GIUSTI, GIUSEPPE. - Poet, b. at Monsummano on 12 May 1809, d. at Florence on 31 March 1850. Educated in his early years by a priest and later at the Seminary of Pistoia and the College of Nobles in Lucca, in 1834 he took his degree in law at the University of Pisa. He spent almost his entire brief life in Tuscany, with a few intervals of residence in Naples and Milan, where he was a guest of Manzoni, to whom he always felt bound by a respectful friendship.
He lived intensely the history of his time and, by the sad privilege of a keen intelligence combined with an extremely sincere character, he accelerated its movement by contradicting and satirizing it. Foreign domination, Italian servility, police methods, wavering consciences, political opportunism found in him a mocker and an inexorable scourge, because he was in love with the idea of a homeland redeemable only by motives of liberty and sincerely pursued political morality.
A poet by instinct, he began writing verses at the age of 12, early acquiring fame as a lyric poet of the «mournful smile», as he liked to define himself, and arousing expressions of sympathy, but also insidious criticism. Guerrazzi and Tommaseo were bitter adversaries of his; yet his verses ran through Italy all the same, stirring and victorious in their popular impression. In 1848, on the proposal of G. Capponi, he was made a resident member of the Accademia della Crusca; in the same year he was appointed major of the Civic Guard and, by the electors of Borgo a Buggiano, sent as a deputy to the Tuscan Assembly. Politics, which had nevertheless animated the writer, disappointed and embittered the parliamentarian: he lacked the militant politician's capacity for adaptation and skill in moving among the interests and egoisms of party.
What remains of G. is the poet and the prose writer; there remain the satirical Poesie or «scherzi» (dominated by the satirical note, in which the polemicist resurfaces, and by the elegiac, which expresses his affective world) and the prose, gleaming, immediate and perfect (Epistolario, Memorie inedite, I proverbi toscani, Discorso su G. Parini, etc.). Death cut short his deepening study of Dante.
Criticism has often raised or lowered him hastily. Manzoni reproached him for certain writings, irreverent in tone toward religion and the authority of the Church; G. excused himself, writing to him: «from that time I cut out of my writings every page that could offend modesty, every personal attack, every sarcasm against religion». Many poems were in fact repudiated by him. He has also been accused of superficiality, and certainly the political atmosphere in which he lived, the nervous fragmentariness of his work, the frequent allusions to his milieu sometimes narrowed his spiritual horizons.
When G. episodically expressed the lights of his moral world, he revealed deep feeling and a genius capable of rendering in artistic synthesis the nostalgias, the sorrows, the aspirations that in the human soul are always connected with the sense of the divine. In S. Ambrogio G., the awakener of national conscience, rises to a conception that unites the subjugated and the subjugators, leading them to a Christian will to love one another under the impulse of «a desire for peace and love», «a mournful thought of the dear mother», «a dismay of distant exile». Some sonnets, such as La fiducia in Dio, the Sospiro dell'anima, All'amica lontana, attest to that substantial religiosity which, over the wanderings of the earthly vicissitude, offers to each the redemption of the moral personality.
Bibliography12 works
Salvatore Lombardo Restivo