born July 27, 1835, Val di Castello, near Lucca, Tuscany
died Feb. 16, 1907, Bologna, Italy
Italian poet.
He taught literary history in Bologna for 40 years and in later years served as a senator. He opposed the prevailing Romanticism and advocated a return to classical models of prosody, but his rhetorical tirades provoked resistance to reform. His best volumes of verse, The New Lyrics and The Barbarian Odes (1887), contain evocations of landscape, memories of childhood, and representations of the glory of ancient Rome. Regarded in his time as Italy's national poet, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906.