Scapigliatura

It attracted attention and scandalized the more conservative and Catholic circles of Italy with many pamphlets, journals and magazines like Arrighi's Cronaca Grigia, Antonio Ghislanzoni's Rivista Minima, Cesare Tronconi's Lo Scapigliato and Felice Cavallotti and Achille Bizzoni's Gazzettino Rosa, which challenged the status quo artistically, socially and politically.

Hoffmann), French bohemians Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval and, above all, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the works of American writer Edgar Allan Poe.

The group also helped with the introduction of Wagner's music into Italy, with musician Franco Faccio (1840–1891) conducting the first Italian performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

It was on the lukewarm premiere of the former in 1863 that Faccio was fêted with a banquet where Boito read his ode All'arte italiana, which famously so offended Giuseppe Verdi that the composer refused to work with him when the publisher Ricordi first suggested a collaboration.

The offending lines, Forse già nacque chi sovra l'altare / Rizzerà l'arte, verecondo e puro, / Su quel'altar bruttato come un muro / Di lupanare ("Perhaps the man is already born who, modest and pure, will restore art to its altar stained like a brothel's wall").

In the late 1860s he detached himself from the movement, moved on to more conservative positions and was even made Senator of The Kingdom of Italy in 1914, while Faccio suffered a nervous breakdown and ended in the same mental institution where his father was an inmate.

The manifestos of these young and rebellious writers were the works themselves: poems like Praga's Preludio (Prelude), which opened Penombre striking against Catholicism, and the many mediocre followers of the main Italian novelist of the time, Alessandro Manzoni, author of the classic historical novel I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed).

Another such manifesto was Arrigo Boito's poem Dualismo (Dualism), which challenged common values and sense of decency by espousing a decadent take on art, inspired mainly by Baudelaire and Poe.

The influence of the supernatural stories of Poe and Hoffmann on Praga and Tarchetti was the foundation of Italian writers such as Antonio Fogazzaro, Luigi Pirandello and Dino Buzzati.

The works of Praga, Tarchetti and poet Giovanni Camerana (1845–1905) mark the transition from Romanticism to Decadentism, with their Romantic themes of love and death, Gothic imagery, sexuality and narcotics, and the supernatural.

Tarchetti died aged twenty-nine in 1869 of tuberculosis and typhoid fever while completing his novel Fosca, practically destitute, in the house of his friend and follower Salvatore Farina.

Praga's poetry collection Trasparenze, published posthumously in 1878, and his novel Memorie Del Presbiterio (left unfinished, completed by Roberto Sacchetti in 1881) are perhaps some of the best examples for illustrating how the Scapigliati were somewhat ahead of their times and prophetic in terms of their vision.

[1] While official culture in Italy has often forgotten the Scapigliati, the movement has had several revivals: during the counter-cultural climate of the late 1960s many of their works were back in print and there were exhibitions dedicated to them, and again in the 1990s, when Tarchetti's Racconti Fantastici and Fosca were translated and published in the US by Lawrence Venuti as Fantastic Tales and Passion, respectively.

In 2005 Robert Caruso (Anglo-Italian rock singer and poet, not to be confused with the American film-director of commercials) translated Praga, Camerana and some of Tarchetti's poetry into English for the first time.