"Fantastic Tales" by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti

Fantastic Tales

by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti 

(translated by Lawrence Venuti)

A review

Iginio (or Igino) Ugo Tarchetti (1839 – 1869) was a journalist and author, a leading figure within the Scapigliatura movement.  The Scapigliatura consisted of a like-minded group of Italian authors, musicians, painters and sculptors who, in the wake of the Risorgimento, sought to revitalise their country’s predominantly conservative culture.  The literal meaning of “Scapigliato” is “dishevelled”, whereas “Scapigliatura” is equivalent to the French term “bohème” (bohemian).  It was derived from the title of the novel La Scapigliatura e il 6 Febbraio by Cletto Arrighi, the pen-name of Carlo Righetti (1830-1906), one of the forerunners of the movement.  The Scapigliati often sought to shock the Catholic establishment (whose authority had already been questioned, on the political front, by the ongoing upheavals in the newly-formed Italian state). To achieve their aims, they sought models outside the Italian tradition.  While the musicians within the group (such as Arrigo Boito and Franco Faccio) looked towards Wagner, authors such as Tarchetti were influenced by the German Romantics (such as Heine and E.T.A. Hoffmann), the French Bohemians (such as Gautier) and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire.  Another source of inspiration was Edgar Allan Poe.

The literature of the fantastic has illustrious antecedents in Italian literature. Indeed, Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its tour of Heaven, Purgatory and Hell, can be read as a work of supernatural – and in some aspects Gothic – fiction, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, with its sorcerers and fantastic creatures in an imagined East, is a worthy forerunner of Oriental Gothic.  Yet, the resurgence of the literature of the weird and the fantastic in Italy owes much to the Scapigliati and their interest in works of figures such as Hoffmann and Poe.

In this regard, Tarchetti’s Racconti Fantastici, first published by Treves in 1869, is an important, not to say seminal, collection. Lawrence Venuti’s translation was first published by Mercury House in 1992, and is now being issued on Archipelago Books.  Reading this collection, one detects two distinct currents in Tarchetti’s style.  Some stories harken back to an earlier form of Gothic. This is the case, for instance, with The Legends of the Black Castle with its well-worn tropes of ruined castles and old clerics with mysterious histories.  A Spirit in a Raspberry and A Dead Man’s Bone are, essentially, ghost stories where, once again, the Anglo-Saxon tradition of supernatural fiction is evident.  The Lake of the Three Lampreys, “A Popular Tradition”, reminded me of the folklore-infused stories of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, but its "nature writing" and inevitably sinful monks are also close to Radcliffe.  Nowhere is the influence of English Gothic more evident than in The Elixir of Immortality.  Tarchetti subtitles it "In Imitation of the English".  It is, in effect, a plagiarized version of Mary Shelley's "The Mortal Immortal".

The theme of “Fate” recurs in Tarchetti’s stories. Often, the protagonists battle against the vicissitudes of Fortune, with scant results.  Fate can set some individuals on the course of tragedy (as in The Fated) but, in other cases, has a decidedly benevolent influence (Captain Gubart’s Fortune).

Ebbrezza (1888) by Luigi Conconi, one of the artists associated with Scapigliatura 

In other works, Tarchetti is particularly reminiscent of Poe. In Bouvard, the eponymous protagonist is haunted by his deformities, which keep him from winning the love of his life.  The conclusion of the story brims with morbid horror.  Then there is what is possibly the most original story in the collection – The Letter U (A Madman’s Manuscript).   When I started reading this tale about a man obsessed with the “evil” letter U, I smiled at this absurd, quasi-comic premise. By the end of it, I definitely felt uneasy.

Lawrence Venuti’s translation is excellent. The authenticity of the language he uses does not stem only from its faithfulness to the original but also from the fact that Venuti bases his style on that of the (English-speaking) Gothic authors of the nineteenth century. As a result, his prose, albeit flowing, has a slightly archaic feel to it which fits the subject perfectly.

Fantastic Tales is an enjoyable read, but it is also a window onto an as yet underappreciated era of Italian fiction.

Paperback, 260 pages

Expected publication: September 29th 2020 by Archipelago Books (first published 1869)

Sacrifice of the Virgin to the Nile, by Federico Faruffini, one of the painters associated with the Scapigliatura movement

The Scapigliatura was as influential on Italian music (opera in particular) as on the country’s literary and artistic fields. In this area, the primary figures were composer and librettist Arrigo Boito, and composer and conductor Franco Faccio (1840-1891).  Indeed, traditional musical scholarship tends to focus on these two figures as representing a transitional phase in Italian opera, between the masterpieces of Verdi and the rise of verismo as represented by Mascagni, Leoncavallo and others.

Three operas are specifically associated with the Scapigliatura movement.  Franco Faccio’s I Profughi Fiamminghi (1863) was a failure, with only five performances at the Teatro alla Scala.  Nonetheless, it was at a party celebrating the opera’s performance that Boito, notoriously, read his poem Ode Saffica col bicchere alla mano, a send-up of the musical establishment which Verdi, rightly or wrongly, interpreted as a personal attack from a young upstart.

Faccio was far more successful with his second opera, the Shakespearean Amleto.  While hardly part of the mainstream, the opera is occasionally still performed.   This is a scene from Act IV including what is possibly the opera’s best-known part, the “Funeral March”:

But perhaps the most representative of the Scapigliatura operas is Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele.  This is typical of the movement in that it looks to German literature and music as inspiration – Boito borrows his subject from Goethe’s Faust and his approach (that of writing both music and libretto) from Wagner’s ideas of Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”).  And of course, there are the Gothic undertones of the subject, which come to the fore in the Chorus of Witches and Warlocks in Act II (Rampiamo, Rampiamo che il tempo ci gabba).

It would be wrong, however, to dismiss the Scapigliatura musical movement as a three-hit (or near-hit) wonder.  Despite the original rivalry between Verdi and the younger artist, it was Arrigo Boito (together with publisher Ricordi) who coaxed Verdi out of retirement leading to his two late masterpieces – Otello and Falstaff – both to a libretto by Boito and, in the case of the former opera, first conducted by none other than Faccio.  The old master was not too proud to learn from the scapigliati and from their German models!

Boito was also a promoter of a younger generation of artists. In 1884, he partly funded the premiere of the first stage-work of a then yet unknown composer.  The opera-ballet in question was called Le Villi.  Its composer was none other Giacomo Puccini.  Le Villi is inspired by European fairy legends and, in this regard, is part of a long tradition of Gothic themes in opera.  Here is “La Tregenda” (Witches’ Dance), one of the opera’s intermezzi.  

Years later, Puccini would (perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not) write an opera which could be seen as a tribute to the Scapigliatura movement.  La Bohème, featuring a group of poor bohemian artists in Paris, is based on Scènes de la vie de bohème, a collection of inter-related stories by Scapigliatura favourite Henri Murger.  Listening to O Mimì tu più non torni, it does not take much imagination to think of Puccini sounding his elegy to the bohemians of Milan.