GIORDANI,
PIETRO. — Writer, born at Piacenza on 1 January 1774, died at Parma on 14 September 1848. Having completed his studies in philosophy and law at Parma, he joined his brother
in the Benedictine monastery of S. Sisto at Piacenza. Already a subdeacon, in June 1800 he left the Order and took employment as secretary to the provisional government of the Apuan Alps; three years later he requested and obtained dispensation from his vows.
He attempted various offices; in 1808 he was pro-secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, but in 1815 he was expelled because of his liberal ideas; at Piacenza, where he went, sustained by his substantial paternal inheritance, he was sent into exile by Duchess Maria Luisa for an ill-advised writing; from Florence in 1830 he was expelled by the grand duke together with Poerio; at Parma in 1834 he was imprisoned. Despite these adventures, G. lived out his ideal of the perfect writer, faithful to the tradition of the “good and sufficient” language of the golden Trecento, in the most elaborately wrought prose and [in] his panegyrics (Allo imperatore Napoleone; Ad Antonio Canona), in his speeches (Per le tre legazioni riacquistate dal Papa; Della religione in Italia, an unfinished work against the papacy; Degli improvvisatori e dell'ordine dello studiare la storia e della tortura data a Galileo), in his works of philology (Istruzioni a un giovane italiano per l'arte di scrivere; Dei volgarizzatori trecentisti; Degli studi degli Italiani nel sec. XVIII), in his polemics (Il peccato impossibile) against theologians, and in his translations and deservedly famous epigraphs. Hostile to the Church, he nevertheless praised the religious value of Manzoni’s work, and rightly reassessed the great Jesuit writers of the seventeenth century: Bartoli, Segneri, Pallavicino. Rather, the myth of the word was his so-called religion—that is, the cult of pure formal beauty and of a sober and harmonious eloquence—which still dominates and characterizes his vast, fragmentary oeuvre, which, among other things, won the immense admiration of Leopardi (of whom G. was an intimate friend and discoverer) and of Carducci. The Opere (decr. 5 September 1825) and the Epistolario, edited by A. Gussalli (decr. 7 April 1856), are on the Index donec corrigatur.