SCAPIGLIATURA. – Italian literary movement whose center was in Milan between 1860 and 1870.
It arose as a reaction against the languors and sentimental complacencies of late Romanticism, in opposition to which the “scapigliati” advocated a more personal and autonomous vision of art, greater adherence to the demands of life, and a more candid, dynamic, immediate inspiration and expression. But the s., after having fought the ideals of the final Romantics and after having heightened—rather than avoided—the Romantic poetic material (nightmares, terrors, visions of ghosts and skeletons, etc.), after 1870 turned toward more intimate themes and forms, conceived and cadenced in a decadent manner, passionately seeking the inner movements of consciousness and interpreting the images and events of life according to the intimate and sometimes imperceptible tremors of the soul. From a moral point of view, the s., which at the beginning 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 irredeemably cursed and condemned).
The principal protagonists of the movement of the s. are Giuseppe Rovani, Arrigo Boito, Emilio Praga, Giovanni Camerana, Carlo Dossi, Cletto Arringhi, Salvatore Farina and Gian Pietro Lucini. Through the intelligent mediation of Camerana’s poetry, a phenomenon of s. also arose in Piedmont (approximately between 1880 and 1890), with G. Faldella, R. Sacchetti and A. G. Cagna as its protagonists.