Carlo Porta

The Milanese dialect poet Carlo Porta, one of Italy’s most important writers, was born on 15 June 1785 and died on 5 January 1821. Like Manzoni, he lived in Milan, at the time one of Europe’s cultural capitals. He was employed in the financial offices of the Napoleonic and Austrian governments, gradually working his way up the administrative ranks. Following in the footsteps of the great Milanese dialect poets, including Maggi, Tanzi, Balestrieri and Parini, he skilfully used the expressive resources of the Milanese dialect for his anti-aristocratic and anticlerical satire, which was nurtured by an Enlightenment and reformist spirit and driven by sophisticated humour and indignant polemic. His targets were the social classes and characters that had also been satirized by Parini several decades earlier with the aim of modifying their customs, although now, with the bourgeois revolution in full swing, these were simply a residue of the ancien régime (a good example is the conceited noblewoman in L’offerta a Dio, Donna Fabia Fabron de Fabrian). He was a great storyteller and skilful portrayer of individuals and groups, foregrounding for the first time in Italian literary history a “humiliated and insulted” world made up of the poor and oppressed from the lowest levels of society who were subjected to the exploitation of the more powerful, but eager to claim their rights and dignity (in characters such as Giovannin Bongee, the Marchionn “with the squinty legs” and the prostitute Ninetta). Participating energetically also in the cultural debate during the romantic polemic, Porta started up an important literary salon in his home (the so-called Cameretta), which was frequented also by Manzoni. The author of the Promessi Sposi was considerably influenced by Porta’s poetry, and the novel contains frequent echoes of Porta’s comic idiom (such as in the dialect expressions of the “Full Moon Inn” episode in Chapter XIV).