Oriani, Alfredo

ORIANI, ALFREDO. - Writer and historian, b. 22 Aug. 1852 at Faenza, d. 18 Oct. 1909 at Casola Valsenio. From birth the family environment, which was not generous with affection toward him, helped to form his taciturn character and to imprint on him a bitter pessimism toward life. At the College of St. Louis in Bologna, where he spent his boyhood years, religious practices were for him a torment; they were superstructures that had no hold on his disheartened and skeptical soul.

Devoid of affection, which he was incapable of receiving and of giving, he shut himself up within himself and tried the path of letters. His first works bear witness to a profound spiritual emptiness. According to O., feelings do not exist, and conventionalism and conformism lie at the basis of any human act. This cynicism toward life manifests itself in the novels and short stories from 1876 (Memorie inutili) to 1883 (Quartetto) through Al di là, Monotonie, Gramigne, No. To the reality of life O. counterposes, with polemical intent, the past. In the world of his own time he perceives an open contradiction with history, the study of which convinces him all the more of the falsity and the aberrations of the present. His first historical work, Matrimonio e divorzio (1886), is a refutation of divorce theories, based on the assertion of monogamy throughout the ages. The three volumes of Lotta politica in Italia (Turin 1892) are a history from the fall of the Roman Empire to 1887, which sets out the vicissitudes of the Italian nation over the course of the centuries, and identifies the factors that hindered its unitary unfolding, foremost among which, according to O., is the Catholic Church. After his other works: historical essays, dramas, short stories, novels (Gelosio; Vortice; Olocausto; Oro, incenso e mirra), worthy of mention is La rivolta ideale (1908), which gives a picture of the social and political conditions of Italy, and finds in them the symptoms of a profound future crisis, to which he counterposes the necessity of a strong State, the principle of authority, the morality of Christ.

Nearing death he wished to be reconciled with the Catholic Church: «morto bene, come un cristiano antico che trasmette la sua fede al figlio, e, munito dei Sacramenti, passa alla realtà delle sue speranze» (A. Leanza, in Civ. Catt., 1909, IV, p. 371). His works were all placed on the Index (decree of 24 Apr. 1940) for the violent offenses against religion and its divine laws and for an exasperating verism, admitted, moreover, by the author himself (cf. M. Cordovani, in L'Osserv. rom., 28 Apr. 1940).

Silvio Furlani