Jan 15, 2026
3 min read
Fact Check: Was He Really The Poet Kira Starna: Death, Relationships With Women, Complicated Relationships With Sisters, Faith, Politics, Relationships With Kardachi
Giovanni Pascoli and his sisters in the film "Zvanì"
The film Zvanì, a family novel by Giovanni Pascoli, shown on Rai Uno on January 13, 2026, provided a reconstruction of the life of the "star horse" poet, an indelible scientific memory of many generations.
It is precisely because of this school memory that for most Giovanni Pascoli he has long remained locked in a set of clichés, which the release of the films Zvanì ("Giovannino") by Giuseppe Piccioni, released in cinemas on October 2, encourages them to try the "time of the capital of history".The school brought us the prisoner Pascoli back from his many losses, from the nostalgia of the lost nest, from the complicated relationships with his sisters and with women, thanks to some psychoanalytical readings.But also a poet of apparent ease, at least in the collective imagination, which has done him some justice.But is Giovanni Pascoli really remembered by many of us?
We checked the facts with someone who worked with him throughout his life, a philologist who edited editions of his works.
“It is true that Pascoli, who was born in 1855 and died in 1912, was for a long time considered in schools a “children's poet”: the little flowers, the birds, the redressed Valentino, the attention to the tiny reality that is really a feature of Pascoli, but whose value and importance has been underestimated,” says Gianfranca Lavezzi, professor of Italian literature at the University of Pavia and editor of the annotated edition of the Canti di Castelvecchio inBookstores from October 21st for Bur.“Pascoli had been a teacher and had also edited school anthologies, including Fior da fiore, which appeared in 1901 and was then “renewed and expanded” twice in the 1930s, first by Benedetto Migliore and then by Carlo Saggio: a distorting operation that inserted texts that, in Pascoli, provided a kind of common thread between the Risorgimento and the unification of Italy"It was only in 1955, on the occasion of his first 100th birthday, that Giovanni Pascoli was able to restore his true place in the history of literature when the philologist Gianfranco Contini held a conference in San Mauro di Romagna on Pascoli's language, the first to understand its true complexity and innovative scope.
A life marked by sadness
From school we carry with us the tears and regrets of Pascoli's "Orfano's Lullaby," marked by countless family deaths, even as experience has taught us to beware of the danger of misunderstanding in reconciling life and literature."In the case of Pascoli, we must be clear," Lavezzi explains, "the biography had a great influence on the poetry, because it was a non-trivial biography due to the impressive series of deaths that shocked the family in a short period of time. Above all, the violent death of his father Ruggero (contains an atmosphere of good and crime. He remained silent, but Giovanni Pascoli, one of his father's enemies, La Torre of the Princes of TorloniaCanti di Castelvecchio, in compensation for the memory of his father and his family, lost his sister Margherita, his mother and his brothers Luigi, as well as the prestigious university chair in Bologna.In comparison with his tired predecessor, he was a master of lessons, but in the end he was an emblem of the success he had achieved.It was accepted because it was a compensation."
A nest between biography and poetics
In the house of San Mauro di Romagna there is a cradle with a "nest" carved in wood by Ruggero Pascoli, which later marked itself as a symbol of Pascoli's poetics and a symbol of electric voltage. I wonder how real and how implicit it is.In this regard, the connection with the sisters Ida and Mario was discussed from a psychoanalytic point of view, which indicated controversial elements of the disease."On a biographical level, it is clear that his goal was to rebuild the protection area, the original family, the nest lost when he lost his mother, sisters and two brothers after his father. This is a concentration of tragic events that go beyond the child mortality statistics of the time. Pascoli is survived by two brothers. (Mariù), did not have a real relationship while in Bologna and lived their youth in a convent / boarding school.
Mixed political commitment
In Bologna, Pascoli enrolled at the university, which he would not have been able to buy if he had not had a scholarship from the committee with Josue Carducci as president: "It took nine years to finish literature, because at that time he was involved in politics: he was close to socialists, anarchists, three months of friendship with Andrea Costa in prison. Although political convictions will eventually have a very inconsistent evolution for us: he supportsColonialism in Libya, its socialism flows into nationalism, which translates into an interest that has never been abroad, for Italian immigrants, with the idea of Pascoli, which aims not to earn a living elsewhere.Explain the lack of political coherence.
San Mauro or Castelvecchio Is this house the real house?
He will never return to the nursery in San Mauro di Romagna, Pascoli's birthplace, now a museum: the main center of Pascoli's memory is still in Garfagnana in Castelvecchio: "San Mauro Pascoli was hindered by nostalgia for Pascoli, the memory of his mother who did not like these places "soon Pasco did not return that to the White House, that is Hatchio, that is not Hatchio.is actually the house he chose, with a vegetable garden and a vineyard country farm.which preserves his memory and passes on his legacy.
Bad mariù mirror: sister, wife, dog
For a long time, we knew Pasquali only through the testimonies and documents left by Mario, and therefore through the filter of his views, which allowed us to free ourselves a little, without ignoring the importance of other documents recently collected by his sister: the balance was shaken by the marriage of his sister Ida in 1895, and Mario later became tyrannical towards her, but I constantly put him under control, but he bored me.more psychological accusations and guilt than anything else in all of this.This can also be understood from some recently published letters of Fallino, in which Pasquali plans to start a family, to share "Mariokina" with his brother, six months from one and six months from the other.Italy, even when he often goes to Rome, for the needs of the service he pays attention to the house.He sends a lot of letters a day, even three, and in 1894, Gully the dog enters his solitary house, behaves like a family, even adds a paw greeting to the letters.
Nature, real or recreated?
The theme brings us back to Pascoli's nature, which is very present in his poems, which gives him the definition of an impressionist poet: think of the fragments of light clouds and the gull wing of Temporales, the details that make it difficult to understand the border between the real and the imaginary: "In Castelvecchio Pascoli, he lives inside the farmer. There is a vineyard, a vegetable garden.He was so angry at Leopard's verse mixing roses and violets that he could not imagine such a mistake, regardless of the various seasons.Nature in Pascoli's poetry is so real and so precise that it never allows itself to be captured: it uses precise names and numbers.He does this because, as Contini points out, Pascoli wants animals, things, and people to each speak their own language.And this exactness he acquired both from frequent visits to the countryside, from walks listening to the birds, and from the perusal of ornithological treatises, which we find annotated and annotated in the library of Castelvecchio.But often nature refers to something else, to the back, to mysterious symbolism, about the night jasmine or the crimson fox glove, special poems like the Day of the Dead opening Mirica and the last chapters of Canti di Castelvecchio.
Believer or unbeliever?
The eternal dialogue with the dead, which Pascoli's verses receive, the question can only be raised about Pascoli's relationship with the dimension of faith: "Mariù accepts John Pascoli as a believer, but it is probably a projection of the desire of his religious sister. We know that the poet had a Catholic education, his mother calls him childhood, but is the monstrous memory of him, but is terrifying. of his mother, but he does not transfer it to faithgrown-up, Pascoli's sense of faith has no consolation, which increases his restlessness.
Pascoli vs Carducci, Ipenia hears you onei
The school, by supporting him for a long time, contributed to perpetuating the rivalry with Carducci, feeling that today Pascoli maintains the rhythm of modernism much better: "It is certainly so and we probably owe it to his restless spirit. Carducci has survived less in contemporary taste because he has a vision, then marble, classicism, a definitive vision, never questioned, Pascoli has a difficult relationship with classicism: he is nocturnal. The poet, his poems are full of nights, storms,winds, but the doors are always clear.It is difficult to imagine anything more current or more contemporary than this condition that brings us closer every day.
