ZANELLA, GIACOMO. - Priest, poet and critic, b. at Chiampo (Vicenza) on 7 Sept. 1820, d. at Vicenza on 17 May 1888. At Vicenza he did his first studies at the municipal Ginnasio and in 1831 entered the Seminario vescovile. On 6 Aug. 1843 he was ordained a priest. He remained in the Seminary, as a teacher of the gymnasium classes for three years; then, having obtained in 1847 the degree in philosophy at the University of Padua, as a professor of philosophy and letters in the lyceum classes.
In Apr. 1848, in two sermons delivered in the church of S. Caterina in Vicenza he extolled the the "Five Days" of Milan. He also composed a collection of patriotic poems. This made him hateful to Austria. In 1853 he was forced to give up teaching in the Seminary, having "expounded principles and sentiments adverse to the government." The prohibition was lifted only in 1857, when Archduke Maximilian sought to inaugurate a new system of government with conciliatory intentions. Having obtained at Padua the qualification to teach literary subjects, Z. held the office of professor in the Lyceums of Venice and Vicenza and, in 1863, of headmaster of the Lyceum of Padua. After the annexation of the Veneto to Italy, in 1866, he was appointed by the minister Domenico Berti as full professor of Italian literature at the University of Padua. In 1868 he published his poems (Versi, Florence 1868), which immediately gave him wide popularity. He was then appointed magnifico rector, a member of various national and foreign academies, an effective member of the Royal Venetian Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts. Without the school being changed into "exercises of moral and religious sermons," he willed and hoped that, against the positivism and determinism then in vogue, greater place be given to spiritual values. After the death of his mother (1872), he fell into a melancholy that lasted three years: a form of "depressive neuropsychosis." He had already suffered from it in 1850 and was seized by it again in 1870. Meanwhile, in 1875, he asked and obtained from the minister Bonghi to be placed on retirement, and from 1879 he began to sojourn in the little villa he had built for himself near Cavazzale, along the Astichello. There he wrote poetry on the simple country life and attended to the composition of the Storia della letter. ital. dalla metà del '700 ai giorni nostri (Milan 1880) and the Paralleli letterari (Verona 1885).
Z.'s poetic activity unfolded in the first twenty-five years of the new Kingdom of Italy and, in literary terms, occupies that period commonly called that of the "second romanticism." Nevertheless he was a classicist, in the traditional sense of the term. He fashioned his artistic education on the long and loving study of the Greek, Latin and Italian classics; with classical rigor he used the meters of Italian poetry and he also had the aesthetics of the classics ("Art must always be an end, not a means"), even if his poetry often turned to moral and practical purposes (the first complete edition of the Poesie was edited by A. Graf [Florence 1928, repr. ibid. 1933]).
He sang of the homeland set toward new destinies (Il grido di Venezia, I cavalli di S. Marco, A Camillo Cavour, Ossari di S. Martino e Solferino), but above all of science. The impetus of the new scientific conquests, with which the 19th century was rich, was understood by Z. in all the ideality of the torment that drives humanity to renew itself. While, through the work of Darwinian doctrines, science placed itself in contrast with faith, Z. denied the dissension and attempted poetically to compose the harmony that, joining faith and science, heaven and earth, will comfort men to feel, beyond the "discovered truths," the immutable certainties of the "revealed truths." From this were born his best poems: the ode Sopra una conchiglia fossile, his masterpiece, which affirms the duties incumbent, by the will of God, on man, and the one entitled La veglia, where the poet retraces in thought the ages of man and reaffirms his faith in the perfecting of every created thing, and in the existence of a beyond. To the same ideal are inspired, with historical and moral references, l'Industria, Pel taglio dell'istmo di Suez, Microcosmo e telescopio, and the short poem Milton e Galilei. Other poems are inspired by faith (Voci secrete, Alla Madonna di Monte Berico, Assisi, Dopo una lettura dell'Imitazione di Cristo): they stand at the center of Z.'s spiritual world, they illuminate and reflect his Christian soul.
From the last years is the Astichello, a collection of 91 sonnets, Virgilianly limpid, composed between 1880 and 1887. The collection can be linked to those, slightly earlier, of José-Maria de Heredia (Les Trophées) and of Prati (Psiche), but, if the formal decorum reveals a Parnassian taste for form, Z. departs from the Parnassians through his Christian sentiment of nature. That tendency to establish a relationship between the natural spectacle and moral meaning, besides from a dignified prudence, springs above all from the revelation of that sense of the soul of things, already so full in the lesson of the parables and the Gospel episodes.
Particular mention deserve the translations from the ancient and modern languages (Versioni poetiche di G. Z., with preface by E. Romagnoli, Florence 1921).
BIBL. A. Fogazzaro, G. Z., Naples 1892; F. Lampertino, G. Z., Vicenza 1895; A. Bonacci-Brunamonti, G. Z., Città di Castello 1896; A. Zardo, G. Z. nella vita e nelle opere, Florence 1903; G. Alberti, La poesia scientifica di G. Z., in Marzocco, 8 Jan. 1922; A. Prearo, Classissimo e originalità nella poesia di G. Z., Vicenza 1924; C. De Lollis, Un parnassiano d'Italia, in Saggi sulla forma poetica dell'Ottocento, Bari 1920, pp. 240-67; G. Solitro, G. Z., Padua 1938; T. Franzi, G. Z., Turin 1939; P. Bargellini, Pena dell'Ottocento, Brescia 1944, pp. 113-46; B. Croce, La letter. della nuova Italia, I, Bari 1947, pp. 394-313; A. Scarpa, Attualità di G. Z., Turin 1948; M. Parenti, Il cantore della «Conchiglia» (Saggio di bibl. zancillana), Florence 1948; M. B. Brizzo, Della poesia di Z., in Città di vita, 8 (1932), fasc. 7.
Silvio Pasquazi