Giovanni Battista Casti

Giovanni Battista Casti (29 August 1724 – 5 February 1803) was an Italian poet, satirist, and author of comic opera librettos.

Life

He was born in Acquapendente near Viterbo. He entered the priesthood after studying at the seminary of Montefiascone and became a canon in the cathedral of his native place, but gave up his chance of church preferment to satisfy his restless spirit by visiting most of the capitals of Europe. In 1784, after the death of Metastasio (in 1782), he failed to be appointed Poeta Cesareo, or poet laureate of Austria, and he left Austria in 1796.

In 1798 he moved to Paris and was able to publish works that had been unacceptable in Italy – the ottava rima Poema tartaro (1797), which satirizes Russia and Catherine II, and the philosophically materialist and often licentious Novelle galanti (definitive edition 1802), satirizing relations between the sexes.

In Paris he also wrote his most famous work, Animali parlanti (1802), a poem in twenty-six canti of six-line stanzas, which uses the classical fable to depict the political battle between the aristocracy and democracy then under way. Though it attracted stinging criticism, it was lauded by Leopardi, who treated it as a model of political satire.

Casti spent the rest of his life in Paris, where he died in 1803.