GINGILLINO, jin-j11-leno. In the literary movement which preceded and prepared the uprising of 1848 in Italy,— a movement char acterized by the political writings of Gioberti, Balbo and d'Azeglio, by the inspiring pamphlets of Giuseppe Mazzini, an important place must be made for the Tuscan satirical poet, Giuseppe Giusti. In composed at Pescia in the spring of 1845, Giusti gives us a master piece of satire in his own special field, a genre picture of the abuses of his times.
As the poet states in his "Correspondence,* was written "to show what paths and through what sort of apprenticeship government posts could be reached" in Tuscany. The name "Gingillino' has since become syn onymous in Italy of the man who to seek ad vancement utilizes every cunning art of hypoc risy and pandering. Written at a time when political conditions throughout Italy were at a low ebb, when the oppressive hand of Austrian and Bourbon princelings lay heavily over the country, (Gingillino) reflects in biting satire the stagnant enervation in Tuscany under the reign of the Grand Duke Leopold II, "the Tuscan Morpheus,' as Giusti calls him. During the flaccid rule of the latter, the entire administra tive fabric of the state, in particular the civil service and the magistracy, had become honey combed with inefficiency, servility and corrup tion. Aimed directly at the vicious system of political preferment in vogue in his state, Giusti's poem became a call for internal reform and in its larger aspect an appeal for Italian regeneration.
The poem itself which the author calls a dithyramb is a polymetric satire in praise of Gingillino, the perfect example of the cringing place seeker, whose career the poet describes from the cradle lullaby crooned to him by such deities as Cupidity, Duplicity, Sordidness, In trigue, etc., to the final Credo of materialistic
greed uttered by Gingillino in his maturity. It to decide whether to admire most the richness and variety of the metre so full of movement and animation, the subtle irony which the great poet and critic Carducci com pares to Parini's immortal verse, the Byronic incisiveness and pungency of the satire, the picturesque colloquialness of the Tuscan idiom which the poet wields with unerring skill, or the power of political invective which makes him the greatest Italian satirical poet of the 19th century. With the lapse of time and the changes in political conditions, the satire has lost some of its sting. Then too the language of Giusti is so characteristic of his native province that it takes a Florentine to get the real flavor and tang of (Gingillino.' It re mains none the less, with its enormous popu larity in its own day and its wholesome moral tone, one of the noblest poems of Giuseppe Giusti.
For the Italian text and criticism consult