Anton Giulio Barrili
1836–1908
Biography
Anton Giulio Barrili lived from 1836 to 1908. He was born in Savona, on the Ligurian coast, and trained for the legal profession before giving it up for journalism in Genoa. He volunteered in the campaign of 1859 and later fought under Garibaldi in 1866 and 1867. From 1865 onward he published a large number of novels, which were widely read and were often compared with those of the French novelist Victor Cherbuliez.
Titles that stand out in his output include Santa Cecilia, from 1866, Come un sogno, from 1875, and Raggio di Dio, which came out in 1899. He also wrote two plays and several volumes of criticism, one of them on the renewal of Italian letters (1890). In 1876 he took a seat in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, and in 1889 he was appointed to teach Italian literature at Genoa's university.
On this site he is represented by L'olmo e l'edera (1877), counted among his best later novels. The title means the elm and the ivy, a pair of plants that grow together, and the book belongs to the popular fiction that made him widely known in a newly united Italy. Readers who want to see what Italian novels looked like in the decades after unification will find him a useful starting point.
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Books
L'olmo e l'edera
by Anton Giulio Barrili
Presented as a true story, the novel follows Guido Laurenti, a young doctor in Genoa, and Luisa, a gentle woman whose frail health and lonely life draw him to her. Barrili sets their quiet, hesitant love against the gossip of the city's fashionable drawing rooms.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.