Giuseppe Parini

Giuseppe Parini (1729 - 1799) was an Italian poet and satirist of the Enlightenment, working in a Neoclassical manner. He wrote in Italian, and his work became one of the most respected moral voices in Lombardy of his day, although its refined style won him fewer readers than he might have hoped.

The son of a modest silk trader, he was educated in Milan thanks to an elderly great-aunt who left him a small income on condition that he become a priest. Parini did so, though without much enthusiasm for religious life. To support himself he worked as a copyist and as a tutor in noble households, and in those houses he saw at close hand the idle life of the Milanese aristocracy, the raw material of his best-known work.

In 1752 he published a small selection of poems under the pseudonym Ripano Eupilino, which opened doors to literary academies. His major poem, Il giorno, offers ironic advice to a young nobleman on how to spend his days. The first part appeared in 1763 and made his name; the later parts were left unfinished at his death. The tutor who narrates the poem works as a mask for the author, so the reader grasps the emptiness of such a life without any need for a sermon.

Support from Count Firmian, the Austrian representative in Lombardy, brought him posts as court poet of the theatre and professor at the Palatine School. His odes, written between 1757 and 1795, praise simplicity, honesty and a dignified life in a tone more rational than devout. During the French occupation of 1796 he joined the revolutionary council of Milan, but he soon withdrew, uneasy at its excesses. His last years were marked by illness and blindness.

His legacy lies in combining a carefully shaped form with a strict moral purpose. Ugo Foscolo praised the ethical value of Il giorno, and Alessandro Manzoni was shaped by the depth of his thought.