The family had their home in the city center among the narrow streets between the Porta San Gallo and the cathedral, but Cesare Cecchi came originally from the countryside: he worked in an Ironmonger's store.

[3] It was an unusual achievement for one from a relatively impoverished background and he was rewarded by being sent to take a holiday with an uncle of his father's who lived at San Quirico d'Orcia, a hill-town on the far side of the neighbouring Province of Siena.

[8] He made sketches of a number of pictures that particularly interested him and took the opportunity to make the acquaintance of Giani Stuparich and Diego Garoglio, who were teachers of Giovanni Papini, and who provided him with advice on his further reading.

[6] Although Cecchi's progression from humble beginnings to nationally respected literary and arts scholar reflected his own remarkable talent, energy and determination, it was also a tribute to Florence, which during the early years of the twentieth century was among the most open and intellectually lively cities in Italy.

With friends such as these, it is not entirely surprising that in 1903 Emilio Cecchi made what some regard as his own critical debut, with an article entitled "Il concerto", which appeared under the pseudonym "Aymerillot" in the review magazine Leonardo.

[3] In 1911 Emilio Cecchi married Leonetta Pieraccini (1882 - 1977),[12] an artist and the daughter of a physician from Poggibonsi a little town set in the wine country approximately midway between Florence and Siena.

However, he increasingly found himself in opposition to editorial decisions by the La Voce under its editor in chief, his fellow Florentine Giuseppe De Robertis.

[3] Although using "Tribuna" for his feuding with antagonists in the literary journals was no doubt an effective way to raise his profile among Rome's intellectuals, it was not necessarily Cecchi's most important work during this period.

Meanwhile, his "History of nineteenth century English literature" ("Storia della letteratura inglese nel secolo XIX") on which in one way and another he had been working since at least as far back as 1903, was published in Milan.

[3] Despite the formidable energy he devoted to networking, it was only on 15 December 1915, while in Rome on leave from the frontline, that Cecchi had his first meeting with the man whose poetry he had eulogised in print, Dino Campana.

Along with Jahier, those with whom he was in contact through these years included Michele Cascella, Riccardo Bacchelli, Benedetto Croce (who valued his contributions to his magazine "La Critica") and Gaetano Salvemini.

The "wise" (and in several cases strikingly young) men who created La Ronda were engaged in a mission to return to older literary traditions, following the excesses of the Avant-garde.

Cecchi was also by temperament a cautious and conservative man, but he was also driven by intellectual rigour which was reflected in a determination to apply a scholarly and evidence-driven approach in his articles.

[3] More important than the philosophical tensions and contradictions between the contributors to La Ronda was the fact that some of Italy's best young literary commentators had the freedom to follow their own intellectual paths, which especially in the case of Cecchi meant satisfying the constant desire for enquiry and research.

"Pesci rossi" consists of seventeen beautifully crafted prose pieces (actually eighteen, since one in a merger of two originally separate essays) produced by Cecchi between 1916 and 1919.

[3] The topics are diverse: public and private events, sometimes seemingly inconsequential, things read, people met, personal memories, observations of nature concerning plants or animals.

[22] Between 15 July 1921 and 30 November 1923 he was contributing a weekly column to "Tribuna", in a section entitled "Libri nuovi e usati" ("Books new and second-hand": The title was later recycled and used for a volume of Cecchi essays published in 1958.)

Both from his published contributions to literary criticism and from the many notebooks in which he collected his thoughts, it is possible to detected an attitude of "dignified liberal detachment" during the early years of Fascism.

[3] In 1925, as Mussolini's polarising tendencies had their effect, Cecchi was among those who added his signature to Benedetto Croce's Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, a somewhat reactive - and in the context of subsequent events cautious - document which nevertheless represented a reproach to the populist enthusiasm that had carried the Fascists to power.

[24] It is worth bearing in mind that the "manifesto" to which Cecchi added his signature was produced less than a year after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti by fascist thugs had served notice that the relaxed attitude to the more unsavoury aspects of Fascism that had hitherto been mainstream among Italian intellectuals was perhaps not the easy option it might once have seemed.

[3][29] Naturally he shared his experiences and impressions with readers of the Corriere della Sera and - mostly posthumously - with scholars accessing his copious legacy of well-filled notebooks.

[3] In 1942 Cecchi used his literary celebrity to endorse the publication of "Americana", a compilation from contemporary American "narratori" (loosely, "story tellers") that had been put together by Elio Vittorini, an outspoken Milanese critic of Mussolini.

Cecchi adapted the book to the political and military situation of the times by substituting for Vittorini's original an introduction denouncing the "letteratura impegnata" (loosely, "politicised literature") and "democracy" of the United States.

Later biographers, while admiring of his scholarly abilities and energies, and in personal terms sympathetic, have nevertheless felt it necessary to adopt an apologetic tone in respect of what many would construe as Cecchi's political misjudgements during the closing chapters of the Mussolini era.

[3] During the 1930s and early 1940 Cecchi also worked closely with Giovanni Gentile on the "Enciclopedia Italiana" contributing, in particular, numerous entries on the arts and literature to Appendix II (1939-1948) of it.

He had been using his newspaper columns in Italy to write about the cinema, recognising the potential of the new art-form, and commending in particular the work of the young Italian movie directors Alessandro Blasetti and Mario Camerini.

[35] However, Ludovico Toeplitz who had appointed him was finding himself under increasing pressure from the government, who were keen to take more of a "hands-on" role with respect to Italy's leading film studio.

[13] His screenwriting output peaked during the early 1940s, possibly reflecting a reduced demand for literary criticism in newspapers and magazines under wartime conditions.

[3] Following a "brief flirtation" with the recently launched magazine Tempo, the publication to which Cecchi routinely contributed during his final two decades became the Corriere della Sera, published in Milan and distributed nationally.

Foreign publications for which he wrote regularly during the post-war period included La Parisienne, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Times Literary Supplement.