PINDEMONTE, IPPOLITO. – Poet, born in Verona on 13 November 1753, died there on 18 November 1828. He studied in Modena. Barely twenty years old, and also for reasons of health, he undertook travels to Florence, Rome—where he was named an Arcadian academician—Naples, Sicily, and Malta, where he was made a knight of the Order. Returning home, in the twenty years he spent at his villa in Avesa he wrote (besides the long-forgotten tragedy Arminio) the two little volumes of *Poesie e Prose campestri* (1785). He then resumed his travels, visiting Savoy, Switzerland, and France. From Paris he went on to London, Berlin, Vienna, and Marseilles: the journeys that Ugo Foscolo would affectionately recall (Sepolcri, ll. 213-14). Back in Verona, he alternated works of sincere piety with literary compositions: *Epistole*, *Sermoni*, *Viaggi* (in verse), the *Elogi dei letterati*, and his translation of the *Odyssey*, a labor that lasted until his death.
It was to the *Poesie campestri* that Foscolo was referring when he spoke of the “mournful harmony” that governs Pindemonte’s song (Sepolcri, ll. 8-9). A definition that revives and almost creates him. Yet invocations of solitude, melancholy, and the pale sadness of moonlit fields recur insistently in the *Prose campestri*, where one may discern a premonition of Romanticism. Romanticism, not Arcadia; an anticipation, therefore, not a belated flowering. And if one wishes to reduce Pindemonte to a formula, one might say that he was a Romantic dressed in Classicist garb. Pindemonte lives on in anthologies for a single poem: that *Malinconia* which is typical of his art and his soul, with its five-beat lines that seem to give us the exact measure of his light, brief breath. In his own day, he was better
PINDEMONTE, IPPOLITO – Portrait (drawing by F. Matteini). Print for the edition of N. Bettoni – Rome, Museo del Risorgimento.