CAVALLOTTI, FELICE. - Writer, politician, orator, b. in Milano on 6 Nov. 1842, d. in Roma on 6 March 1898. He took part in the second Garibaldian expedition to Sicilia and fought at Milazzo, the Volturno, and Vezza. A Romantic by temperament—“the last of the Romantics,” Carducci called him—with his tribune-like, Victor-Hugo-esque manner, he aspired to be a soldier, politician, journalist, dramatist, poet, and scholar.
See, in this regard, his historical dramas: I pezzenti, Alcibiade, i Messenii. Often hostile in his unbelief, he translated from German Strauss’s Vita di Gesù (1865). As a deputy, he opposed the parliamentary Right; he subsequently also became an opponent of the Left, attacking throughout his life, in polemics and writings, the person and policies of Francesco Crispi. Duels often followed his polemics: he fought thirty-three of them; in the last, against the deputy Ferruccio Macola, he met his death. His lyric poetry is connected with the Milanese scapigliatura (the Marcia di Leonida, for those fallen at Mentana, was very popular); his theatre, in its themes, settings, and conflicts, does not depart from the nineteenth-century “tearful drama”; the one-act Cantico dei Cantici, staged in 1881, was highly successful, and in it the text of Holy Scripture serves as
a “go-between” in the love between Antonio, on the eve of his ordination, and his cousin Pia. “The action holds together only because the author wishes to spite the priests” (B. Croce). The complete edition of his works comprises 10 vols. (Milano 1895–96).