Life

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.