Chiabrera

Gabriello Chiabrera (Italian pronunciation: [ɡabriˈɛllo kjaˈbrɛra]; June 8, 1552 – October 14, 1638) was an Italian poet, sometimes called the Italian Pindar.

Chiabrera was of patrician descent, and was born at Savona, a little town in the domain of the Genoese republic, twenty-eight years after the birth of Pierre de Ronsard, with whom he has far more in common than with the great Greek whose echo he sought to make himself. As he has told in the pleasant fragment of autobiography prefixed to his works, in which, like Julius Caesar, he speaks of himself in the third person, he was a posthumous child; he went to Rome at the age of nine years, under the care of his uncle Giovanni. There he read with a private tutor, suffered severely from two fevers in succession, and was sent at last, for the sake of society, to the Jesuits' College, where he remained till his twentieth year, studying philosophy, as he says, "rather for occupation than for learning's sake."

Losing his uncle about this time, Chiabrera returned to Savona, "again to see his own and be seen by them." In a little while, however, he returned to Rome, and entered the household of a cardinal, where he remained for several years, frequenting the society of Paulus Manutius and of Sperone Speroni, the dramatist and critic of Tasso, and attending the lectures and hearing the conversation of Mureto. His revenge of an insult offered him obliged him to betake himself once more to Savona, where, to amuse himself, he read poetry, and particularly Greek.

The poets of his choice were Pindar and Anacreon, and these he studied until it grew to be his ambition to reproduce in his own tongue their rhythms and structures, and so to enrich his country with a new form of verse in his own words, "like his country-man, Columbus, to find a new world or drown." His reputation was made at once; but he seldom quit Savona, though often invited to do so, saving for journeys of pleasure, in which he greatly delighted, and for occasional visits to the courts of princes whither he was often summoned, for his verse's sake, and in his capacity as a dramatist. At the ripe age of fifty he took to himself a wife, one Lelia Pavese, by whom he had no children. After a simple and blameless life, during which he produced a vast quantity of verse — epic, tragic, pastoral, lyrical and satirical — he died in 1637, at the patriarchal age of eighty-five. An epitaph was written for him in elegant Latin by Pope Urban VIII, but on his tombstone are graven two quaint Italian hexameters of his own, in which the gazer is warned from the poet's own example not to prefer Parnassus to Calvary.

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