Life

Life presents a first-hand, dramatic account of the privileged life and development of a literary mind in late eighteenth-century Europe from an Italian perspective.

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The theatrical tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803), Italy’s greatest dramatist of the late 1700s, feature themes and elegant verse that perfectly reflect his neoclassical age. Life presents Alfieri’s autobiography, detailing a journey that was anything but measured and orderly, giving the modern reader an entertaining and insightful view of privileged life and travel in pre-Napoleonic Europe and the gradual (and late) development of a cultured, literary mind. Alfieri leads us through childhood humiliations in Torino, introductions to popes and sovereigns, love affairs scandalous and noble, Baltic ice storms, treks across Spain, a late-night duel in London, a narrow escape from revolutionary Paris, venereal inconveniences, and the difficulty of breaking into the literary establishment. A stubborn and proud man, Alfieri includes in his memoirs enough self-awareness and self-deprecation to make his character engaging and often sympathetic.

This new translation, the first in seventy years, includes footnotes describing places, people, and events largely unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers plus Alfieri’s own appendices – letters, poems, early drafts of scenes – translated into English for the first time.