Background
Nazareno Caldarelli was born on May 1, 1887 in Tarquinia, Italy, the son of Antonio and Giovanna Caldarelli Romagnoli.
essayist journalist literary critic poet
Nazareno Caldarelli was born on May 1, 1887 in Tarquinia, Italy, the son of Antonio and Giovanna Caldarelli Romagnoli.
With no formal schooling beyond the fifth grade, Cardarelli was largely self-educated.
Cardarelli's first book and various prose pieces were published in 1916-17, in the turbulent period of World War I. Douglas Radcliff-Umstead described the literary climate of those years in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, noting that "Italian writers and artists were in the process of restoring their nation to cultural prominence." Against the tide of modernity, Cardarelli and his like-minded contemporaries looked to classical models, practiced traditional literary techniques, and sung the praises of Italy's glorious history. Though his first poems were published in Lirica, an avant-garde magazine, Cardarelli turned from experimental literature to find more inspiration in Petrarch and Leopardi. Throughout his career, Cardarelli sounded this theme again and again, resolutely preferring lyrical traditions to the avant-gardism that was in vogue.
Cardarelli, Riccardo Bacchelli, Emilio Cecchi, and others founded La Ronda in 1919. The journal established itself as one of the principle voices of cultural conservatism in Rome. Though it spanned a brief period. La Ronda contained the work of several important writers of the period, including Giacomo Noventa, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Cardarelli himself.
In the late 1910s and early 1920s, La Ronda served as a forum for the presentation of the conservative case. The journal was founded in opposition to the avant-garde movements - futurism and hermetic poetry in particular. Cardarelli's talent as a poet and position as editor-in-chief of the journal made him one of the primary proponents of the new classicism.
His poetry epitomized the modern classicism he and his friends espoused in the pages of the conservative journal La Ronda. He later edited the literary weekly La Feria letteraria, which exerted a wide influence from its beginnings in 1949 and was active in the literary circles of Rome until his death. In the end, Cardarelli found his place in the Italian canon as one of the best poets of this movement.
He died on June 15, 1959 aged 72 in Rome, Italy.