Famous Italian Critics & Connoisseurs

Guido of Arezzo was an Italian pedagogue and music theorist of High medieval music. He is often credited with inventing the modern staff notation, which later gave rise to Western musical notation. Among his treatises, Micrologus, was one of the most widely circulated medieval treatise on music.

Italian author Cesare Pavese is remembered for his themes of gloom and loneliness and for his protagonists who were often loners. His prolonged fight with fascists and the failure of his affair with actor Constance Dowling led him to commit suicide by consuming sleeping pills in a Turin hotel.

Renata Adler is an author, journalist, and film critic who has been a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She studied comparative literature at Harvard University and later received a J.D. from Yale Law School. Despite not being much knowledgeable about films, she became a film critic for The New York Times. She has also written many books. 

Giosuè Carducci was an Italian poet, literary critic, teacher, and writer. Widely regarded as the national poet of modern Italy, Carducci was a very influential figure. He became the first Italian to be honored with the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature in 1906. Carducci was also a translator and is responsible for translating some of Heine and Goethe into Italian.

Giuseppe Ungaretti was an Italian poet, essayist, journalist, academic, and critic. One of the most important contributors to Italian literature during the 20th century, Ungaretti was honored with the first Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1970. He is credited with popularizing hermetic poetry, a form of difficult and obscure poetry.

Born to Swiss parents in Italy, Giovanni Morelli later studied medicine in Switzerland and Germany, but never practiced. A connoisseur of arts, he established himself as an art historian and collector. He also dabbled in politics and passed an act forbidding the sale of artwork from public or religious institutions.

An influential art historian, critic, and curator, Germano Celant is known for coining the term, Arte Povera to describe the radically economical art of some post WWII Italian artists. Beginning his career with Geneva based art magazine Marcatrè, he eventually become the curator of New York’s Guggenheim museum and Director of Milan’s Prada Foundation, concurrently authoring many books on art.

While he initially studied mining, medicine, and architecture, Gregor von Rezzori eventually graduated in arts. Fluent in several languages, he had a successful stint as a journalist and became known for both for his light novels and the more poignant ones such as Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.