Arturo Colautti

Arturo Colautti (Zara, October 9, 1851 – Rome, November 9, 1914) was an Italian journalist, polemicist and librettist. He was a strong supporter of Italian irredentism for his native Dalmatia.

Born in Zara, the youngest of four children of Francis Colautti, a Friulian engineer employed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Luisa Couarde, a French native of Antibes, Arturo spent his adolescence in his native town, where he graduated in the local High School and then did his military service in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He was interested very early in journalism: at the age of 17 he founded the newspaper Il Progresso, followed by La Leva. At that time he studied at the Universities of Vienna and Graz, majoring in political science and geography. He thereafter went to Fiume to direct La Bilancia, to return again to his native Zara to direct Il Dalmata from 1872-74.

He relocated to Spalato in 1876, where he founded the magazine of culture and literature, Rivista Dalmatica. The magazine did not last long, because strongly pro-Italian and related to Antonio Bajamonti. In the same year, he was asked to direct L'Avvenire and -from 1876 al 1880- he developed it as an irredentist newspaper.

Following the publication of an anti-Austrian article on his newspaper, in September 1880, Colautti was attacked by a group of soldiers that rendered him impaired for a few months. Shortly after, also because of the threat of lawsuit for crimes against the stringent Austrian press laws and in support of Italian irredentism, Colautti chose the path of exile and took refuge in the Kingdom of Italy.

"He first settled in Padua, where he founded L’Euganeo, then in Milan, where he founded L’Italia" and collaborated with various newspapers. Colautti founded the Corriere del Mattino in Naples (1885), then became its director and remained there for fifteen years, after which he undertook the direction of the Corriere di Napoli. In the many years spent in Naples, he wrote hundreds of articles, but also poems, novels and plays, gaining an excellent literary reputation. Some of his operatic librettos were set to music (Adriana Lecouvreur by Cilea, Fedora by Umberto Giordano and Doña Flor by Niccolò van Westerhout).

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