Vittorio Alfieri
Playwright from Asti (1749-1803), the foremost tragic author of eighteenth-century Italian theatre: he was educated in Turin, where he made his debut at the Carignano in 1775.
Vittorio Alfieri (Asti, 16 January 1749 – Florence, 8 October 1803) was the greatest Italian tragic author of the eighteenth century, the author of nineteen tragedies, of treatises against despotism and of an autobiography, the Vita, which the Enciclopedia Italiana judges to be «artistically a masterpiece».[1][2] Born in Asti, he was educated and became a writer in Turin: in the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia he spent his adolescence at the Academy, lived the fashionable years of his youth and, in 1775, staged his first tragedy. He then chose to leave Piedmont so as to write without having to ask the sovereign's permission.[1]
Asti and the departure for Turin
His father, Antonio Amedeo Alfieri, count of Cortemilia, died on 5 December 1749, when Vittorio was not yet a year old; his mother, Monica Maillard de Tournon, from a Savoyard family, remarried in 1754 to Giacinto Alfieri di Magliano.[3] In the Vita the writer got his own birth date wrong by a day, opening the account thus:[3]
«In the city of Asti in Piedmont, on the 17th day of January in the year 1749, I was born of noble, well-off and honest parents»
Of his years in Asti he recalled a character that was «for the most part quiet and placid; but at times extremely talkative and lively; and almost always at opposite extremes».[3] In 1758 he left Asti for Turin: on the wishes of his guardian, his uncle Pellegrino Alfieri, he entered the Reale Accademia, an institution meant for the education of court pages and nobles.[3][1] The carriage journey left him a vivid memory: «That flying of the carriage gave me meanwhile a pleasure the like of which I had never felt».[4]
The Academy and his travels
At the Academy he followed courses in grammar, rhetoric, the humanities and philosophy, and in 1762 obtained the title of «master of arts»; the judgement he later gave of that education was extremely harsh.[1] Leaving in 1766 with the rank of ensign in the provincial regiment of Asti (in 1774 he would reach the rank of lieutenant, before resigning), he began travelling at once.[1][2] Between 1766 and 1772 he travelled through Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Spain and Portugal, reading in the meantime Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Helvétius.[1]
The house in piazza San Carlo
Having returned from his last journey in May 1772, «he set up house in Turin in great luxury» and gave himself over to society life.[2] The house, furnished with magnificence, was in piazza San Carlo: there he gathered a group of friends every week, a sort of domestic academy in which each one's compositions were read and discussed. For that circle, between the end of 1773 and the start of 1775, he wrote in French the Esquisse du Jugement Universel.[1]
In those years he was bound by a tormented relationship with the marchioness Gabriella Turinetti di Priè, about ten years older than him; the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani calls it «a heavy amorous servitude rather than a passion».[1] It was in the house in piazza San Carlo that the best-known episode of his biography took place: according to tradition, tormented by a passion of love, the writer, by then an adult, had himself tied to his chair by his servant Elia to force himself to sit at his writing desk; the anecdote, often set in his Asti childhood, in fact belongs to these Turin years.[5] Later he acknowledged owing a particular debt to two advisers, Father Paolo Maria Paciaudi and count Agostino Tana, for setting him on the path of tragic authorship.[1]
Cleopatra at the Carignano
On 16 June 1775 the Teatro Carignano, rebuilt from its foundations in the 1752-53 season by the royal architect Benedetto Alfieri, successfully staged Antonio e Cleopatra, the young count's first tragedy, repeated for three evenings.[1][2][6] The author later repudiated it and excluded it from his tragic corpus, but from that moment writing became his occupation.[1][2] Of his state at the time he said he had found himself having to «go mad or burst».[1] The Teatro Stabile di Torino, which runs the theatre today, opens with Carlo Goldoni and Vittorio Alfieri the list of those who have trodden its stage.[6]
«Un-Piedmontising» himself
For a noble subject of the king of Sardinia, every stay abroad required the sovereign's authorisation. After negotiations begun in March 1778, Alfieri transferred his feudal estates to his sister Giulia, keeping for himself a reduced pension: the arrangement allowed him to leave Piedmont without having to ask the king's permission every time, something he sometimes called «un-Piedmontising himself» and, more precisely, «un-vassalling himself».[1]
In Florence, in 1778, he met Luisa di Stolberg-Gedern, countess of Albany, wife of the Stuart pretender Charles Edward, who became his companion for life.[1] Between 1776 and 1786 he wrote nineteen tragedies, not counting the repudiated Cleopatra.[2] Among them Filippo, Antigone, Oreste, Saul and Mirra, published starting with the 1783 Siena edition; he also wrote the treatises Della tirannide and Del principe e delle lettere and the Rime, whose first collection (1789) comprised 194 sonnets and 44 epigrams.[1] In the tragedies an untamable will clashes with tyranny, and his hatred of tyrants and love of republican liberty made him a forerunner of the moral and political demands of the Risorgimento; in the Misogallo he instead gathered prose and verse against revolutionary France.[7]
The last returns and the Vita
After leaving Rome in May 1783 he returned briefly to Turin, where he attended a performance of his Virginia, feeling by then a stranger to his old circles.[1] Between 1783 and 1784 he led fourteen horses bought in England from London to Italy, passing through Paris, Lyon and Turin and crossing the Moncenisio pass: the caravan reached Novalesa, in the Susa Valley, with all the animals healthy. He himself closed the line, riding the smallest and lightest, Frontino.[4]
In 1792 he settled in Florence and from 1793 lived in palazzo Gianfigliazzi, on the Lungarno, where he revised the Vita, begun in 1790 and taken up again between 1798 and 1803, and wrote six comedies.[1] In the introduction to the autobiography he set out his pact with the reader:
«if I shall perhaps not have the courage or the indiscretion to tell the whole truth about myself, I shall certainly not have the baseness to say anything that is not true»
His Turin friend Tommaso Valperga di Caluso praised its faithfulness: «the image turns out marvellously similar and faithful».[1][2] Alfieri died in Florence on 8 October 1803; the countess of Albany entrusted Antonio Canova with his funerary monument in Santa Croce, unveiled in 1810.[1]
Memory in Piedmont
In 1949 Asti celebrated the bicentenary of his birth: on 9 April the President of the Republic Luigi Einaudi arrived, and the companies of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan and of Rome staged Filippo (directed by Orazio Costa), Oreste and Mirra.[5] His birthplace, Palazzo Alfieri, left to the city by the patron Leonetto Ottolenghi in 1904 and declared a national monument in 1922, has housed since 1937 the Centro di Studi Alfieriani, which became a foundation in 2002 and has published the national edition of his works since 1951.[8] Closed in 1996 owing to decay, the palazzo reopened as a museum on 12 May 2016; since 16 January 2017 the poet's private rooms have also been open to visitors, and among the works on display is the portrait painted by Fabre in 1797.[9]
Pages linking here
Related articles: Asti
Sources
- Treccani – Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani
- Treccani – Enciclopedia Italiana
- Astigiani — 13 September 2026
- Astigiani — 16 March 2025
- Astigiani — 16 September 2024
- Teatro Stabile di Torino
- Treccani – Enciclopedia
- Astigiani
- Astigiani — 30 November 2021