Giovanni Papini

Giovanni Papini (January 9, 1881 – July 8, 1956) was an Italian journalist, essayist, literary critic, poet, and novelist.

Early life

Born in Florence as the son of a modest furniture retailer (and former member of Giuseppe Garibaldi's Redshirts) from Borgo degli Albizi, Papini was baptized secretly to avoid the aggressive atheism of his father and lived a rustic, lonesome childhood. At that time he had felt a strong aversion to all beliefs, to all churches, as well as to any form of servitude (which he saw as connected to religion); he also became enchanted with the impossible idea of writing an encyclopedia wherein all cultures would be summarized.

Trained at the Instituto di Studi Superiori (1900–2), he taught for a year in the Anglo-Italian school and then was librarian at the Museum of Anthropology from 1902 to 1904. The literary life attracted Papini, who in 1903 founded the magazine Il Leonardo, to which he contributed articles under the pseudonym of "Gian Falco." His collaborators included Giuseppe Prezzolini, Borgese, Vailati, Costetti and Calderoni. Through Leonardo's Papini and his contributors introduced in Italy important thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Peirce, Nietzsche, Santayana and Poincaré. He would later join the staff of Il Regno, a nationalist publication directed by Enrico Corradini, who formed the Associazione Nazionalistica Italiana, to support his country colonial expansionism.