and other prose writings.

His father was Tullio Carnevali (Lugo di Romagna, 1869), accountant-chief of the prefecture, and his mother was Matilde Piano (Turin, 1873).

After a childhood spent in Pistoia, Biella and Cossato and after the death of his mother (1908), his father enrolled him in a boarding school after remarrying and going to live with his new family in Bologna.

In 1911 Emanuel won a scholarship from the Marco Foscarini College of Venice and spent almost two years there before being expelled.

In 1913 he entered the Pier Crescenzi Technical Institute in Bologna, where he was a pupil of the literary critic and writer Adolfo Albertazzi.

[1] As he relates in his autobiography, due to frequent quarrels with his father whom he considered authoritarian and reactionary, he decided to emigrate to the United States in 1914 at only 16 years old.

During the period 1914 to 1922, he lived between New York and Chicago while working odd jobs: dishwasher, grocery boy, waiter, snow shoveller, etc., and suffering from poverty and hunger.

During this time he also wrote original poetry in English and reviews of books and theatrical plays.

His poems were published in various literary journals, including Poetry Magazine, founded in 1912 and directed by Harriet Monroe.

Suffering the effects of chronic syphilis and encephalitis lethargica, in 1922 he returned to Italy, where he lived for the last twenty years between the hospital and various pensions in Bazzano, the Policlinico of Rome and the Villa Baruzziana clinic in Bologna, where he continued to write in English.

In 1925, a selection of his works was published under the title A Hurried Man by Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions, based in Paris.

Carnevali's letters to Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Papini are published under the title Voglio disturbare l’America (1980), edited by Gabriel Cacho Millet.

The poet and critic Dana Gioia has said that Carnevali was "the first Italian writer to make a significant, if short-lived, impact on modern American poetry.