Tozzi, Federico

TOZZI, FEDERICO. - Writer, b. in Siena on January 1, 1883, d. in Rome on March 21, 1920. He moved from 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 last years of his life.

Even today it is not easy to give an exhaustive judgment of T., above all because of the difficulty of grasping in him the relationship between the diaristic-memorial moment and the tendentially narrative aspect. His is a body of work that can be placed chronologically between the literature of La Voce, of broad scope even in its prose of memory, and the experiments of another review, La Ronda; but from both T. detaches himself with his deeply felt development of psychological and moral contents, often the expression of a dramatic religious spirituality, and through his faculty of transporting them onto a plane of accentuated mythicization of characters. To be remembered, within his production, are his youthful sentimental epistolary published posthumously under the title Novale, the prose of Bestie (1917), the stories of Giovani and Ricordi di un impiegato (1920), and the novels Con gli occhi chiusi, Il podere, Tre croci, the latter posthumous (1920).