FRUGONI, CARLO INNOCENZO. — Poet, born in Genoa on 21 Nov. 1692, died in Parma on 20 Dec. 1768. He spent most of his life at the Farnese court, praised and acclaimed as the greatest lyric poet of his age.
In his youth he had entered the Order of the Somaschi, from which he soon departed through the intervention of Cardinal Bentivoglio; little of the order’s discipline remained in the worldly and heroic tone of his lyric poetry. His vast poetic output (collected in 10 volumes in the complete Parma edition of his Opere poetiche, 1779) is a fluent, rhetorical, and frivolous epitome of the poetic taste of the Arcadia, in which Frugoni found his most fortunate but also most superficial and Epicurean representative.
BIBL.: G. Carducci, Delio svolgimento dell'ode in Italia, in Ediz. Naz. Carducci Opere, XV, Bologna 1936, pp. 1-81; E. Bertana, In Arcadia, Napoli 1909, passim; C. Calcaterra, Storia della poesia frangianna, Genova 1930; A. Equini, C. I. F. all'ord. del Parnaso e dei Borboni di Parma, Palermo 1930-31; Fubini, Arcadia e illuminismo, in Querini e correnti di storia letteraria, Milano 1949, p. 503 ff. Giorgio Petrocchi