SCAPIGLIATURA. – An Italian literary movement that had its center in Milan between 1860 and 1870.
It arose as a reaction against 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 frank, impetuous, and immediate inspiration and expression. However, after combating the ideals of the last Romantics and, rather than avoiding it, exacerbating Romantic poetic material (nightmares, terrors, visions of ghosts and skeletons, etc.), the *scapigliatura* turned after 1870 toward more intimate themes and decadentistically conceived and cadenced forms, passionately seeking the inner movements of consciousness, interpreting the images and events of life according to the intimate and sometimes imperceptible tremors of the soul. From a moral standpoint, the *scapigliatura*, which at its outset delighted in impious and sacrilegious subjects and led a disorderly life—in fact, life developed within it a substratum of religiosity, though this remained always a vague aspiration (like a distant and unattainable myth for sinners so irredeemably cursed and condemned).
The principal figures of the *scapigliatura* movement are Giuseppe Rovani, Arrigo Boito, Emilio Praga, Giovanni Camerana, Carlo Dossi, Cletto Arrighi, Salvatore Farina, and Gian Pietro Lucini. Through the mediatic intelligence of Camerana’s poetry, a phenomenon of *scapigliatura* also occurred in Piedmont (approximately between 1880 and 1890), with protagonists G. Faldella, R. Sacchetti, and A. G. Cagna.