GOZZANO, GUIDO. – Poet, born at Agliè Canavese on 19 December 1883, died there on 9 August 1916. Having graduated in law, he did not practice as an advocate, but instead turned toward a literary life. As both poet and prose writer, he succeeded in forging a style of his own, in which even his imitations (of Pascoli, D’Annunzio, and Nietzsche) and the echoes of his readings of Dante merge into a distinctive musicality and singular turns of phrase. His work, consisting of verse and fiction scattered through periodicals, was collected in volumes: I tre talismani (fairy tales, 1904); La via del rifugio (lyrics, 1907); Colloqui (lyrics, 1911); L'Altare del passato (short stories, 1916); Verso la cuna del mondo (letters from India, 1917); La principessa si sposa (fairy tales, 1917); L'ultima traccia (short stories, 1919); I primi e gli ultimi colloqui (1925).
Stricken with tuberculosis (he died of it at the age of 33 during the First World War), G. acutely experienced, amid the very disintegration of his physical energy, the entire drama of an age in transition, oscillating between the gentle nostalgia of the past and the anguished foreboding of the future. Troubled by an exacerbated sensuality, mentally disoriented by contemporary culture, traversed by paradoxical philosophies, pitilessly sincere toward others and toward himself, he lost his certainty of God, while always painfully aspiring to Him amid the folds of an irony without malice, smiling with tranquil detachment, as revealed in the Ultimi colloqui and in the question: « shall I not die pressing the rosary – against my mouth in the grace of the Lord? ».
