Di Giacomo, Salvatore

DI GIACOMO, SALVATORE. - Dialect poet, b. in Naples on 12 March 1860, d. there on 4 April 1934. Having abandoned the faculty of medicine, he devoted himself very young to journalism and poetry, collaborating with the Neapolitan newspapers (Il pungolo, Il mattino, Il corriere di Napoli) and taking part in the festival of Piedigrotta with songs that became famous. He was later librarian of the Lucchesi-Palli collection, and a member of the Accademia d'Italia from 1929.

He passed from poetry to the short story, to drama, to historical-anecdotal works, remaining substantially a poet. Thus in La cronaca del teatro S. Carlino; Celebrità napoletane; Luci ed ombre napoletane; Ferdinando IV e il suo ultimo amore, etc., while the diligence of the research may be praised, the voice of the poet speaks more loudly. The initial realistic tendency persisted in him even when psychological depth and the development of a pictorial sense came to enrich his art. In his poems, in his dramas (A. S. Francisco, Assunta Spina, L'abbé Péru, O voto), in his stories (Pipa e boccale, Novelle napoletane, L'ignoto), he portrays the sorrows, sufferings, dreams, passionate impulses of creatures agitated between good and evil, and at times he lingers in the murk of the underworld. The drama O mese mariano offers, in contrast to the brutalities of some of his compositions (cf. Documenti umani, La taglia, Lo sfregio), a picture in which the motif of pity has the greatest prominence.