PARINI, GIUSEPPE. — Poet. Born at Bosisio (Brianza) on 23 May 1729, died at Milan on 15 Aug. 1799. He studied in Milan at the Arcimboldese Schools, run by the Barnabites. In 1752 he published *Alcune poesie di Ripano Eupilino* (i.e. Parino dell’Eupili, or Lake of Pusiano), which earned him admission to the Accademia dei Trasformati. More from necessity than vocation, he entered the ecclesiastical life and was ordained priest on 14 June 1734.
From that year until 1752 he served as tutor in the household of Duke Gabrio Serbelloni. Living in that milieu and frequenting other noble houses, Parini studied with the severity of a moralist that frivolous and ostentatious world and prepared to become its judge. He gained a certain notoriety through two famous polemics: with the Servite Alessandro Bandiera and with the Barnabite Paolo Onofrio Branda. To the years spent with the Serbelloni may be ascribed several writings that prepared the ground: short poems in which he trained himself to wield blank verse as a master; the first three odes (*La vita rustica*, *La salubrità dell’aria*, *L’impostura*); the *Lettere del conte N. N. ad una falsa devota*, a satire of false devotion under the guise of continual ironical instruction; the *Discorso sopra le caricature*, i.e. on the ridicule of high society; a group of terza-rima satires (*Il trionfo della Spilocerica*, *La maschera*, *Lo studio*, *Il teatro*); and the *Dialogo sopra la nobiltà*, between two recently deceased persons, a nobleman and a poet born of plebeian stock, who debate the origin and merits of nobility.
Count Imbonati, head of the Trasformati, entrusted him in 1763 or 1764 with the education of his son Carlo, to whom Parini dedicated the ode *L’educazione*; this may be considered the intermezzo between *Il mattino* and *Il mezzogiorno*, published in the summer of 1765. In 1768 Parini accepted the post of poet to the Ducal Royal Theatre. Throughout 1769, by order of Count Carlo di Firmian, plenipotentiary minister of Austria in Lombardy, he worked on the compilation of the *Gazzetta di Milano*. In November of the same year Firmian appointed him royal professor of belles-lettres in the Public Palatine Schools; and in July 1773 this chair was confirmed in those schools, which shortly afterwards were established, under the name of Royal Gymnasium, in the Palazzo di Brera. Outside the school as well, Parini carried out assignments for the government: in 1771, for the wedding of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria to Archduchess Maria Beatrice d’Este, he wrote a melodrama (*Ascanio in Alba*), set to music by the fifteen-year-old W. A. Mozart; he drafted the statutes of the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Agriculture. But above all he devoted himself to the school, in whose service he collected, before 1777, his lectures under the title *Dei principi generali e particolari delle belle lettere applicati alle belle arti*: in the first part, a treatise on classical aesthetics; in the second, a historical survey of Italian writers. When the Academy of Fine Arts was inaugurated in Brera (1776), Parini, remaining professor of rhetoric in the Royal Gymnasium, admitted the young men enrolled in the fine-arts courses into his own school. As an arbiter of all the arts, friend and counsellor to Andrea Appiani and his colleagues at Brera and to other younger artists, he drafted programmes for paintings and sculptures, supplied subjects for ballets and stage representations, and became one of the leading exponents of Neoclassicism in that Milan which, not without his merit, became the stronghold of neoclassical art.
In October 1791 he was also assigned the post of Superintendent of Public Schools in Brera (in that year one of his pupils had prepared the first edition of the *Odi*). Eager to render service to his country, he entered the new municipality established in Milan in the first days after the arrival of the French (May 1796). When his efforts to vindicate for the municipality the right to give a constitution to the Cisalpine Republic without awaiting orders from Paris proved fruitless, he resigned after three months in office, secretly arranging through his parish priest for the compensation he had received to be distributed to the poor. He found peace of soul in thoughts of eternity and in the serenity of study. His last meditations were devoted to Leonardo’s *Last Supper*.
Parini’s masterpiece is *Il giorno*, of which the first two parts, *Il mattino* and *Il mezzogiorno*, were published in 1763 and 1765; the last two, *Il vespro* (unfinished) and *La notte*, appeared posthumously in 1801. It is a poem in blank hendecasyllables, unique in its kind: satirically didactic in that the poet pretends to write a kind of etiquette manual for the “young lord”; epically satirical in that it gives satire the dimensions of an epic. In it Parini contrasts the world of labourers with a class that has fulfilled its historical mission, and seeks to vindicate the Italian character of custom, language, thought and culture, which had been contaminated by foreign imports adopted by the nobility of his time. He enlivens his subject, giving variety to the depiction of a world that was meant to be the world of Pleasure but was in fact the world of Boredom: not only through the much-praised episodes, but through constant social antitheses, the comparison of contemporary nobles with their “illustrious ancestors,” the depiction of natural scenes, inspirations drawn from classical art, mythology and chivalric epic, exotic and preromantic vignettes, and lyrical outpourings that at times pleasantly interrupt the irony. This variety of motifs is unified by the poet’s personality, who, acting as tutor, becomes the actor of the social comedy of his time, and, as a vates, its judge. The true protagonist of *Il giorno* is the poet himself. The nobility of Parini’s style has been compared, from Foscolo onwards, to that of Virgil.
Parini wrote some excellent sonnets, easy and cheerful little songs, witty “scherzi”; he left short poems, epistles, fragments of idylls; but after *Il giorno*, his greatest claim to fame consists in the nineteen odes (first complete edition, 1795). The ironical “tutor of pleasant rites” here becomes a master of civilisation and life: he contrasts the corrupt urban life with rural freedom (*La vita rustica*); sings the praises of civil progress (*L’inno di Valfierno*, *La laurea*); combats the evils of society (*La salubrità dell’aria*, *L’impostura*, *Il bisogno*, *La evirazione*); creates a Christian Achilles in *L’educazione*; expresses a lofty conception of art (*La recita de’ versi*, *In morte di A. Sacchini*, *Alla Musica*); stings the frivolity of those who cannot see in immodest dress the symbol of corrupt morals (*A Silvia*). All intimate and subjective are *La caduta* and the three amorous odes (*Il pericolo*, *Il dono*, *Il messaggio*). Carducci distinguishes two periods in the development of Parini’s lyric: the first, from 1757 or 1758 (*La vita rustica*) to 1777 (*La laurea*), lacks neither vigour nor unevenness and hesitancy; the second, from 1783 (*La recita de’ versi*) to 1795 (*Alla Musica*), is that of the Horatian manner, i.e. more properly Parinian. Parini created the neoclassical ode, which he bequeathed to Monti and Foscolo. It must be acknowledged that the ideal and emotional world of the odes is less vast than that which, through the veil of irony, is glimpsed in *Il giorno*; yet it may be complemented by the thoughts and feelings expressed in other lyrics of Parini’s, of lesser artistic value but historically important; and one arrives at the conclusion that the Italian renewal, reconciling new ideas with tradition, not devoid of historical sense, respectful of religious feeling, found in him, among poets, its greatest representative.
The religious sentiment was more alive in Parini than it appears in the Odes. He fought false devotion (Letters to a False Devout Woman) and considered religion the only curb on the impetus of the passions, the bond of love among men, and the yearning for heaven (Noon, vv. 975-79). Among the religious lyrics, one should recall the tercets On the Day of St. Bernardino of Siena, the canzone To St. Ambrose, the sonnet May You Sound on My Lips dedicated to the Virgin, those To Jerome Emiliani and To Catherine of Pallanza, and the discourse On Charity. Since in the edition of Parini’s works (Milan 1801-1804) F. Reina replaced in the prose the word “God” with “nature,” the word “Providence” with “the laws,” and turned an unfavorable judgment on Machiavelli into praise (cf. the introduction by G. Mazzoni to the edition of All the Published and Unpublished Works of G. P., Florence 1925, p. xci), Parini could be seen by some as an Enlightenment figure and a Jacobin. He rejected the philosophy of Voltaire, “the soft Aristippus of our century,” and of Rousseau, “the new Diogenes”; of Catholic worship he felt, as Carducci noted, “more sympathetically what is best in relation to social life... by virtue of his more civil than mystical temperament.”