Aleardi

Aleardi was a poet of wonderful descriptive power, and though, as he said himself, he subordinated his love of poetry to his love of country, yet in such service he found perfect freedom.

The essays on Petrarch and Tasso are tedious, but those on Aleardi and Count Arrivabene are excellent, particularly the former. 

When six years later the new Venetian republic came into being, Aleardi was sent to represent its interests at Paris.

Like most of the Italian poets of this century, Aleardi found his chief inspiration in the exciting events that marked the struggle of Italy for independence, and his best work antedated the peace of Villafranca.

A slender volume of five hundred pages contains all that Aleardi has written.