Rebellion, death, and aesthetics in Italy

In this book, author David Del Principe asks whether unspeakable truths in their works kept an entire generation of nineteenth-century Italian writers known as the "scapigliati" at the margins of Italian literary life and sparked critics to deride the movement known as Scapigliatura.

It is coincidental that issues and themes submerged in their graveyard poetics - physical and psychic transference, sexual identity, vampirism, the supernatural, androgyny, and decadence - have become controversial at the turn of another century while literary and cultural interest in Scapigliatura has reemerged?

Scapigliatura, the term that Cletto Arrighi chose to characterize the literary movement led by Ugo Tarchetti, Carlo Dossi, Emilio Praga, Camillo and Arrigo Boito, Giovanni Faldella, Giovanni Camerana, and others, took place in Milan and Turin in the 1860s and 1870s.

As social and political visionaries, the "scapigliati" acquired reputations as consummate anticonformists, lacing their works with protests against capitalism, Catholicism, and militarism, and living in perpetual conflict with a prospering bourgeoisie. A desperate resolve to flee from cultural, sociopolitical, and literary strangulation instilled an apocalyptic vision and an affinity for self-destruction in the scapigliati. In fact, several of them lived relatively short lives, and Tarchetti's own tormented life has come to exemplify the anguish of the era of Scapigliatura.

Although these artists are loosely grouped as a literary movement, the influence of Scapigliatura has been rightfully confirmed in Decadent fin de siecle literature and, arguably, in the twentieth-century historical avant-garde.