Ippolito Nievo - a candid, astute account of what it feels like to combine lofty patriotic illusions about a People, with a realistic view of how ignoble and mistaken people generally are

Ippolito Nievo, Confessions of an Italian, Trans. by Frederika Randall, Penguin Classics, 2015.

   
An overlooked classic of Italian literature, this epic and unforgettable novel recounts one man's long and turbulent life in revolutionary Italy.

At the age of eighty-three and nearing death, Carlo Altoviti has decided to write down the confessions of his long life. He remembers everything: his unhappy childhood in the kitchens of the Castle of Fratta; romantic entanglements during the siege of Genoa; revolutionary fighting in Naples; and so much more. Throughout, Carlo lives only for his twin passions in life: his dream of a unified, free Italy and his undying love for the magnificent but inconstant Pisana. Peopled by a host of unforgettable characters - including drunken smugglers, saintly nuns, scheming priests, Napoleon and Lord Byron - this is an epic historical novel that tells the remarkable and inseparable stories of one man's life and the history of Italy's unification.
Ippolito Nievo was born in 1831 in Padua. Confessions of an Italian, written in 1858 and published posthumously in 1867, is his best known work. A patriot and a republican, he took part with Garibaldi and his Thousand in the momentous 1860 landing in Sicily to free the south from Bourbon rule. Nievo died before he reached the age of thirty, when his ship, en route from Palermo to Naples, went down in the Tyrrhenian Sea in early 1861. He was, Italo Calvino once said, the sole Italian novelist of the nineteenth century in the 'daredevil, swashbuckler, rambler' mould so dear to other European literatures.

'Of all the furore that came out of the Risorgimento, only Manzoni and Nievo really matter today' - Umberto Eco

'The one 19th century Italian novel which has [for an Italian reader] that charm and fascination so abundant in foreign literatures' - Italo Calvino

'Perhaps the greatest Italian novel of the nineteenth century' - Roberto Carnero

'A spirited appeal for liberté, égalité and fraternité, the novel is also an astute, scathing and amusing human comedy, a tale of love, sex and betrayal, of great wealth and grinding poverty, of absolute power and scheming submission, of idealism and cynicism, courage and villainy' - The Literary Encyclopedia

This is a humane piece of fiction, funny and wise, but it is also a candid, astute account of what it feels like to combine lofty patriotic illusions about a People, with a realistic view of how ignoble and mistaken people generally are -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett

He was one of the one thousand who followed Garibaldi. He was an intellectual and writer but he wanted to be with Garibaldi unifying Italy in the 1860s. He was born in 1831 and died very young, at 30 years old. He drowned because his ship was attacked by the Austrian army, travelling to Sicily. He was Venetian. These Confessioni are his memoirs and he writes about when he was a child. You can see how people lived in the north of Italy, very poor in these small societies. He wanted the readers to know how poor and ignorant the peasants were at his time, and he attributes this condition to the Austrians who ruled the north of Italy and were against every change in the country. That’s why he fought with Garibaldi, for the unification of Italy. He wrote a portrait of a girl called La Pisana, a famous figure in Italian literature, because it is such a beautiful portrait of this little girl, and the poor people, the peasants.. - Dacia Maraini

An Interview with Frederika Randall