Ferrari on Cabiati (2022)

Alessandro Cabiati’s book fills a much needed lacuna in Anglophone scholarship on the French roots of the Italian poetic movement known as Scapigliatura, which lasted twenty years and included poetry, journalism, manifestos, music, and art history. Cabiati defines Scapigliatura—using Cletto Arrighi’s terms—as a caste or class of bohemian artists who break with the dominant artistic expressions of their era to embrace madness, disorder, and an independent spirit. For the first time, Cabiati creates a through line from Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura to the Futurist poets and proves that three writers in particular, Arrigo Boito, Emilio Praga, and Giovanni Camerana laid the foundation for Futurist aesthetics. In his theoretical frame, Cabiati analyzes the aesthetic paradigm shift that emerged from the end of Idealism and the beginning of a new kind of Realism that defined Italian Modernism. Through close readings of poems by Baudelaire and the Italians, his analysis provides a plethora of examples not only of this French influence, but also of the new principles Scapigliatura introduced to the literary scene in Milan.

Chapter one (“Introducing Modernity: French, Italian, and Comparative Perspectives” ) demonstrates how Baudelaire’s break with Idealism in Les Fleurs du Mal opened up his poetry to other aesthetic, moral, and spiritual realms. Furthermore, it demonstrates the coherence and inter-connectedness among the three Italian poets and their appropriation of the themes and literary devices in Les Fleurs du Mal, which in turn created the nascent Italian modernity that would flourish in the Futurist movement. Cabiati’s close readings of the Italians’ verse prove that these poets espoused Baudelaire’s elevation of the unpoetic and the ugly, with its unique blend of Realism, Romanticism, and Decadence. They wrote verse that portrayed provocative anatomical examinations, medical terminology, technological evolutions, and abnormal sexuality.

In chapter two (“Unpoetic Poetry and the Rise of Modernity: Science and Medicine in the Scapigliatura”), Cabiati argues that the realism of the Scapigliatura movement relies on Baudelairian oxymoron and juxtaposition. Cabiati analyzes the Scapigliatura’s realism in terms of the negative and positive that permeate reality. The oxymoron, Baudelaire’s preferred poetic device, acquired what Cabiati calls an “ontological value [...] in its attempt to unite contradictory elements to communicate the ineffable” (38). Boito, Praga, and Camerana jettisoned the Platonic ideal of absolute beauty in favor of the doubling and contrasting aspects of reality in which images of death, illness, and deliriousness dominate their poetry. Macabre, medical, and technical themes appear in Praga’s “A un feto,” and the idealized Stilnovistic and petrarchan lady waxes lustful. With Praga in particular, an indifferent bourgeoisie’s beauty-richness contrasts the desperate poet’s ugliness-poverty. Cabiati exposes how these tensions marked a distinct turn towards what would inspire the Futurists.

In chapter three (“Allegory and Modernity in the Scapigliatura”), Cabiati details the effects of Baudelaire’s inspiration with close readings of the antithetical realism within Scapigliatura poetry. He focuses on Boito’s long, medieval poem, Il Re Orso. This poem depicts new poetic and moral subjects and includes allegories of animality, evil, and decomposition. It also ushered in the modern themes of obsession, monomania, hallucinations, and ennui. By contrast, Camerana’s sepulchral allegories and anguish are counteracted by the images of death as a soothing end to the poet’s suffering. His nature is moribund, with recurring images of fog, the abyss, the dying man, and the funeral sea. Cabiati succeeds in underscoring not just the poets’ adoption of Baudelaire’s aesthetics, but also their particular poetics that produced Italian modernity.

Chapter four (“Sensual Sacredness and Sacred Sensuality: Love, Sex, and Religion in the Scapigliatura”) examines Baudelaire’s doubling of women—both as subjects of desacralization and tender love—that the Scapigliatura also integrated into its repertoire. Cabiati references “Chants d’automne,” “Le Balcon,” and “La Douceur du foyer,” among others. He then illustrates how Boito juxtaposes erotic and religious elements and de-idealized heaven to indicate that the corporeal domain prevails over the spiritual. Praga represents beautiful female ghosts and monks involved in orgies that are “desecrated” by moral purity rather than the reverse, but he also depicts caring women. Lastly, inspired by Baudelaire’s carnal desire for the Virgin, Camerana poetizes a Mary who actually possesses her own voice and desire. Their verse represents sex as the powerful union of the body and soul, thus eliminating the Christian divide between the two.

Chapter five (“Writing Analogy, Writing Modernity: the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire’s Correspondances”), discusses the three poets’ adaptation and recasting of Baudelaire’s masterful use of synesthesia and analogy. Boito’s synesthesia is associated with the inebriation and derangement of the poetic speaker as well as eros. If Baudelaire portrays harmony in scents and an instrumental music yet to be linked to the human voice, Cabiati shows how Praga instead uses fragrances and vocal music yet to be linked to instruments. For Camerana, art does not replicate nature and reality, but rather reflects the artist’s subjective interpretation and depiction. 

Chapters six (“From Organic to Inorganic Matter, From Spirit to Speed: Early Futurist Poetry and the Scapigliatura’s Legacy”) and seven (“Concluding Modernity: Writing Analogy, Writing Avant Garde”) unite all the strands and distinctions Cabiati draws out from Baudelaire and links them to the prevailing themes of the Futurists. In his manifesto, F.T. Marinetti proclaims the importance of the ugliness, violence, and irreverence of modern life at the heart of Futurism. Mario Bètuda’s “Re Alcool” echoes images in Boito’s Re Orso. Absinthe is both friend and enemy; materialist society is negative and the poet unappreciated. The same principles of ugliness, the fantastic, psychological distress, sensory derangements, prosaic structures, cadavers, and anatomists found in Baudelaire and later the Scapigliatura all persist in Futurist poetics. 

Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity is an excellent resource for scholars who wish to explore Baudelaire’s profound influence on Italian modernity. His study of transformation in aesthetic paradigms harkens back to Toril Moi’s Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (2006). One can easily read these two texts in tandem to acquire a deeper understanding of the stakes. To name recent scholarship that complements Cabiati’s transnational approach, Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (2024) delves into Baudelaire’s afterlives in Europe. Guilhem Farrugia offers a French genealogy in his 2025 Influences de Baudelaire, which examines the poet’s influences from the Baroque period onward as well as his legacy in twentieth-century Europe. Cabiati’s work on both the Italian and French traditions is unique in Anglophone criticism and provides much-needed attention in this area. Hopefully, there will be more to come.