Biography
Vittorio Alfieri was born on January 16, 1749, in Asti, Piedmont, to Count Antonio Alfieri and his wife, Monica Maillard de Tournon, a Turinese lady of Savoyard origin and the widow of Marquis Cacherano. His mother was much younger than his father, who married when he was in his late fifties and died before Vittorio was a year old. Later, Alfieri’s mother remarried a man her own age, Giacinto Alfieri, from a different branch of the same family, with whom she lived in perfect harmony.
Alfieri and his older sister, Giulia, lived with their mother and stepfather, but when Giulia was sent to the convent boarding school, Alfieri, although living at home, felt very lonely under the care of his private teacher, and he developed a melancholy that was to accompany him for the greater part of his life.
At the age of nine, Alfieri was sent to the military academy in Turin, where he stayed from 1758 to 1766. Although this school enjoyed a good reputation in eighteenth century Europe and counted prominent foreigners among its graduates, Alfieri condemned it as a horrible institution with an antiquated and useless system of education. On graduating, he received the military degree of ensign and joined the provincial regiment in Asti. Intolerant of any kind of subordination, he could not adapt to military life and asked permission from the king to travel. His first journey took him through various Italian cities and was followed by a trip abroad from 1767 to 1768 to France, England, Holland, and Switzerland. Half a year later, he departed again, this time for Austria, the German states, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia. In 1771, he was again in England. Then, passing through Holland and France, he visited Spain and Portugal. He returned to Italy only in 1772 and settled in Turin for a time. His restless travels reflect his desire to conquer the melancholy and boredom that oppressed him. His uneasy spirit found comfort in constant motion. He did not actually visit these countries, he flew through them, stopping only to admire that which caught his fancy and affected his sensibility, such as the immensity of the sea, the deep silence of the forests, the spectacle of a frozen Nordic sea, the danger involved in passing in a boat through floating ice, and the desolate beauty of the Spanish desert. Intolerant of all authoritarianism, Alfieri was quick to criticize the French court, Prussian militarism, Pietro Metastasio’s servile genuflections in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa, and Russian primitivism. This period, through 1774, was also a period of unrestrained passions, which made him suffer to the degree of attempting suicide, as in Holland, when Cristina Emerenzia Imholf abruptly ended their relationship. In England, his liaison with Penelope Pitt ended in a duel with the lady’s husband, who was generous enough to spare the Italian’s life.
Although Alfieri’s travels were carried out with impatience, they served not only to acquaint him with his world and its problems but also to bring him in contact with many European diplomats, some of whom shared their cultural opinions with him, becoming his close friends. While abroad, Alfieri avidly read the works of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles de Montesquieu, and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. Once settled in Turin, he started to write. His desire to polish his Italian, contaminated by French and the Piedmontese dialect, brought him to Tuscany. In 1776, he took up residence in Siena, where he enjoyed the friendship of Francesco Gori-Gandellini, who gave him moral support and practical advice, encouraging his literary creativity and love for liberty.
In Florence in 1777, Alfieri...
(This entire section contains 1255 words.)
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met Louise Stolberg Gedern, countess of Albany, wife of Charles Edward Stuart, pretender to the English throne. His devotion to this woman became a great, inspiring, and lasting love. He saw in her his ideal tragic woman: beautiful, intelligent, kind, and the victim of a cruel and unreasonable husband, who was a heavy drinker and impatient with his much younger wife. Alfieri helped her escape to a convent, from where she proceeded to Rome under the protection of her brother-in-law, Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart, duke of York.
Pressed for an absolute need to be free from all civil obligations, Alfieri decided in 1778 to give all his possessions to his sister, Giulia, reserving for himself only an annual pension. While in Florence from 1778 to 1780, he worked diligently on his tragedies. He left Florence for Rome to be closer to the countess of Albany and stayed there two years. He frequented the salons of Roman society, where he read his tragedy Virginia and recited from his Antigone, which was also performed by a group of amateur actors. It was in Rome that he was recognized and admired as Italy’s great tragic writer. After the reading of his Saul on April 8, 1783, he became a member of the Academy of Arcadia. Alfieri was at this time also preparing his complete tragedies for publication, excluding, for political reasons, Mary Stuart, The Conspiracy of the Pazzi, and Don Garzia.
Yet no lasting peace was destined for Alfieri. When Cardinal York learned of Alfieri’s true relationship to his sister-in-law, the playwright was diplomatically asked to leave Rome, which he did on May 4, 1783, while the countess stayed. A clamorous scandal resulted. Someone circulated a satiric sonnet written by Alfieri a few years earlier on the Papal States. Roman literati vented their ill feelings against him, and critics, too, were not kind to his tragedies when the first volume appeared in print. Alfieri fought back with epigrams and expressed his love-grief in sonnets written during his wanderings through Italy, which became a pilgrimage of sorts, not only of an unhappy lover but also of a writer now completely consecrated to his poetic work. He visited illustrious writers such as Melchiorre Cesarotti in Padua and Giuseppe Parini and Pietro Verri in Milan. He departed for France with letters for Carlo Goldoni and Louis-Sébastien Mercier, and he went to England for the sole reason of buying horses. Meanwhile the countess of Albany had obtained a legal separation from her husband, and Alfieri was able to see her in August, 1784, in Alsace, in Martinsburg near Colmar, but the two were again separated. She, being obliged to live in the Papal States, chose to go to Bologna, while he settled in Pisa.
When the countess went to France, Alfieri returned to Martinsburg, experiencing a renewed creativity and attending to the publication of the definite and final version of his tragedies. To be closer to his French publisher, Didot, Alfieri moved to Paris, where he met the playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais and the poet André Chénier and witnessed with enthusiasm the events leading to the French Revolution. In 1791, he accompanied the countess, whose husband had died in 1788, to England. After returning to France with the hope of taking up his literary activities, Alfieri and the countess had to flee Paris. The violent and bloody acts of the French Revolution, in which he had lost all his books, shattered his ideal and abstract notion of liberty and made his former admiration turn into hate for the new French rulers.
Alfieri returned to Florence in 1792 and spent the rest of his life in ever-increasing semiseclusion. His anti-Gallic attitude, reinforced by the French occupation of Florence in 1799, found its way into his writings. His last years were dedicated to his six comedies, on which he worked with such fervor that the countess attributed his death to them. Alfieri died on October 8, 1803, and was buried in the church of Santa Croce in Florence.