Gabriello Chiabrera

Gabriello Chiabrera (Italian pronunciation: [ɡabriˈɛllo kjaˈbrɛːra]; 18 June 1552 – 14 October 1638) was an Italian poet, sometimes called the Italian Pindar. His "new metres and a Hellenic style enlarged the range of lyric forms available to later Italian poets." Chiabrera is routinely compared by Italian critics to his younger contemporary Giambattista Marino.

Early life and education

Chiabrera was born in Savona, a small coastal town near Genoa, into a family of patrician descent. As he states in a pleasant fragment of autobiography prefixed to his works, where, like Julius Caesar, he speaks of himself in the third person, he was a posthumous child; he went to Rome at the age of nine, under the care of his uncle Giovanni. There he read with a private tutor, suffered severely from two fevers in succession, and was sent at last, for the sake of society, to the Roman College, where he remained till his 20th year, studying philosophy, as he says, "rather for occupation than for learning's sake".

Losing his uncle about this time, Chiabrera returned to Savona, "again to see his own and be seen by them." A little while later he returned to Rome and entered the household of Cardinal Cornaro, where he remained for several years, frequenting the society of Paulus Manutius and of Sperone Speroni, the dramatist and critic of Tasso, and attending the lectures and hearing the conversation of Muretus. After being involved in a duel, he left Rome and returned to his native Savona, where he spent the next decade pursuing his literary studies.