Salvatore Di Giacomo
Salvatore Di Giacomo | |
---|---|
Born | 12 March 1860 |
Died | 5 April 1934 | (aged 74)
Salvatore Di Giacomo (12 March 1860 – 5 April 1934) was an Italian poet, songwriter, playwright and fascist, one of the signatories to the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals.
Di Giacomo is credited as being one of those responsible for renewing Neapolitan language poetry at the beginning of the 20th century. The language of Salvatore Di Giacomo is, however, not the everyday Neapolitan language of his contemporaries; it has a distinct 18th-century flavour to it, with archaisms that recall the golden age of Neapolitan culture. This was the period between 1750 and 1800, when Neapolitan was the language of the best-loved[citation needed] form of musical entertainment in Italy, the Neapolitan comic opera.
Early career
Di Giacomo was born in Naples.
He studied
He had a lifelong love of libraries as well as literary and historical research, founding, in the course of his career, the Lucchese section of the National
Plays and lyrics
Di Giacomo's plays, such as A San Francesco and Assunta Spina, are bitter stories about turn-of-the-century life in the Naples of the Risanamento (the massive, decades-long urban renewal of the city that displaced tens of thousands of persons), workers whose health is ruined by their labors, prostitution, betrayal, prison, crime, etc. As a song lyricist, he wrote easily and abundantly for the famous Neapolitan song festival of Piedigrotta, a fact that still leads some critics to dismiss him as a lightweight.
Use of language
Di Giacomo seemingly viewed standard language as necessary for modern commerce and politics, but almost by definition devoid of the life that people bring to the language they speak, the vernacular turn of phrase that exists only at a particular place in a particular time for a particular people. He closed his own essay on Neapolitan poetry, written in 1900, with this passionate quote from
Sources
This entry is an abridgement of a Salvatore Di Giacomo[1] article on another website and has been placed here by the author and copyright owner of that article.
References
External links
- Media related to Salvatore Di Giacomo at Wikimedia Commons
- Works by or about Salvatore Di Giacomo at Internet Archive
- Works by Salvatore Di Giacomo at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)