Enrico Thovez

[1][3] His mother, Maria Angela Berlinguer, was from Sardinia, but could trace her own family back to Catalonia from where her ancestors had emigrated at the end of the sixteenth century.

[1] That was the year in which he obtained his "licenza liceale", the school completion qualification that opened the way to a university place as a student of classics.

[3] In 1895 he came to wider prominence with readers of "Gazzetta letteraria" when he started to denounce plagiarism of the poems of D'Annunzio, whose work at this stage was more widely appreciated in France than in Italy, chiefly on account of some superb translations produced by Georges Hérelle.

[3] In 1902, following an extended trip to Germany the previous year, Thovez teamed up with Leonardo Bistolfi, Giorgio Ceragioli, Enrico Reycend and Davide Calandra to establish the periodical magazine L'arte decorativa moderna, which was devoted to decorative arts.

[3] In 1901 he transferred his poetic insights into his "Ritratto della madre" ("Painting of the Mother") which was exhibited by the "Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti" in Turin.

It shows the figure of a man, with the hills outside Turin in the background: the artist Felice Carena is believed to have posed for the painting, though it does not purport to be a portrait.

However, in May 1924 he took the opportunity of a stay on Giannutri to subject his 1887 work, "La casa degli avi" (loosely, "The house of the ancestors"), to what a biographer describes approvingly as a "careful lexical revision" ("... un’assennata revisione lessicale"), following which he had it republished.

Towards the end of his life he fell victim to a malignant cancer, from which on 25 February 1925 he died at the family home in the Torinese suburb of Moncalieri.

In his (posthumously published) diary he writes, "It cheers me that I have reduced my poetry to a minimum of syllabic ligaments: I am persuaded that if I had written my poems in prose I would never have been taken seriously [as a writer] in this land of guitars and mandolins".

Critics condemned it as the rant of a man disappointed and annoyed by the commercial failure of his own juvenile poetry, and his theses was increasingly marginalised by senior members of literary establishment.