Vittorio Alfieri

Vittorio Alfieri (Asti, 1749 - Florence, 1803) was a Piedmontese count who became the most important Italian dramatist of the eighteenth century. He is regarded as the founder of modern Italian tragedy. He wrote nineteen tragedies, sonnets and satires, as well as a notable autobiography, and he translated Virgil and other Latin and Greek authors. His restless character and his passion for liberty have led critics to see him as a forerunner of Romantic sensibility, although his dramatic work belongs to classicism.

He was born in Asti, in the Kingdom of Sardinia, into a noble family. He lost his father in infancy and was raised by his mother, and later sent to the royal academy in Turin, where he studied grammar, rhetoric and law. He gave up his legal studies, joined the army and, at twenty, with a large inheritance at his disposal, began a long series of journeys through Europe that took him to Paris, London, the Netherlands, Sweden, Russia, Portugal and Spain. In London he had an affair with Penelope Pitt, the wife of a viscount, which ended in scandal and forced him to leave Britain. These years left him with a lasting love of horses and a deep distrust of despotism, which he nourished by reading Plutarch.

Back in Turin in 1773, he resolved to devote himself entirely to literature. His first tragedies, Filippo and Polinice, were drafted in French, but he soon judged his Italian too weak and set out to improve it in Tuscany. There he met Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, Countess of Albany, wife of the Jacobite pretender Charles Edward Stuart, with whom he formed a lasting bond that lasted until his death. To remain close to her he gave up much of his property to his sister. Over the following decade he wrote many tragedies, among them Saul, Merope, Antigone, Agamemnon and Myrrha, and translated Virgil. His works were published in Siena and later in Paris, where the couple lived until the French Revolution drove them to Florence.

Alfieri saw tragedy as a stage for the struggle between freedom and tyranny. In his essay Della tirannide he argued that absolutism was incompatible with the rights of man, and in Del principe e delle lettere he claimed that poets are the heralds of freedom and the natural enemies of tyrants. He at first welcomed the French Revolution, but the Terror turned him against it, and in 1799 he published Il Misogallo, a satire against revolutionary France. That stance did not prevent him from being honoured when Napoleon attended a performance of his Virginia.

His influence was wide. For Italian liberals and republicans of the Risorgimento he became a political as well as a literary reference, and his sober, passionate dramatic style shaped the Italian theatre. His ideas on liberty and on the poet as a critical conscience also resonated in British Romantic poetry.