CARLO PORTA. - Poet, born in Milan on 15 June 1776, died there on 5 January 1821. He lived his entire life in his native city, employed at the Finance Intendancy, in constant contact with the entire Milanese cultural world.
Of liberal ideas and profound Romantic faith, Porta directed the energy of his social satire toward the conditions of Lombard life during the Austrian Restoration, and made the Milanese dialect the instrument of his vivid popular realism. The greatness of his poetry lies in the power of his representation of human passions as they are, within a framework of elemental psychology, and, precisely for this reason, crude and rough. The principal object of his verses was anticlerical satire, violent and coarse, perhaps dictated more by social resentments than by religious impiety. Rota has demonstrated that Porta’s anticlericalism derives from the same nature—not religious and moral, but political—of the Jansenist environment in Lombardy, and from the inevitable popular reactions.