Settembrini, Luigi

SETTEMBRINI, LUIGI. - Writer, b. in Naples on 17 April 1813, d. there on 3 Nov. 1876: a protagonist of the insurrectionary events against the Bourbons of Naples, he was arrested several times as a conspirator, and suffered imprisonment in '39 and '49, and life imprisonment on the island of S. Stefano in Feb. 1851.

In Le Ricordanze della mia vita there converge, together with family memories, the dramatic aspects of the Risorgimento cause: the narrative unfolds there calmly, yet vividly. Founder of the Grande Società dell'unità italiana and, together 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., for men of good sense, 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. Devalued today for their weak historiographical significance, for the erroneous conception of a literary progress established on the Church-Empire antagonism ended with the triumph of Ghibellinism, for the misrepresentation of the history of the Middle Ages, of the papacy, of the Tridentine Reform, the Lezioni nevertheless grafted themselves onto that ideological process which perceives and demands, in literature, a justified adherence to the national cause. They were placed on the Index by decrees of 4 July 1867 and 14 Dec. 1868.

Enzo Navarra