Ferdinando Fontana (30 January 1850 – 10 May 1919) was an Italian journalist, dramatist, and poet. He is best known today for having written the libretti of the first two operas by Giacomo Puccini – Le Villi and Edgar.
Biography
Born in Milan, then part of the Austrian Empire, into a family of artists - both his father Carlo and his brother Roberto were painters - he entered a Barnabite school at the age of seven and then went on to study at the Collegio Zambelli. He was forced to abandon his studies while still young to provide for himself and his two younger sisters following the death of their mother. During that period, he worked in a series of menial jobs before becoming a copy editor for the newspaper Corriere di Milano. This brought him into contact with the world of journalism and literature, which was to become his career.
An exponent of the second Scapigliatura artistic movement, Fontana was a very versatile writer. Apart from his plays and opera libretti, he wrote poems (in both Italian and Milanese dialect), travel books, and articles in various Italian newspapers, including the Milanese daily Corriere della Sera. From 1878 to 1879 he was the Berlin correspondent for the Gazzetta Piemontese (today La Stampa) in Turin.
In 1881–1882, Fontana with his colleague Dario Papa (it), an influential editor of the Corriere della Sera, made a journey through the United States from New York to San Francisco. In New York he befriended Adolfo Rossi, the editor-in-chief of the Italian language newspaper Il Progresso Italo-Americano and contributed to the recently established daily.
