Luigi Settembrini

While still a young man he had been affected by the wave of liberalism then spreading all over Italy, and soon after his marriage he began to conspire mildly against the Bourbon government.

[2] On the advice of his friends, he went to Malta on a British warship, but although when King Ferdinand II granted a constitution (February 16, 1848), he returned to Naples and was given an appointment at the ministry of education, he soon resigned on account of the prevailing chaos, and retired to a farm at Posillipo.

His friends, including Antonio Panizzi, then in England, made various unsuccessful attempts to liberate him, and at last, he was deported with sixty-five other political prisoners.

[2] His chief work is his Lezioni di letteratura italiana, of which the dominant note is the conviction that Italian literature "is as the very soul of the nation, seeking, in opposition to medieval mysticism, reality, freedom, independence of reason, truth and beauty" (P.

[2] Settembrini's homosexuality was first mentioned in 1977, the year of the publication of The Neoplatonics, a homoerotic fantasy written while in prison soon after completing his translation of Lucian (1858–1859).