SETTEMBRINI, Luigi. – Writer, born in Naples on 17 April 1813, died there on 3 November 1876: a leading figure in the insurrectional events against the Bourbons of Naples, he was repeatedly arrested as a conspirator, imprisoned in 1839 and 1849, and sentenced to life imprisonment on the island of Santo Stefano in February 1851.
In *Le Ricordanze della mia vita* he brings together, alongside family memoirs, the dramatic aspects of the Risorgimento cause: the narrative unfolds calmly yet vividly. Founder of the Grande Società dell’unità italiana and, with De Sanctis, of the Associazione unitaria costituzionale, SETTEMBRINI remained a patriot and political writer not only in the *Protesta del popolo delle Due Sicilie* and in the *Difesa scritta da L. S., per gli uomini di buon senso*, but also in the anti-Mazzinian pamphlet *Della lingua italiana all’On. E. Broglio* and in the *Lezioni di letteratura italiana*, published in Naples in three volumes between 1866 and 1872. Though now undervalued for their weak historiographical significance, their mistaken view of a literary progress based on the antagonism between Church and Empire culminating in the triumph of Ghibellinism, and their distortion of medieval history, the papacy, and the Council of Trent, the *Lezioni* nonetheless belong to that ideological process which, in literature, demanded and justified adherence to the national cause. They were placed on the Index by decrees of 4 June 1867 and 14 December 1868.