Meli, Giovanni

MELI, GIOVANNI. - Poet, b. in Palermo on 6 March 1740, d. there on 20 Dec. 1815. A pupil of the Jesuits, a district physician at Cinisi for five years, later a lecturer in chemistry at the Palermo Accademia degli Studi. He was called "abbot" and wore the clerical habit, without even having received the minor orders.

Of Arcadian poetry he retained only, and not always, the outward motifs: his true inspiration was the aspiration to justice and peace, sought in the life of the fields and in communion with the wisdom of his people (his Riflessioni sullo stato presente del Regno di Sicilia [1801] concerning agriculture and sheep-rearing are explicitly aimed at reformist programs). He sang the Sicilian countryside with modern sensibility (Buccolica) and woman with gallant malice (Anacreontichi). In L'origini di lu munnu he mocked ancient and recent cosmogonic conceptions, especially that of the Monreale philosopher V. Miceli). The humorous poem Don Chisciotti e Sancti Panza constitutes a not entirely successful representation of the contrast between the ideal and the real, which was the poet's perpetual torment. Yet he did not shut himself up in the pessimistic and at times rebellious positions of the idyll Polemmi, of the tercets Lu chiantu d'Eraelitu, of the short poem Lu specchiu di lu disingonnu, but grew serene in a moderate optimism, which reconciled him with life and with Providence. In the late Favuli murali, constituting a corpus without equal in Italian fable literature, he expressed, through the animal world sympathetically studied, his ideal "of honorableness and probity." Of his poetic work, in "illustrious" Sicilian, there are numerous versions in Italian, Latin, Greek and other languages: notable is the German one by Gregorovius (Leipzig 1886, 2nd ed.); Goethe imitated two stanzas of M. in Sizilianisches Lied; Foscolo translated the lyrical monologue of the Don Chisciotti.

Enzo Navarra