Italy

Jolanda Insana was born in 1937 in Messina, Italy. Insana was the author of several volumes of poetry, beginning with Sciarra amara (approximately translated “Bitter Harvest”) published in 1977. In addition...

Guiseppe Ungaretti grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. In 1912, he moved to Paris, France, where he studied at the Sorbonne. His poetry collections include Morte delle stagioni (“Death of the Seasons,” 1967), La...

Italian poet, editor, and theorist Filippo Tommaso (F.T.) Marinetti was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1876, and he was educated in Egypt and France. He was the author of Destruction (1904) and La Ville Charnelle...

Poet, musician, and musicologist Amelia Rosselli is considered to be one of the best Italian writers of the post-WWII generation. She was born in Paris to Italian parents who fled Italy. Her father and uncle...

Born in Kassa, Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia), to a Hungarian noble family, Sándor Márai traveled to Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris in his youth before settling in Budapest in 1928. The first person to write...

Born in Turin, Italy, the novelist, memoirist, and poet Primo Levi earned a PhD in chemistry at the University of Turin. After joining the Italian anti-Fascist resistance, he was arrested by the Nazis in late...

One of Italy’s most famous and controversial filmmakers, Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a novelist and poet. Born in Bologna to a military family that moved frequently, Pasolini began writing poetry at age seven...

Emanuel Carnevali was born in Florence, Italy, and immigrated to the U.S. just before World War I. He held a series of menial jobs in New York City before joining literary circles whose ranks included William...

German-Italian writer, dramatist, and journalist Kurt Erich Suckert published under the pseudonym Curzio Malaparte (which he learned was Napoleon Bonaparte’s original family name), was born in Prato, and raised...

Gaspara Stampa was a 16th-century poet, musician, and singer born in Padua, Italy. Following her father’s death in the 1530s, she and her mother moved to Venice. There, her family home became an epicenter ...

The poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus has had two lives. In Rome, Catullus and his generation, the “new poets,” played an essential role in the development of Augustan poetry. They helped to create the possibility...

Eugenio Montale produced only five volumes of poetry in his first 50 years as a writer. But when the Swedish Academy awarded the Italian poet and critic the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature, they called him...

Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) was an Italian poet and classical scholar.

Francesco Petrarch was born in 1304 in Arezzo, Italy, though he spent most of his childhood living around Florence, Tuscany, and Avignon. After briefly studying law in Bologna in 1320, Petrarch decided to ...

Renowned and beloved in her native Italy, poet Alda Merini’s numerous books include The Presence of Orpheus, Fear of God, Roman Wedding, Diary of an Other, and Love Lessons (2009),a selection of poems translated...

Valerio Magrelli is a professor of French literature at the University of Cassino and a frequent contributor to the cultural pages of several Italian dailies. He is the author of four prize-winning poetry ...

Prolific writer, translator, and thinker Giacomo Leopardi was born in the small provincial town of Recanati, Italy, during a time of political upheaval and unrest in Europe created by the French Revolution...

Umberto Fiori was a singer/songwriter for the rock group Stormy Six, who recorded several albums and toured widely in Europe, and continues to write songs, operas, and pieces for orchestra and voice. He is...