Aleardi, Aleardo (born Gaetano)

ALEARDI, ALEARDO (baptismal name GAETANO). - Poet, born in Verona on 14 Nov. 1812, died there on 17 July 1878. He endured Austrian imprisonment at Mantua (1852) and at Josephstadt (1859). After 1860 he was briefly deputy for Lonato. Professor of eloquence at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 1863, after 1864 he taught aesthetics and the history of art at the Florentine Institute of Fine Arts. The Lettere a Maria (1846) marked his first success. Among his patriotic and civic poems, worthy of note are Le città italiane marinare e commercianti (1856) and, from the same year, Il Monte Circello. The Canto politico dates from 1862, in which he reproaches Pio IX for having forgotten the liberal sentiments of 1848. In his final years he competed with Zanella in singing of humanitarian and scientific theories. A sincere patriot; but in the religious sphere he followed the fashion of the time, allowing himself to be carried away by the anticlerical spirit, and contenting himself with a generic and superficial religiosity. The melody of his verses was spontaneous, though often too facile. Yet he typically embodied the Romantic poet, prone to sentimentalism and tears.