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SORRENTO: Historical Personages
The famous personages who lived in Sorrento.
SAINT'ANTONINO
Still very little is known
of Saint Antonino's place and date of birth and of the kind of
life
he led until he arrived in Stabia and was warmly welcomed by
Catello, bishop of that city, who then, retired to a life of a
hermit on Mount Faito and entrusted him with the task of the
spiritual direction of his diocese. But not much later, Saint
Antonino left his post and retreated to this mountain as well,
and there, after a vision of the archangel Gabriel they built
together an oratory in his honour. In the meantime, the fame of
his holiness spread through the small nearby towns and the
Sorrentines begged him to settle with them. He accepted their
invitation, left the solitude life of Faito and Bishop Catello,
and entered into the Benedictine monastery of Saint Agrippo
where at the time the abbot was a certain Bonifacio who in the
imminence of death appointed him his successor. Also in this
capacity Saint Antonino gave luminous examples of virtuousness
and holiness, and performed miracles, the most famous of which
was the liberation and the safe and sound return to his
desperate mother of a child who had been swallowed by a large
cetacean that had come close to the beach of Sorrento.It is also
known that when Saint Antonino had some free time from taking
care of the monastery, he often did manual work, especially as a
carpenter and as a vine-dresser. St.Antonino left this world,
full of merit, on 14th February of the year when Probiano was
consul, and that is in 830 A.D.As regards his date and place of
birth, nothing is actually certain also as for St.Antonino's
death. Some scholars date his death to the year 626 A.D. while
others in 830 A.D.
TORQUATO
TASSO
The greatest Italian poet of the
late Renaissance, best remembered for his masterpiece
LA GERUSALEMME LIBERATA (Jerusalem Delivered, 1575). Its hero was
the leader of the first Crusade, Godfrey of Bouillon; its climax was the
capture of the holy city. In the 1570s Tasso developed a persecution
mania which led to legends about the restless, half-mad, and
misunderstood author. He died a few days before he was due to be crowned
as the king of poets by the Pope. Tasso remained one of the most widely
read poets by educated Europeas until the beginning of the 19th century.
Io, ch'altre volte fui nelle
amorose
insidie colto, or ben le riconosco,
e le discopro, o giovinetti, a voi.
(from 'Quel labbro che le rose han colorito')
Torquato Tasso was born in Sorrento.
The family had branches all over Europe, notably the Taxis family in
Germany. Tasso attended a Jesuit school in Naples, and was also educated
at home by his father, Bernardo Tasso, himself a distinguished man of
letters, a poet-courtier, who had been exiled from Naples and held posts
here and there. Tasso continued his education in various Italian cities,
notably in Urbino, where he studied at the court of Duke Guidobaldo II
delle Rovere. His first major work, the narrative poem RINALDO, appeared
when he was 18 years old. The work was dedicated to Cardinal d'Este.
From 1560 to 1565 he studied law and philosophy at the universities of
Padua and Bologna. One of Tasso's friends in Padua was Scipio Gorzaga,
later a famous cadinal, whose help meant much to Tasso. For the Academy
of the Ethereals Tasso wrote three essays on the heroic poem. In Ferrara
he entered the service of Cardinal Luigi d'Este, and later his brother,
Duke Alfonso II, as poet-in-residence. During this time he wrote the
pastoral drama AMINTA (1573), and La Gerusalemme liberata,
composed between the years 1559 and 1575. Tasso had left his first love
in Padua, but he then fell in love with Lucrezia Bendidio, a singer,
whose father was a Ferrarese nobleman. Tasso dedicated to her forty-two
poems of RIME DEGLI ACADEMICI ETEREI (1567). Lucrezia later married a
widower, Conte Paolo Macchiavelli.
After finishing his masterwork,
Tasso started to suffer from mental problems - his sensitive nature was
racked by doubts about the critical and religious orthodoxy of his work
and by suspicions of hostility toward him on the part of patrons and
friends. Tasso had travelled with Cardinal d'Este to France, and when
King Charles IX praised his work, he answered with an undiplomatic
remark about toleration of Protestants at the court. From this
disastrous journey started Tasso's problems. He couldn't tolerate
criticism, feared assassins, negotiated with the Medicis, who were the
enemy of the house of Este, and attacked a servant with a knife. He
didn't stay long in one place, and when Alfonso was getting married, he
shouted curses in public. Finally he was declared insane and he spent
from 1579 seven years in the hospital of Santa Anna by order of the duke.
During this time Tasso wrote a number of philosophical and moral
dialogues, and was visited in the middle of his misery by
Montaigne.
Tasso never totally regained his
sanity. He was released in 1586 on condition that he would leave
Ferrara. At the same time he found himself honored for his Jerusalem,
which had gained a huge popularity. Despite his further wanderings in
Italy from court to court, the unhappy, paranoid, and poverty-stricken
Tasso completed in 1586 a tragedy, TORRISMONDO, and a poem about
creation, IL MONDO CREATO (1609). He completed and revised version of
his masterpiece, called Jerusalem Conquered, to meet critical and
ecclesiastical objections.
In 1594 Tasso was invited to Rome by
Pope Clement VIII to be crowned Italy's Poet Laureate. However, Tasso
became seriously ill and died in Rome on April 25, 1595 before he could
accept the honor. Among Tasso's other works are some 2 000 short poems,
including sonnets and madrigals. He wrote letters, dialogues, the
tragedy RE TORRISMONDO (1587), and the theoretical restatement of
ancient theories of poetry, DISCORSI DEL POEMA EROICO (1594). From the
time of Edward Fairfax's translation into English of Jerusalem
Delivered (1594, 1600), Tasso strongly influenced English poets,
from Spencer, who used Tasso's sonnets in many of his Amoretti,
to Byron, whose
The Lament of Tasso is based on the legend of Tasso's passion for
Leonora d'Este.
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