SALVADORI, GIULIO. – Writer, poet, and critic, born at Monte S. Savino in Val di Chiana (Arezzo) on 14 September 1862, died in Rome on 7 October 1928.
He began collaborating at a very early age in Rome, with prose and verse, in literary periodicals; and from 1881 especially in the Cronaca bizantina and the Domenica letteraria. During his university years, from 1880 to 1884, came the religious deviation that led him to an open profession of naturalism, finally inducing him to proclaim a palingenesis originating in the new science. An intellectual crisis, matured with the overcoming of a romantic passion, brought him back, in the spring of 1885, during a stay in Ascoli Piceno, to religious practice and Christian thought. He withdrew into a life of retreat and meditation and devoted himself to the education of youth in the schools (Albano Laziale and Rome). In 1923 he was called to the Università cattolica del S. Cuore in Milan to teach Italian and Dantean literature. He exercised an incessant and fruitful apostolate among young people and in cultivated society.
In the years immediately following his conversion he composed the Canzoniere civile (1889), made up of poems and prose exalting the socially and civilly renewing action of Christianity at the highest and most significant moments of its history; a later collection of poems, the Ricordi dell'umile Italia (1918), reproduced compositions from the earlier work, reworked, as well as others written on various occasions. The poetic work of S., though uneven, almost always contains an original lyrical core, particularly sustained in the shorter compositions, inspired by nature and by the author’s intimate and religious life. Of his historical-literary and critical work, notable fruits are the essay Sulla vita giovanile di Dante (1901 and 1907), as well as studies on Guinzelli and Cavalcanti. His devotion to Dante’s poem was long and faithful, and he illustrated it through various readings; a great deal of material also remains from a commentary based on original research. His predilection for the nineteenth century is expressed in Enrichetta Manzoni Blondel e il Natale del '33 (posthumous, 1929) and in the commentary on Le memorie poetiche di Niccolò Tommaso (1916), where one observes a strongly and at times excessively psychological criticism, with ingenious and exquisite insights, but also at times with personal interpretations insufficiently founded. For a long time he investigated the life and work of s. Francesco d'Assisi and the many ties between the Italian civilization of the thirteenth century and Franciscan spirituality. His body rests in the Basilica of Aracoeli. He was a Franciscan tertiary and a man of profound spirituality: the process for his beatification has begun.