BIOGRAPHY

Giovanni Camerana was born in Casale Monferrato, in the province of the city of Alessandria, in Piedmont, on the 4th of February 1845. His mother was Francesca Leotardi Di Brusasco; his father, Giuseppe Camarana, was a judge.
Camerana started his interest in poetry and painting when still at school, and his personality was, in a sense, already formed by the time his family moved to Milan in the early 1860s, because of his father's job. Here Camerana met Emilio Praga and Arrigo Boito and became associated with the nascent Scapigliatura movement, around 1864. He grew even more involved with it, when he went to the University of Pavia to study law, for this was the place where the younger Scapigliati were too, such as Roberto Sacchetti, Giulio Pinchetti, SalvatoreFarina e Carlo Dossi. In '65, Camerana, in Turin to finish his degree, entered the literary cenacle "Dante Alighieri", later known as the nucleus of the Piedmontese Scapigliatura, which included Sacchetti, Giovanni Faldella, Giuseppe Cesare Molineri and playwright Giuseppe Giacosa, to name but a few. In this way, Camerana became instrumental in putting the original Scapigliati from Milan in touch with their Piemontese followers. He got his law degree in 1867: his family destined its male members to either a career in the military or the judiciary, Giovanni opted for the latter, much to his regret in later years. In 1869 he started writing for the art magazine "L'Arte in Italia"; he became friends with painters Antonio Fontanesi, Vittorio Avondo e Lorenzo Dalleani and the sculptor Leonardo Bistolfi. In art, his major influences were Giovan Battista Piranesi, Arnoldo Bocklin and Claude De Lorrain. He was also an admirer of the French painter Corot, and Dutch landscape painters Hobbema, Ruysdael and Potter. In 1874 he started working as a judge: his job kept him constantly on the move, in cities like Varallo, Ivrea, Alba, Saluzzo, and then finally to Catania, in Sicily, over a period of a few years. In the meantime he started publishing his poetry on a variety of magazines, never signing them with his own name, but only with a "y". When asked why this was by the poet Corrado Corradini, or the reason why Camerana would not collect his poems in volume form, Camerana answered that a judge could not be thought of as a passionate dreamer, as a poet; in his own words:" He (the judge) must always be dispassionate, impartial, impassive, a lover only of truth witnessed and proved...judge and poet are incompatible, they cannot be reconciled to one another. Can't you see that a judge cannot and must not publish poetry?....There are many priests who are tempted by women, but if they are good priests, they keep their vows; and if they should fail, they would not go telling all and sundry about their sins. My love affairs with poetry are illegitimate; a gentleman would not brag about them in public." When Corradino told him that his poetry reminded him of Baudelaire, Heine and Praga, Camerana stated: "You yourself have said the reason why I should not publish my poems; you have named three dead poets. I write dead poetry."That was a lot of truth in that statement. Camerana had by then travelled across Europe, in France, Switzerland, his beloved Holland; he had several painful and unsuccessful relationships, he never married. He became a sombre, detached man, with an elegant, serious and noble appearance; pale and with intense eyes, black hair and beard, his friends remembered his aristocratic Piedmontese accent and the grave tone with which he would recite his verse to a few friends along deserted city streets at night or walking through the gloomy country landscapes that recur in his sketches and lyrics. This was the only consolation of a life that seemed always directed towards death. Alas, his refusal to publish his poetry, was what left his life bereft of any happiness or personal sense of satisfaction. His solitary existence, his failed relationship with women, the general backlash against the Scapigliatura movement by the forces of conservative Italy, the miseries of life that he witnessed daily in court, the contradictions between his aspirations as a poet and the reality of his work as a judge, they all contributed to make his life hopeless and gloomy. Poetry was in reality was the only thing that kept Camerana alive for as long as he did live, for he seemed obsessed with the idea of death. The impressionism that Praga transposed from painting to poetry became the dominant mode of Camerana's style; but no more sketches of daily life in all its variety for him: no, for Camerana the landscape is enough. In nature Camerana seeks the silence, clouds and water reflecting one another; the flat Dutch landscape is a metaphore for death. The dark landscapes of his drawings and verse represent his own interior disease of livng. If in the early days of the Scapigliatura , the refusal of the rules of society had a historical and social character, with Camerana , it became an existential one. Early poems, written before 1870, such as "Emancipazione" (Emancipation), do not really represent the mature poet; it is in the following years of the '70s and '80s that Camerana became the dark existential poet remembered by posterity for his originality, his use of a refined poetic language parallel to Veralaine's, with the use of words such as diaphanous, phosphorecence, transparency; all this foretells the poetry of future generations, of Decadentism, Symbolism, Existentialism. Camerana's vision is not only that of a suffering humanity; in his poems the whole universe seems to be suffering, life is a cosmic tragedy that engulfs both humanity and nature, with no hope of salvation this side of extinction. Existence for Camerana is incomprehensible, only pain and isolation being constants in a world of continous change. The eight sonnets written to Bocklin between 1899 and 1904 read like Camerana's own epitaph; in fact, he wrote several of his own epitaphs. "La Nera Solitudine" (The Black Solitude) and "Cerco la strofa che sia fosca e queta" (I seek the verse that is dark and still) are classic examples of his poetic sensitivity.
In the final years of his life, Camerana moved back to Turin, having been promoted to the Appeal Court of that city. He then became procurator of the Cassazione Court. This final contradiction of his interior and public lives was, according to some, the reason why on sunday, July 2, 1905, left by himself in the early hours of the morning in his Turin home, Camerana first tried a revolver by levelling it against a painting, then fired two shots killing himself.
His friend Leonardo Bistolfi collected Camerana's poems written after 1870 in 1906, publishing them in Turin, with the title "Versi" (Verse). "Poesie" (Poems), which included the earlier poems, was collected by Francesco Flora in 1956. An even better edition, edited by Gilberto Finzi ,came out in 1969, with the same title of "Poesie" (Poems). Camerana's poetry, in the meantime, entered the textbooks of Italian high schools; today anyone interested in Italian modern literature would be familiar with "Il Pioppo nell'azzurro" (The Poplar in the blue) or some other poem of his. The critic Piero Nardi,writing in the 1940s, called Camerana the last of the Scapigliati, for he was the last surviving member of the original group; he kept the movement's theses going for longer than anyone else. In this sense, Camerana represents a bridge from the last days of Romanticism and early Decadentism all the way to our own times.