PASCARELLA, CESARE. - Poet, born in Roma on 28 April 1858, died there on 8 May 1940.
He made his debut as a poet with Roman dialect sonnets published in the Capitan Fracassa, in which his thoughtful and melancholy personality was beginning to take shape. But the tendency toward narrative, toward objective representation yet transfigured by an intense lyric impulse, became concentrated and organized, under Carducci’s influence, in more ambitious attempts (Il morto di campagna, 1884), until it emerged in the broad historical visions of Villa Glori (1886) and La scoperta dell'America (1894): epic poetry brought back to its most genuine sources
and placed in the mouth of an ingenuous rhapsodist from Trastevere, who, stripping it of every legendary aura, gives it realistic prominence and makes it almost contemporary. Signs of weariness, as well as certain gaps in the historical development, may be observed in the 350 sonnets of Storia nostra, an Italian epic from the foundation of Roma onward.
P.’s anticlericalism, which appears explicit and convinced in certain sonnets, is based, rather than on dogmatic or ethical motives, on the controversy, common to other contemporary writers, concerning temporal power.