Casa Carducci

I know neither truth of God nor peace with the Vatican or any priests. They are the real and unaltering enemies of Italy. Giosuè Carducci

Born in Valdicastello di Pietrasanta, Tuscany, the poet Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907) was the eldest son of a physician, a well-educated liberal and fervent supporter of Garibaldi and Italian Unification.

A precocious child, he was reading in Latin and Greek at an early age, and especially appreciated the classic, restrained economy in the poetry of Horace, Ovid and Virgil. After winning a scholarship to Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa he began teaching, and in 1857 published his first book of poetry, Rime. He moved to Bologna in 1860 when he was appointed Chair of Italian Eloquence at the University, and remained in the city for the rest of his life.

In 1863, Carducci, a lifelong atheist and Masonic freethinker (Masonic lodges in France and Italy were major hotbeds of revolutionary activity), composed his most notorious verse, a drinking toast to the devil which he recited to friends, then published two years later as the Inno a Satana ('Hymn to Satan', in the original and translated into English). For Carducci, Satan symbolized resistance to the 19th-century earthly power of the papacy and personified all the things the Church condemned: freedom of thought and speech, human reason, sensuous pleasure in love, art and beauty and political progress and justice.