Ivo Ćipiko was born on 13 January 1869 in Kaštel Novi,[1] on the estate of his forefathers who came from Italy in the Middle Ages and settled along the Dalmatian coast.

[1] After the war, Ćipiko became one of the most ardent proponent of Jovan Skerlić's unitarian ideas along with other Serbian writers from Croatia, Dalmatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as Mirko Korolija, Niko Pucić, Svetozar Ćorović and Aleksa Šantić.

The sense of alarm concerning the deterioration of social conditions present in one of Ćipiko's notable works, the 1909 novel Pauci (The Spiders),[1] had a lot to do with it.

In his short-story collections, such as "Seaside Souls" (1899) and "By the Sea" (1911), the novel "For Bread" (1904), and the drama "On the Border" (1910), Ćipiko depicted the life of Dalmatian peasants and their struggles with moneylenders, landowners, and Austrian bureaucrats.

Ivo has "poems in prose" in which the narrative element is totally subordinated to lyricism, the evolution of mood, the expression of emotions and passions, and to language and style in Ceznja (Longing, 1898).