GABRIELE ROSSETTI: A Patriotic Poet
The statue of Gabriele Rossetti in the city of Vasto
Many Italian Americans know that General Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807- 1882) was primarily responsible for winning the military victories against the foreign troops that occupied the Italian peninsula and for creating a united Italy under King Victor Emanuele II (1820-1878). However, there were many other less wellknown Italians who contributed to the political re-organization of Italy known as the Risorgimento which occurred during the period from 1860 to 1870. Some of these secondary figures used a sword; others used a quill pen. Some of them lived to see a unified Italy; others died trying. This is the story of one of those lesser known heroes who fought with his pen but died before the great battles for unification were won.
This is the story of one of the heroes who fought with his pen but died before the great battles for unification were won.
Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti was born as the fourth of seven children on February 28, 1783, in the city of Vasto which is located on the Adriatic coast of the province of Chieti in the central Italian region of Abruzzo. Two older brothers, Antonio (1771-1853) and Domenico (1776- 1816), also became poets and patriots. His oldest brother Andrea became a priest. He also had three younger sisters: Angiola Maria, Maria Giuseppa and Maria Michela. Their parents were Nicola Rossetti and his wife, Maria Francesca Pietrocola, who were religious Roman Catholics. The father was a blacksmith and a locksmith of a severe and irascible nature. In 1799 when Gabriele was 16, French forces led by Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, invaded central Italy and overran Vasto, one of the larger regional seaports at that time.
Most of the local citizens resisted. However, since they were unorganized and outgunned, many were slain, including Nicola Rossetti, when he refused to horseshoe the French cavalry. (Three ancestors of the author also were killed.) This event radicalized young Gabriele and he became determined for the rest of his life to help rid Italy of all foreign invaders. In 1804, Tommaso d Avalos, the Marquis of Vasto, recognized Gabriele’s talents in poetry, music, and painting and gave the fatherless young man a scholarship to the University of Naples. So, at the age of 21, Rossetti left his hometown, never to return alive. Two years later Rossetti published his first little volume of poetry simply called Poesie. As a result of this publication, he was hired in 1807 as a librettist at the San Carlo Opera House in Naples. After a year, he left to become a curator of ancient Latin and Greek marbles and bronzes in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.
While so employed as a bureaucrat during the day, he spent his evenings as a member of a secret revolutionary society called the Carbonari starting in 1812. During 1813 and 1814, he served as the secretary of the Roman section of the government for Public Instruction and the Fine Arts. When Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815 and the terms of the Treaty of Vienna went into effect in 1816, French troops withdrew from Naples, and the Spanish Bourbon King Ferdinando I (1751-1825) returned from Sicily to resume power. For the next four years, Rossetti remained undisturbed in his official position while publishing his poems under the pseudonym Filidauro Labidiense. However, in 1820, the king announced new repressive measures against personal liberties, and an open revolt ensued in which Rossetti took to the streets with the rest of the enraged populace. Backing down, the king agreed to grant a constitution to quell the disturbances, but a year later he revoked it.
Inflamed by the turnaround, Rossetti wrote and published a poem “You are so beautiful with the stars in your hair”. In the ode, he celebrated Lady Liberty and indicated that the king would be assassinated if he persisted in denying citizens their rights. Unmasked by a royalist, Rossetti went into hiding. For distributing his poem, Rossetti was tried in absentia and sentenced to death on April 9, 1821. However, with the assistance of other Carbonari members and British Admiral Sir Graham Moore, who was secretly helping the rebellion, Rossetti dressed as an English lieutenant and fled on the ship Rochfort which was leaving the port of Naples for the island of Malta. There he remained for the next three years, studying English and continuing to write poetry. In 1822 his mother died in Vasto, but he was unable to return for her funeral. In April 1824, he boarded a ship bound for London where he stayed for the rest of his life. In the capital of Great Britain, he was greeted with open arms by other Italian exiles who had already reached safety after the unsuccessful uprisings of 1799 and 1820.
Because of a growing interest in Italian by wealthy English students, Rossetti initially supported himself by tutoring the language before undertaking a required grand tour Of Europe. He befriended a Tuscan named Gaetano Polidori who taught Italian at King’s College in London. In April 1826 at the age of 43, Rossetti married Francesca Maria Lavinia Polidori, considered the brightest and the most attractive of the four daughters of Gaetano. They were wed first in the Roman Catholic Church and two days later in the Anglican Church. Together they had four children in the next four years. They were Maria Francesca (1827-1876), Dante Gabriel (1828-1882), William Michael (1829-1919), and Christina Georgina (1830-1894). All of them would become renowned in the arts in their own right. Maria became an Italian language text writer and an historical essayist; Dante became a painter and a poet; William became an art critic and a literary editor, while Christina became a religious and a children’s poet. (A separate article about the four Rossetti children will follow in the next issue.)
Rossetti also supplemented his income by writing scholarly works when he was not printing revolutionary tracts aimed at his native country. For example, in 1825 and 1827, he published a two-volume commentary on Dante’s The Divine Comedy. To help support his burgeoning family and fueled by another unsuccessful revolt in Italy in 1830, Rossetti printed in 1831 his most famous work: Disquisitions on the Antipapal Spirit Which Produced the Reformation. In this book, Rossetti claimed that The Divine Comedy was written by Dante about 1320 in a code language of a secret humanistic society that was opposed to the political and ecclesiastical tyranny of the time. Although branded by some critics as eccentric, the book gained support from a minority of Dantists who espoused Rossetti’s views for many years thereafter. Because of the work’s antipapist nature, Rossetti was appointed later that year to be a Professor of Italian Language and Literature at the Anglican — based King’s College, upon the recommendation of his father — in-law.
Two years later, Rossetti published his second volume of poems entitled God and Man which was a collection of hymns to liberty and calls for freedom that he thought should be supported by all religions. Now more financially secure, Rossetti devoted the next 11 years of his life to raising and educating his young brood. As an amicable and indulgent older father, Rossetti imparted to them his love of Italian poetry and in particular his admiration for Dante as the world’s greatest poet.
Rossetti’s poetry inspired exiles and motivated Italian patriots to continue the fight for freedom.
Rossetti resumed his writing in 1842 when his youngest child was 12 with the publication of The Mystery of Platonic Love and The Beatrice of Dante. In the latter work, Rossetti interpreted Beatrice as the symbol of Dante’s soul and not as a real person. In 1847 misfortune struck when Rossetti became blind, probably due to glaucoma. Reluctantly, he had to resign his professorship at the age of 64. The family fell upon hard times and relied upon the income earned by the younger son William who at 18 was already a clerk in the Excise (later Inland Revenue) Office of the British Government in London. The older son Dante had previously left home, but Rossetti’s two daughters were unmarried and remained living with their parents. Although he was a constitutional monarchist at heart, Rossetti exulted at the news in 1848 that another revolution in Rome had finally succeeded and he made plans to return to Italy. Unfortunately, his hopes were dashed when the new republic was besieged, and the Old Order was re-established after a few months.
In reaction to this disappointing turn of events, Rossetti dictated to his daughters who arranged for the printing of his last collection of patriotic and religious lyrics. He entitled the work The Evangelical Harp which was published in 1852. On April 26, 1854, almost exactly 30 years after arriving in London, Rossetti died in his home at the age of 71 and was buried in the Highgate Cemetery. Six years later Garibaldi and his 1,000 Redshirts conquered Sicily and Naples. In 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed under Victor Emanuele II, but it was not until 1870 that the Risorgimento ended when the French troops were driven out of Rome and Pope Pius IX took refuge in the Vatican.
Although Rossetti did not live to see the day that Italy was united, his poetry written over his lifetime inspired other exiles and motivated Italian patriots to continue the fight for freedom against the forces of Spain in the south, France in the central regions, and Austria in the north. In 1901 Rossetti’s sole surviving child William published his father’s Versified Autobiography posthumously in English. In 1910 William arranged to have the autobiography published in Italian under the title La Vita Mia (My Life) by a printer in the city of Lanciano, northwest of Rossetti’s hometown of Vasto. The Italian government honored Rossetti by erecting a large statue of him in the central plaza of Vasto in 1925. In 1987 more than 200 years after his birth, Rossetti’s bones were disinterred from his grave in London and he was returned again to his beloved hometown of Vasto where he was reburied in the same central plaza near to his statue. ❚