TASSONI, ALESSANDRO. - Poet, b. at Modena on 28 Sept. 1565, d. there on 25 Apr. 1635.
After his studies at Bologna and Ferrara, he moved to Rome in 1597 and remained there for a long time, wholly intent on his literary work. From these years date the Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca, written not out of «ill will against Petrarch, king of the melic poets», but against the «constipated» worshippers of the latter. In 1606 he was «prince» of the «Umoristi»: he was also a member of the Lincei and of the Crusca. When Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy went to war against Spain, T. seconded the enterprise with two Filippiche contro gli Spagnoli (1615), which are the noblest and most vigorous oratorical prose of the seventeenth century. In 1618 the Duke named him secretary of the Piedmontese embassy at Rome and gentleman of his son Maurice the cardinal; in 1619 he summoned him to Turin as his first secretary; in 1621 he gave him as companion to Maurice, who was at Rome for the conclave. Meanwhile he had composed the Secchia rapita (1615), in 10 cantos, which he was able to print only in 1624, in 12 cantos. In 1620 he printed the Pensieri diversi, in 10 books. In 1626 he agreed to serve Cardinal Ludovisi, on whose death (1632) he went, invited by Duke Francis I, to the court of Modena, where he ended his days.
In the Pensieri diversi (natural, moral, civil, historical, literary) there lives a combative and whimsical spirit, acute and paradoxical, opposing reason to tradition, an enemy of ideas accepted without examination and of the authority of the "ancients", a revealer of new truths, though not immune to curious prejudices. La Secchia rapita is the masterpiece of Italian mock-heroic poetry. T. sought to parody the heroic epic, of which the epigones of Tasso made excessive use, and which was in contrast with the wretched social and political reality of his time: and he produced a felicitous poem, a fluent and brisk narrative, where, with lively mutability of tone, with "laughs that fall unforeseen amid serious matters", he passes agilely from the serious to the burlesque and the grotesque. That the characters in general are little defined, that they are masks and caricatures rather than characters, matters little: they suffice to color the parody of a poetic fashion and the satire of an inept and servile age. Considerable relief is given, moreover, to the count of Culagna, the noble braggart and coward, whom T. presents as the nephew of "don Chisotto", and to Titta di Cola, the refashioned Roman commoner, a swaggerer and boaster, a kind of Rugantino. And no less felicitous is the realistic representation of a whole crowd of peasants and townsfolk, armed in the strangest ways and speaking the most heterogeneous languages.
Bibliography9 works
Giulio Natali