Italy

Vincenzo Monti

1754–1828

Born in Alfonsine, near Ravenna, and active in Rome and Milan, Monti was the leading Italian poet of the Neoclassical age. He did not read ancient Greek: his Iliade, published in 1810, is a verse rendering in the blank hendecasyllables of Italian epic, built on existing Latin and Italian versions, and it became the Iliad most generations of Italian schoolchildren learned. Its opening, “Cantami, o Diva, del Pelide Achille”, is the one Sons of Troy set to music in Cantami, o Diva!