Dino Campana - Life

Life

Campana was born in Marradi, near Faenza, northern Italy. Here he spent a happy childhood, despite the discipline of his parents. His father Giovanni, an elementary school principal, was a forthright community member of weak and neurotic character. His mother, Fanny Luti, came from a wealthy family but was an eccentric and compulsive woman, affected by mental illness. She would often wander the hills, forgetting about family duties, and would pathologically attack Dino's younger brother Manlio, born in 1887.

In 1900, at approximately fifteen years of age, Campana came to be diagnosed with the first symptoms of nervous disturbances, and was medicated and sent to an asylum. This did not, however, prevent him from completing the several stages of Italian school. He completed his elementary education in Marradi - his third, fourth and fifth gymnasium years at the college of Salesiani di Faenza. He then undertook his liceo studies, partially at the Liceo Torricelli of the same city, and partially in Carmagnola, at another college. However, when he returned to Marradi, the nervous crises were sharpened, together with frequent jolts of humour - symptoms of a difficult relationship with his family (above all his mother) and his hometown. The future poet obtained his liceo certificate at Carmagnola. In 1903 he enrolled himself at the University of Bologna, in the chemistry faculty, in order to pass through to the faculty of pharmaceutical chemistry in Florence, but he did not succeed in finishing his university career and had difficulty in finding his true calling. This he could only find hints of in writing poetry, and it was to this pursuit – between periods of exaltation and depression – that he applied himself.