SETTEMBRINI, LUIGI. - Writer, born in Naples on April 17, 1813, died there on Nov. 3, 1876: a protagonist of the insurrectional events against the Bourbons of Naples, he was arrested several times as a conspirator, suffered imprisonment in '39, in '49, and life imprisonment on the Island of S. Stefano in February 1851.
In Le Ricordanze della mia vita, family memoirs converge with the dramatic aspects of the Risorgimento cause: the narrative unfolds in a calm yet vibrant manner. Founder of the Grande Società dell'unità italiana and, with De Sanctis, of the Associazione unitaria costituzionale, S. remains a patriot and a 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-Manzonian letter Della lingua italiana all'an. E. Broglio and in the Lezioni di letteratura italiana, published in Naples in 3 vols., in the years 1866-72. Depreciated today for their weak historiographical significance, for the erroneous conception of literary progress established upon the Church-Empire antagonism ending with the triumph of Ghibellinism, and for the misrepresentation of the history of the Middle Ages, the papacy, and the Tridentine Reformation, the Lezioni nevertheless grafted themselves into that ideological process that perceives and demands, in literature, a justified adherence to the national event. They were placed on the Index by decrees of July 4, 1867 and Dec. 14, 1868.