TOZZI, FEDERICO. - Writer, born in Siena on 1 Jan. 1883, died in Rome on 21 March 1920. He left his native city after complex and painful experiences shadowed forth in his narrative work. He received his first recognition as a writer, especially from G. A. Borghese, in the final years of his life.
Even today it is not easy to give a comprehensive judgment of T., above all because of the difficulty of grasping in him the relationship between the diaristic, memorial element and the tendency toward narrative. His work may be placed chronologically between the literature of La Voce, broad in scope even in its memoir prose, and the experiments of another review, La Ronda; yet T. stands apart from both through his impassioned development of psychological and moral content, often the expression of a dramatic religious spirituality, and through his capacity to transpose characters onto a plane of marked mythification. Among his works should be recalled the youthful sentimental correspondence published posthumously under the title Novale, the prose pieces of Bestie (1917), the stories in Giovani and Ricordi di un impiegato (1920), and the novels Con gli occhi chiusi, Il podere, Tre croci, the last of these published posthumously (1920).