GIUSTI, GIUSEPPE. – Poet, born at Monsummano on 12 May 1809, died 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 graduated in law at the University of Pisa. He spent almost his entire short life in Tuscany, with brief sojourns in Naples and Milan, where he was a guest of Manzoni, to whom he always felt bound by respectful friendship.
He lived intensely through the history of his time and, by the sad privilege of a keen intelligence combined with an extremely sincere character, he hastened its course by contradicting and satirising II. Foreign domination, Italian servility, police methods, wavering consciences, political opportunism found in him an inexorable mocker and scourge, because he was devoted to the idea of a fatherland redeemable only through motives of freedom and sincerely pursued political morality.
A poet by instinct, he began writing verses at the age of twelve, early acquiring the reputation of a lyric poet of the “melancholy smile,” as he liked to describe himself, and arousing sympathetic approval, but also insidious criticism. He had as adversaries Guerrazzi and Tommaseo; yet his verses ran through Italy alike, stirring and triumphant in the popular imagination. 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 deputy to the Tuscan Assembly. Politics, which had indeed animated the writer, disappointed and embittered the parliamentarian; he lacked the adaptability and skill of the militant politician to move among sectional interests and egotisms.
What remains of G. is the poet and the prose writer: there remain his satirical poems or “scherzi” (dominant on our stage, in which the polemicist stands out, and the elegy, which expresses his emotional world) and his sparkling, immediate, and perfect prose works (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 some writings, whose tone was irreverent toward religion and the authority of the Church; G. apologised to him in writing: “From that time onward I have excluded from my writings every phrase that might 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 fragmentation of his work, and the frequent allusions to his environment sometimes narrowed his spiritual horizons.
When G. episodically expressed the lights of his moral world, he revealed deep feeling and a talent capable of rendering in artistic synthesis the yearnings, sorrows, and aspirations that are ever connected in the human soul with the sense of the divine. In S. Ambrogio G., the awakener of national conscience, rises to a conception that unites the oppressed and the oppressors, bringing them to a Christian will to love one another under the impulse of a desire for peace and love, “a thought very much of the dear mother,” “a dread of distant exile.” Some sonnets, such as La fiducia in Dio, Il sospiro dell’anima, All’amica lontana, attest to that substantial religiosity which, amid the wanderings of earthly life, offers to each the redemption of moral personality.