Alfredo Panzini

Italian novelist and lexicographer (1863–1939)

Alfredo Panzini (31 December 1863 – 10 April 1939) was an Italian novelist, critic, historical writer, and lexicographer. A prolific and popular writer, Panzini is famous in Italy for his brilliant and amusing humorous stories.

Alfredo Panzini was born at Senigallia, the son of Emilio Panzini, a physician, and Filomena (Santini) Panzini. Panzini spent his early life at Rimini. He was educated at the Marco Foscarini Lyceum in Venice and at the University of Bologna, where his teacher was the great poet Giosuè Carducci. He graduated from University of Bologna with a degree in literature and a thesis on macaronic Latin poet Teofilo Folengo. Panzini was Carducci's lifelong disciple. He himself became a teacher. In 1886 he was appointed to the Ginnasio Governativo of Castellammare di Stabia, a small town on the gulf of Salerno. He taught the second year class in Italian, Latin, History and Geography. In 1888, he was transferred to the Ginnasio Giuseppe Parini in Milan. In July 1890 he married Clelia Gabrielli; they had three sons (one deceased) and a daughter. In 1897 he was called by Senator Francesco Brioschi to teach Italian literature in the preparatory school of the Polytechnic University of Milan. He did not, however, give up his teaching duties at the Parini, but retained both positions and continued with his private tutoring. In 1905, in fact, he undertook a third teaching position at the Circolo Filologico. In 1907, after 19 years, he left the Parini but continued in both the other two teaching positions. In 1918 Panzini moved to Rome, where he taught at the Istituto Leonardo da Vinci until 1924 and then at the Liceo Terenzio Mamiani. In 1924 he began contributing to the cultural page the Corriere della Sera. In 1927 he retired to Bellaria, a quiet village on the Adriatic, where he spent the rest of his life. Panzini welcomed the advent of Fascism. In 1925 he was one of the signers of the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals, and in 1929 he was among the first members of the Royal Academy of Italy named by Mussolini. A prolific writer, Panzini published some forty six volumes of narrative, belles lettres, and literary, historical, and linguistic studies. He began his literary career in 1893 with Il Libro dei morti (The book of the dead), and during his life published about thirty more books. He is noted for the humorous and often genial tone of his writings. His style, however influenced by contemporary decadentism, is delicate and lyrical, at the opposite extreme from the poetic and rhetorical complexities of D'Annunzio. Trained by a great classicist, Panzini developed great sensitivity toward classical literature, Greek, Latin and Italian. In 1928 he published an Italian translation of Hesiod's Works and Days (first in Nuova Antologia and then in a little volume brought out by Treves). His reverence for Homer, Catullus, Hesiod, Vergil, Boiardo, and Ariosto (to mention a few of his favorite authors) is reflected in the pages of the numerous books he wrote during his life. His style, often worked with a proverbial fine artist's file, was carefully chiseled so as to translate into literature the idyllic and pastoral world he longed for. covered all forms of the language including slang. Panzini's dictionary contains words and expressions from all fields, of all origins, and in numerous languages. Thus Latin, Greek, French, English phrases and words are registered. The success of the work was immediate and quite unexpected by both the author and the publisher. The reason for this was twofold. On the one hand the volume served a real purpose, since most Italian dictionaries were very conservative and refused to include any of the newly coined words whose origin was not untainted, On the other hand Panzini's presentation of the material was very original and definitely superior to that of other contemporary dictionaries of a similar nature. After the first initial success Panzini continued to collect words and very soon he began to prepare a second edition. A characteristic of this dictionary was that, in order to retain its value, it had to keep up with the spoken language which, of course, was in a state of continual flux. The consequences were that new words would continually be entering the language and therefore would become eligible to enter Panzini's dictionary, while at the same time certain words, which had temporarily enjoyed a degree of popularity, would quickly disappear and had to be discarded. In order to keep up with this changing situation Panzini published no less than eight editions of the dictionary, each of which was enormously successful. Panzini’s Dizionario Moderno was re edited ten times up to 1963. Panzini also penned several historical works, including a famous biography of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. He died in Rome on April 10, 1939, at the age of 75. La Casa Rossa, the villa in Bellaria where the writer spent with the family much of his years, was opened to the public in 2007. Today it is an important centre for literary events and the seat of the Accademia Panziniana.

1940 – Carteggio Alfredo Panzini Renato Serra. 1986 – Carteggio Panzini Moretti 1914 1936, edited by Claudio Toscani. 1990 – Carteggio Panzini Prezzolini 1911 1937, edited by Sandro Rogari.