Panzini, Alfredo

PANZINI, ALFREDO. - Writer, b. at Senigallia on 31 Dec. 1863, d. at Rome on 10 Apr. 1939. A disciple of Carducci and of Acri at the University of Bologna, he was later a secondary-school teacher, with a long residence in Milan. His fundamental spiritual experience was the crisis of humanistic culture: the yearning for an exemplary world of serene and peaceful virtues, in contrast with practical reality dominated by economic self-interest and egoistic ambition: his feeling sighs toward the first element, his intelligence accepts the second with resignation, and seeks to master it with smiling humor. Toward religion too his desire sometimes turns, but without trust in its transcendent value.

This experience takes concrete form in an assiduous, free-and-easy meditation on the facts of life, in which offhandedness is often held back from showing itself too believing in values superior to immediate experience. Such meditation is entrusted to an analytical vocabulary (Dizionario moderno) and more often to narrative prose of slender plot, often rather poetic and suspended digressions than true constructions of short stories or a novel. A perfect stylist of this state of smiling and painful contemplation, he expresses it also in the search for an expression adhering to contemporary usage that nevertheless often takes refuge in echoes of classical literary words and cadences. This expressive search is one with his posing as a teacher bent on making his pupils feel the eternal modernity of the most ancient facts (Santippe; Il bacio di Lesbia): and from the torment of a perplexed life he often seeks refuge in the yearning for the passion of love, felt at once as a trembling of dream and as the instinctive, invincible impulse of the dark roots of life. He also wrote critical and historical essays: the latter less happy. Of his narrative works he began the definitive, revised collection in the volume Sei romanzi fra due secoli, which was followed after his death by the other two unrevised volumes: Romanzi d'ambo i sessi; La cicuta, i gigli e le rose. A precious introduction to his fundamental state of mind are the youthful writings later collected under the title: Per amore di Biancofiore (Florence 1948).

Fausto Montanari