GUERRAZZI, FRANCESCO DOMENICO. – Writer and politician, born at Livorno on 12 August 1804, died at Cecina (Livorno) on 23 November 1873. Turbulent and obstinate from his youth, while studying law at Pisa he took part in disturbances, partly political, and was suspended from his studies for a year. In 1821 he met Byron there, who became his model and whose memory inspired his Stanze, his literary debut (Livorno 1825).
After collaborating with the Indicatore livornese and repeatedly suffering imprisonment for political reasons, he was elected deputy and summoned to Florence by Montanelli (1848) as Minister of the Interior. On 8 February 1849, after the grand duke had fled, he became a triumvir together with Montanelli and Mazzoni. He adopted violent measures with the aid of bands from Livorno, which he later claimed he had been unable to control, and opposed the union of Tuscany with Rome. After 12 April (the restoration of grand-ducal rule), he refused to leave Florence; he was therefore arrested and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, commuted to exile in Corsica (1853). From there he fled in 1857 to Genoa, where he remained until 1862.
Elected deputy to the Subalpine Parliament, he was an ardent anticlerical and republican. In 1870, not having been re-elected, he withdrew to Livorno and then to his villa at Cecina.
He made his debut with tragedies of little success; the historical novels, on the other hand, aroused great sensation. These works, with patriotic aims, romantically mingle the terrible and the grotesque, in a declamatory style full of apostrophes and with the movement of poetic prose, clearly dependent on Byronian models: La battaglia di Benevento (1827), L'assedio di Firenze (1836), Veronica Cybo (1839), Isabella Orsini (1844), Il Marchese di S. Prassede (1853), Beatrice Cenci (1854), Pasquale Paoli (1860). History is often distorted in them by practical aims, at times also for violently anticlerical purposes.
Novels of manners, more moderate and humorous in tone, though still burdened with lengthy dissertations, are: Il buco nel muro (1862) and Il secolo che muore (published posthumously in 1885); satirical works include: La serpicina (1847), I nuovi tartufi (1847), L'asino (1857). The various autobiographical writings and the correspondence collected by Carducci are important (Livorno 1880–82). The following are on the Index: L'assedio di Firenze (decree of 14 February 1837), Isabella Orsini (decree of 8 August 1844), and Beatrice Cenci (decree of 14 December 1854).