MELI, GIOVANNI. — Poet, born in Palermo on 6 March 1740, died there on 20 December 1815. A pupil of the Jesuits, he served as a municipal physician in Cinisi for five years, and subsequently taught chemistry at Palermo’s Accademia degli Studi. He was called “abbate” and wore the clerical habit, without having even received Minor Orders.
Of Arcadian poetry he retained only its outward motifs, and not always even those: his true inspiration was the aspiration to justice and peace, sought in country life and in communion with the wisdom of his people (his Riflessioni sullo stato presente del Regno di Sicilia [1801], concerning agriculture and pastoralism, explicitly pursue reformist programmes). He sang of the Sicilian countryside with modern sensibility (Buccolica), and of woman with gallant mischief (Anacreontichi). In L'origini di lu munnu he mocked ancient and recent cosmogonic conceptions, above all that of the philosopher from Monreale V. Miceli). The humorous poem Don Chisciotti e Sancti Panza offers a not entirely successful representation of the conflict between the ideal and the real, which was the poet’s perennial preoccupation. He did not, however, confine himself to the pessimistic and at times rebellious positions of the idyll Polemmi, the terzine Lu chiantu d'Eraelitu, and the short poem Lu specchiu di lu disingonnu, but attained a serene moderate optimism that reconciled him with life and Providence. In the late Favuli murali, constituting an unparalleled corpus within Italian fable literature, he expressed, through the sympathetically studied animal world, his ideal of “honour and probity.” His poetic work, in “illustrious” Sicilian, has numerous versions in Italian, Latin, Greek, and other languages: noteworthy is the German version by Gregorovius (Leipzig 1886, 2nd ed.); Goethe imitated two stanzas by M. in Sizilianisches Lied; Foscolo translated the lyrical monologue from Don Chisciotti.