Giuseppe Giacosa
1847–1906
Biography
Giuseppe Giacosa was an Italian playwright, poet and librettist. He was born in 1847 at Colleretto Parella in the Canavese district of Piedmont, near Turin, and he died in the same village in 1906. The son of a lawyer, he studied law at the University of Turin and for a time worked in his father's office, but the theatre pulled him away from the courtroom. His first success was the play Una partita a scacchi (A Game of Chess), staged in 1871, and from then on he devoted himself to writing for the stage. From 1885 he taught literature and history at Turin's academy of fine arts.
Most of his plays are set in Piedmont and examine the values and moral lives of the middle classes of his day. He wrote with clarity and restraint, and critics of his time placed him among the leading dramatists of Italy. He is best known to opera audiences for his partnership with the librettist Luigi Illica. Together they wrote the libretti for Puccini's La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, and it is through those works that his name has lasted.
His short stories are less familiar than his plays. The site holds his Novelle e paesi valdostani, a collection of stories set among villages of the Aosta Valley, so readers can see another side of a writer usually remembered for the stage.
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Books
Novelle e paesi valdostani
by Giuseppe Giacosa
Stories and sketches of the Aosta Valley by the playwright Giuseppe Giacosa: mountain guides, hunters, a priest, a mine and a village minuet sit beside pieces on local traditions, legends, hermits and the snow. Together they make a portrait of an Alpine region in the 1880s.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.