SCAPIGLIATURA. - An Italian literary movement whose center was in Milan between 1860 and 1870.
It arose as a reaction to the languors and sentimental complacencies of late Romanticism, against which the "scapigliati" advocated a more personal and autonomous vision of art, a greater adherence to the demands of life, and a more genuine, moved, immediate inspiration and expression. But the s., after having fought the ideals of the last Romantics and after having exacerbated, rather than avoided, the Romantic poetic material (nightmares, terrors, visions of ghosts and skeletons, etc.), after 1870 turned back toward more intimate themes and forms, conceived and cadenced in a decadent manner, passionately seeking out the inner movements of consciousness, interpreting the images and events of life according to the intimate and sometimes imperceptible stirrings of the soul. From a moral point of view, the s., which in its beginnings took pleasure in impious and sacrilegious subjects and led a disorderly life, gradually developed within itself a substratum of religiosity, which nevertheless always remained a vague aspiration (as of a distant and unattainable myth for sinners so irremediably accursed and damned).
The principal protagonists of the s. movement are Giuseppe Rovani, Arrigo Boito, Emilio Praga, Giovanni Camerana, Carlo Dossi, Cletto Arrighi, Salvatore Farina and Gian Pietro Lucini. Through the intelligent mediation of Camerana's poetry, there was a phenomenon of the s. also in Piedmont (approximately between 1880 and 1890), with G. Faldella, R. Sacchetti, A. G. Cagna as its protagonists.