TORTI, GIOVANNI. - Poet, b. in Milan on 24 June 1774, d. in Genoa on 15 Feb. 1852.
He was a pupil of Parini, and held several offices in the administration of Milan. After 1848 - the Inno alle Cinque Giornate is his - when the Austrians returned to Milan, he took refuge in Genoa, where he was president of the Administrative Council of the University.
In 1808 he wrote the Epistola sui Sepolcri: a comparison between Foscolo's poem and Pindemonte's. With the tercets Sulla Passione di Cristo (1816) and with the four Sermoni sulla poesia (1818), his adherence to Romanticism is in evidence. He also wrote a short poem, La Torre di Capua (1829), and in '36 Scetticismo e religione.
Manzoni, in a letter to D'Azeglio and in the Promessi Sposi, praises his verses. The three epistles: Un'abiura in Roma in the second year of the pontificate of Pius IX, which tacitly contrast Pius IX the reformer with the more cautious and conservative Pope of his last years, are on the Index (decree of 20 Apr. 1852) also because of the anticlerical spirit that animates them, for which «a sensible and honest heterodox man» laments the purity of heaven in the face of the corruption of the Church.
BBL.: Poesie complete by G. T., edited by G. B. Ceresato, Genoa 1853; E. Bellorini, G. T., Naples 1907; G. Mazzoni, L'Ottocento, Milan n.d., see index. Maria L. Armao