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the Italian authors of the second half of the nineteenth century, Modenese
Paolo Ferrari (1822-1889) was the most popular among the public and widely
acclaimed throughout Victor Emmanuel II and, partly, Humbert I's reigns.
Ferrari dealt with various genres in his works, ranging from historical
subjects to popular stories to “thesis” plays. His most famous work was
“Goldoni e le sue sedici commedie” (1851), a text showing several elements
that were clearly taken from Goldoni and that was written, furthermore,
according to a convincing compositional style highlighting the author's
skills as a man of letters as well as his intuitive ability in transposing
the text for the stage's needs. In this four-act comedy, inspired by “Memoirs”,
Ferrari outlines the different phases of Goldoni's drama: his beginning,
his triumph with “Vedova scaltra”, his crisis with “L'erede fortunata”
and, finally, the most difficult moment in the playwright's life: writing
sixteen new works in just one year.
The comedy, written with wisdom, represents the drama and the characteristic subjects of Goldoni's repertoire; the characters outlined by Ferrari adhere to reality and the text, on the whole, is well developed and consequential. Another work that unquestionably met with big success at the time was “La satira e il Parini” (1854) that, as in the previous comedy, set Giuseppe Parini face to face with the society he had mocked in “Giorno”. 
This five-act play, that was staged for the first time in 1856, deals with a fact that actually occurred during Parini's life: the ban to spread and publish the “Giorno”. In order to annul such “censorship”, the abbot literary man went to the president of the Accademia degli Enormi, marquis Colombi. The imaginary character that represented marquis Colombi was a very successful idea as it was the clear prototype of the academician surrounded and overwhelmed by his own ignored ignorance. After a failed attempt, Parini managed to publish his “Giorno”. Just as successful with the public, although modest, were “La medicina d'una ragazza ammalata” (1860), at first written in Modenese dialect and then in Italian with Tuscan influence, that took its plot from Goldoni's “Finta ammalata” and the comedy “La bottega del cappellaio” (1862). With the following works Ferrari wrote some so-called “thesis” plays such as “Il Duello” published and staged in 1868. This work, inspired by French contemporary authors, expressed a way of doing theatre where a topical issue was analysed and the thoughts were stated metaphorically. |
The
leading character, count Sacchi, is depicted in an extremely successful
way. In “Ridicolo” (1873), he was inclined to prove the prejudices of the
period in which people were more disposed to mock a betrayed husband than
to condemn an adulterous wife. Even in the works “Il Suicidio” (1875) and
“Le due donne” (1877) Ferrari acknowledged the need to surrender to the
social conventions of his world instead of opposing them as the French
models did.
He supported, in fact, the bourgeois society and its moral that he represented in its slightest details through an appreciable originality in purpose. Although sometimes rough and willingly careless in writing tragedies in verse, Roman Pietro Cossa (1830-1881) took his inspiration from Hugo and from French Naturalism and tried to create a romantic realism strongly anchored to the Italian tradition. His masterpiece is “Nerone” (1872) where the emperor is gaily depicted actually because of the legendary terror that surrounded his figure and that was handed down to us. Among his other works are “Messalina”, where there is a strong sense of lust; “Plauto e il suo secolo”, where the Latin playwright turns into the example of ancient morality that too permissive habits had ignored; “Giuliano l'Apostata”; “Cola da Rienzo”; “I Borgia”; “Cecilia”; “Napoletani del 1870”; and finally “Puskin”, the only tragedy that Cossa wrote in prose. A certainly important work for its remarkable depiction of nineteenth-century society is “Le miserie di Monsù Travet” (1863) by Vittorio Bersezio (1828-1900), whose compositional imagination and humanity make it rather different than and somehow also opposes Paolo Ferrari's last works. This comedy, written in Piedmontese dialect, deals with the every-day life of a petty middle-class man. Its leading character is Ignazio Travet, a state employee, flooded by an endless muddled bureaucracy, always liege to his own work, albeit decent, but who lives in the dullness of an exasperating routine, enslaved by his picky boss' tormenting behaviour every day. Monsù Travet, which later became a common way to indicate a petty clerk par excellence , is a character who is able to stigmatise a reality and a way of thinking of a social condition that was about to become common for many people. Its author, Vittorio Bersezio, a journalist and a writer, was interested with satire and edited “Il Fischietto”, the first humorous illustrated newspaper in the history of the Italian periodical publishing industry. With “Le miserie di Monsù Travet”, Bersezio, who knew reality and news very deeply, described the few lights and the many shadows of the petty royal bourgeoisie in an extremely clear way: on the one hand it was mediocre, ill-treated and impoverished and on the other, it never stopped being proud of its condition that it strenuously had reached. It also presents, however, its fear of intermingling with the other social strata that were still considered as being inferior, in particular with the emergent commercial and artisan bourgeoisie whose creed was a stingy saving. |
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