Giovanni Papini

Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) was an Italian journalist, critic, poet and novelist. The son of a modest furniture retailer in Borgo degli Albizi, Papini was born in Florence, Italy, on January 9, 1881. He was baptized secretly to avoid the aggressive atheism of his father and he lived a rustic and precociously introspective childhood, lacking the trusting and watchful love of his parents. It is therefore unsurprising that from his childhood onwards he felt a strong aversion to all beliefs, to all churches, and to any form of servitude. While experiencing ardent enthuasiasm and deep disappointments, he sought out as many diverse and new experiences as possible: he was anarchic and revolutionary, rejecting all rules and discipline, unscrupulously experimenting with any and all intellectual drugs; an errant Jew of knowledge, zealously inspired from an early age by the impossible idea of writing an encyclopedia wherein all cultures would be summarized. He had a tempestuous spirit, weakend by delusions of grandeur, with a gift libinidoso cerebral juanismo, that did not respect limits or borders. He was an unfortunate sceptic immersed in his own ideological madness and the morbid enchantment of his inner tragedies.

External links

• Article on Papini at Books and Writers
• Article on Papini at Britannica Online