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Essay on biography
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One of the most grueling tasks for an author can be coming up with ideas for their novel. Many of them suffer from writer’s block and take months, even years, to finish one book. While writing a novel is tasking, writing a biography is not. All you have to do is write about your own life, how hard can that be? Well, this is the case with The Garden of the Finzi-Conitini’s. Giorgio Bassani writes of his own life throughout the entirety of the novel, with themes like the death of love, with the love of his life Micol Finzi-Contini, wealthy landowners, as he was high on the social ladder in his life much like the Finizi-Contini’s are, and he represents the persecution and isolation of the Jewish people, as he is outlawed from tennis courts and libraries.
Giorgio Bassani was born into a wealthy Jewish family. They lived affluently with chauffeurs, butlers, and a large house. He grew up attending a private school to receive a superior education and his first love was the piano, although literature soon became the focal point of his studies. He attended the University of Bologna in Italy where he studied the art historian Roberto Longhi. His idea of a free state of mind inspired Bassani as that idea was being oppressed in the first place by the Nazi’s. Bassani eventually developed a thesis on Niccolo Tommaseo, a nineteenth century writer and journalist who tried to unify all of Italy to speak one language. Bassani was also a radical anti-fascist who was jailed for resisting the movement and he was released on July 26, 1943, which was the same day that Benito Mussolini was ousted from power. A week or two later he married the love of his life Valeria Sinigallia, a woman he had met by playing tennis. Turns out that being an excellent It...
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...ries. Bassani cultivates a certain confusion between the voice of the narrator (who happens also to be the protagonist of the novel) and the autobiographical self. It is, however, not so much a matter of confusion as a deliberate decision to link the intensely personal “corridor” of memory to a collective memory. In a metaphoric sense, the voyage into the past always leads to funereal perceptions. (Schwarz) The beginning of the novel makes this clear during the visit to the Etruscan tombs. But Bassani also wishes to make clear, as he does explicitly in the final pages of the book, that although the corridor of time and memory gets steadily longer, the past itself can be retrieved. This belief that the past never dies is of course dependent, in the context of Bassani’s tragic themes, on the survival of the witness of a condemned community. As he was in his own life.
Through their superstitious beliefs, devout religious convictions, and established customs the severity of the collective conventionality of the inhabitants of Valle del Sole in Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints is evident and crucial to the ruination of Cristina Innocente. The people of the town have proven themselves to be incredibly superstitious, irrationally believing in things such as the “evil eye” to prove ________________. In addition to their superstitions, their exceedingly pious beliefs further their condemnation of Cristina, casting her out in the eyes of God. The citizens of Valle del Sole also denounce Cristina for her lack of regard to the very specific roles and responsibilities within their
The past dictates who we are in a current moment, and affects who we might become in the future. Every decision people make in lives has an influence on future, regardless of how minimal or large it is. Some decisions people decide to make can have dire consequences that will follow them for the rest of the life. Moreover, even though if someone would want to leave any memories from past behind, however it will always be by his side. Specific memories will urge emotional responses that bring mind back to the past and person have no choose but to relieve those emotions and memories again. Nonetheless, certain events change people and make them who they are, but at the same time, some wrong choices made past haunts us. This essay will discuss the role of the past in novel Maestro, that was written by Australian author Peter Goldsworthy in 1989 and also in Tan Shaun's story Stick Figures which was included in book called "Tales from outer suburbia" and published in 2008.
Mussolini’s population policy was a clear effort to exercise his authoritarian control over the people of Italy, regulating the most personal and private details of their lives. In his bid for complete control, he used new laws, propaganda, and sometimes brutal tactics in order for his wishes to be recognized. It is during the 1920’s to the 1940’s that totalitarian control over the state escalated into full dictatorships, with the wills of the people being manipulated into a set of beliefs that would promote the fascist state and “doctrines.”
In the book the memory palace of Matteo Ricci, the author Jonathan Spence talks about the Italian preacher Matteo Ricci who spent almost his whole life in China. Spence tries to describe a person who was determined and underwent many difficulties in preaching but never lost his faith in establishing Christian faith among Chinese people by using the memory palace. He divided the book into nine chapters. Despite the preface and the summary of the memory palace, each chapter contains an image or picture which is used for introduction of each chapter. In this way, Spence uses these images and pictures to help the reader build their own memory palace of this book which also well-illustrated the memory method that Matteo Ricci had used – the memory palace. According to Brook (p.831), a memory palace is “a mnemonic method that was popular with sixteenth-century Jesuits for retaining in memory.”
Machiavelli’s views were drastically different from other humanists at his time. He strongly promoted a secular society and felt morality was not necessary but stood in the way of a successfully governed state. He stated that people generally tended to work for their own best interests and gave little thought to the well being of the state. He distrusted citizens saying, “In time of adversity, when a state is in need of its citizens, there are few to be found.” In his writings in The Prince, he constantly questioned the citizens’ loyalty and warned for the leaders to be wary in trusting citizens. His radical and distrusting thoughts on human nature were derived out of concern for Italy’s then unstable government. Machiavelli also had a s...
The story unfolds with the increasing limitations on the rights of Jewish people in Italy. Mussolini 's racial laws are beginning to take force on the rights of the Jewish people. Prohibitions such as no servants, no library
Ginsborg P (1990). ‘A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics: 1943-1980’ Published by Penguin; Reprint edition (27 Sep 1990).
After five hundred years, Niccolo Machiavelli the man has ceased to exist. In his place is merely an entity, one that is human, but also something that is far above one. The debate over his political ideologies and theories has elevated him to a mythical status summed up in one word: Machiavelli. His family name has evolved into an adjective in the English language in its various forms. Writers and pundit’s bandy about this new adjective in such ways as, “He is a Machiavelli,” “They are Machiavelli’s,” “This is suitable for a Machiavelli.” These phrases are almost always the words of a person that understands more about Niccolo’s reputation than the man himself. Forgotten is that Machiavelli is not an adequate example of the ruler he is credited with describing; a more accurate statement would be to call someone a “Borgia” or a “Valentino.” Most of the time they are grossly mistaken in their references. All these words accomplish is to add to the legend, and the misinterpretation, of the true nature of Niccolo Machiavelli.
It is abundantly clear how Leonardo Bruni feels about the city of Florence. In Panegyric to the City of Florence, he expresses nothing but the highest praise for the city. Every aspect of Florence is backed by a clear reason why it is the best, and there is no other city in the world that can compare. According to Bruni, Florence has extraordinary beauty, architecture, geography, history, government, and people. This, of course, is only one person’s opinion. In the diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati, they too give their opinions on the city of Florence. In general, they do not seem to give Florence the same recognition and praise that Bruni gives.
Ridolfi, Roberto. The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli. Trans. Cecil Grayson. 1954. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Print.
Suzanne G. Cusick, who considers herself a speicialist in the life and works of Francesca Caccini, argues that Francesca was a proto-feminist and the music she composed for the Medici court contributed to the career of the Grand Duchess Christine de Lorraine of Tuscany. She therefore claims that through her works, Caccini encourages the sexuality and political aims of women in the early seventeenth century.1
Benito Mussolini was brought up in one the poorest regions in Northeastern Italy. When he was in school, he always kept to himself and very quiet. He wasn’t a class clown, never cried or rarely laughed. He always sat in the back of the classroom and read a book. He rather do that than play with the other children in his class. He got kicked out his first boarding school. When he was growing up he was surrounded by many political philosophies. There was anarchism, socialism, and others. Both Benito and his father Allesandro had very bad violent tempers.
For the musical composer essay, I have chosen to write about a man who I felt made the greatest impact on Romantic opera in the 19th century this master of a man was given the name Giuseppe Fortunio Francesco Verdi but was commonly known as Giuseppe Verdi by all who knew and loved him. This great man was born on either October 9, or 10 in the year 1813 in the community of Le Roncole, near a small town called Busseto in the province of Parma, Italy his astrological sign is that of a Libra. His mother and father were both of Italian descent and their names were Carlo and Luigia Verdi respectively. Now this is where it gets complicated Verdi told every person that talked to him about his background that his parents were illiterate peasants. Despite this lie that Verdi told them they later discovered that his parents were not illiterate peasants as he had claimed but were very smart individuals tha...
Since the beginning of its existence as a country, Italy has faced enormous challenges in establishing itself as a unified political and social entity. The geographic, economic, and linguistic differences between its various regions and the artificial manner in which they were amalgamated created a legacy of internal divisions that continues to dominate the country's political climate to this day. Italy's numerous historical fiascoes, such as its disastrous involvement in the two World Wars and the rise of fascism, further escalated the domestic problems that had haunted it since the Risorgimento. At first, the anti-fascist Resistance movement, which dominated the end of World War II, seemed to bring Italy a ray of hope, promising a new era of freedom, reform, and democratic representation. However, this hope was quickly extinguished, as widespread poverty, government corruption, and deep divisions between regions and classes persisted and no true social reform was attained. These harsh conditions were depicted by a group of Italian film directors whose neorealist works have since been celebrated as masterpieces of world cinema. One of the most prominent of these is Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. This 1948 film discusses the prevalent themes dominating Italy's social and political history, within the context of the unsettlingly poor post-War urban proletariat.
The era of the Italian Renaissance was a time period for many great thinkers whose minds helped shape the way that people see the world today and Niccolo Machiavelli is certainly no exception. He is most assuredly one of the top philosophical and political minds in the history books and has been an inspiration for many leaders. Unfortunately, tyrannical dictators such as Adolf Hitler were known to use Machiavelli’s teachings in their quest for power so the world has not always viewed this man in the most positive light, even with the things that he tried to teach.