PORTA, CARLO. – Poet, born in Milan on 15 June 1776, died there on 5 January 1821. He lived always in his native city, employed at the Intendancy of Finance, in constant contact with the entire Milanese cultural world.
Of liberal ideas and profound Romantic faith, P. made the conditions of Lombard life during the Austrian Restoration the subject of his vigorous social satire, and the Milanese dialect the instrument of his lively popular realism. The greatness of his poetry lies in the power with which it represents human passions as they are, in the midst of an elementary psychology and, for that very reason, a crude and unyielding one. The principal object of his verse was anticlerical satire, exceedingly violent and scurrilous, perhaps dictated more by social resentment than by religious impiety. Rota has demonstrated that P.’s anticlericalism derives from the very nature—not religious and moral, but political—of the Lombard Jansenist milieu, and from the inevitable popular reactions.