RICCARDO BACCHELLI (1947)

Poet, dramatist, literary critic, and novelist whose novel trilogy Il mulino del Po or The Mill on the Po is an outstanding work of Italian historical fiction. As a critic, Renaissance and 19th-century masters against the innovations of 20th-century Italian experimental writers.

Bacchelli had already published a novel in 1911 and a notable volume of Poemi lirici in 1914, when he began service in World War I as an artillery officer.

After the war, as a collaborator on the Roman literary periodical La ronda, he attempted to discredit contemporary avant-garden writers by holding up as a models the Renaissance masters and such fine 19th-century writers as Giacomo Leopardi and Alessandro Manzoni. Somewhat later he was drama critic for the Milanese review La fiera letteraria.

During the early period of his literary career, Bacchelli wrote a drama called Amleto (1923; Hamlet) and many novels, the most outstanding of which are Il diavolo al pontelungo (1927), a historical novel about an attempted Socialist revolution in Italy fomented by the 19th-century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and La città degli amanti (1929).

Bacchelli´s strongest works are historical novels, and his masterpiece Il mulino del Po (1938-40) is among the finest Italian works of that genre. Against the background of Italy´s political struggles from the time of Napoleon to the end of World War I, Il mulino del Po dramatizes the conflicts and struggles of a mill on the banks of the Po River. The first volume Dio ti salve (1938) covers the period from Napoleon´s 1812 Russian campaign to the revolutionary events of 1848; the second, La miseria viene in barca (1939) continues the story during the Risorgimento (the 19th-century Italian struggle for political unity), stressing its terrible economic and social effect on the lower classes; and the third, Mondo vecchio sempre nuovo (1940) ends with the battle of Vittorio Veneto in World War I.

Il mulino del Po has been called an "epic of the common man" and its great value is its balanced humanism and compassion for the suffering of the little man caught in the great, impersonal web of political events.

Bacchelli wrote many subsequent novels, among them I tre schiavi di Giulio Cesare (1958; The Three Slavers of Julius Caesar) and Coccio di terracotta (1965). Among his critical works are Confessioni letterarie (1932; Literary Declarations) and a later work on two literary figures he greatly admired, Leopardi e Manzoni (1960). Bacchelli´s early novels have been collected in Tutte le novelle, 1911-51.