Ippolito Pindemonte

Ippolito Pindemonte (November 13, 1753 – November 18, 1828) was an Italian poet. He was an exponent of Italian neoclassicism and pre-romanticism, with poems of the pastoral genre and related to graveyard poets style.

Biography

Ippolito Pindemonte was born in Verona on 13 November 1753 into an aristocratic family. His brother Giovanni Pindemonte was a prominent dramatist.¹ He was educated at the Collegio di San Carlo in Modena and became a close friend of the mathematician and translator Giuseppe Torelli (1721–1781) and the scholar Girolamo Pompei.²

He travelled to Rome in 1780 where he entered the Arcadia as Polidete Melpomenio. He wrote a first tragedy, Ulisse, in 1777, which was followed by others, and by various poems and translations. In 1788–90 he visited Switzerland, France, England, and Germany, drawing on his experiences for a novel, Abaritte (1790).

He was deeply affected by the French Revolution, residing in Paris for ten months during 1789. A brief flirtation with revolutionary ideas led to La Francia (1790), but he rejected the results of the reign of Terror and fled to Italy.³ He withdrew from politics and spent much of the rest of his life in his villa near Verona.

Work

A Romantic poet, he was principally influenced by his friend Ugo Foscolo and Thomas Gray, and was associated with the Della Cruscans. He devoted much of his life to a translation of the , which was published in 1822.