Copyright video, foto e testi © 2020

Among the first years of Romanticism, Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine was born in Macon on 21st of October 1790 in a family of the small landed nobility.

He studied with the Jesuites and already as a kid he showed a great propensity for poetry. Instead of starting a military career at the end of his studies, his family in 1811 allowed him to travel to Italy with relatives who lived in different cities including Naples. This is how in April 1812, he arrived in Procida where he remained for fourteen months. During his long stay in Procida, he met a beautiful girl from the island, Antonella Jacomino, just sixteen, daughter and grand daughter of fishermen, with whom he felt in love and to whom, before suddenly leaving for France, he promised her to return but he never honoured it. A heart breaking younthful love story from which Lamartine took inspiration for his novel Graziella, which idealised in the drama the romantic figure of the young girl from Procida.
His quick return to his homeland was linked to his appointment as major of Milly, the village of Bourgogne where he grew up and where he began his political career which has accompanied his life, together with his literary work. In fact, between 1813 and 1818 he wrote two tragedies, Medée and Saûl. After another great love ended in tragedy with the death of the young Julie Charles, who inspired him for some lyrics, he returned to Italy in 1820, particularly in Naples, and he stayed on the island of Ischia, between Casamicciola and Lacco Ameno. He dedicated some of his poems to the island, which he inserted in the following editions of his Poetical Meditations, which he had published for the first time at the beginning of 1820. The year he got married with Mary Ann Elisa Birch, with whom he returned to Ischia in 1844, exactly when he started writing Graziella, published in 1852.
He started a diplomatic career which led him to hold positions in various Italian cities, Lamartine increasingly favoured with conviction poetry with different collections. He was accompanied by works of a historical nature, such as Histoire des Girondins of 1846. The fall of the monarchy in 1848 saw him for few months as foreign minister of the provisional government, author of the abolition of slavery in the colonies. He was then a member of the National Assembly, until the Bonapartist coup d’état in 1851 which excluded him from the political games. In serious economic difficulties, Lamartine concentrated himself on the literary activity, giving to the press numerous works in the following years. Already seriously ill for some time, Lamartine died on the 28th of February 1869.