About The Author

Dino Carlo Giuseppe Campana was born in 1885 in Marradi, among the rugged landscapes of the Tuscan–Umbrian–Emilian Apennines, a land that would leave an indelible mark on his restless and solitary spirit. He spent his early years there, before being drawn into military service at the Officers’ School in 1904 and later into academic studies in theoretical and pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Bologna.

From the age of fifteen, he was branded as mentally ill — a stigma that would follow him throughout his life. His existence became a long and tormented wandering, marked by intellectual isolation, inner turmoil, and an unrelenting sense of displacement. In 1918, only a few years after the agonizing publication of his works, he was confined to a psychiatric asylum, where he would remain until his death in 1932. He died of septicemia, under circumstances that were never fully clarified, leaving behind a body of work as visionary as it was misunderstood.

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Canti Orfici

By Dino Campana

Overview

A visionary masterpiece born from loss, exile, and poetic obsession.

The Orphic Songs (Canti Orfici) is presented here in its original Italian edition, the work through which Dino Campana left one of the most intense and enigmatic marks on modern literature.

After the mysterious disappearance of his original manuscript — entrusted in vain to an academic mentor — Campana undertook the impossible: to reconstruct the work from memory, rewriting it as if summoned from a dream. In 1914, in the small town of Marradi, he printed a limited number of copies of what would become his only book, a visionary synthesis of poetry and prose.

The result is a hallucinatory journey through inner and outer landscapes, where cities, nights, bodies, and memories dissolve into a single lyrical flow. Canti Orfici moves between ecstasy and despair, wandering and revelation, forging a language that is at once musical, violent, and luminous.

Campana’s life mirrors the intensity of his writing. A restless and misunderstood figure, he would soon be confined to a psychiatric institution, where he spent the final years of his life. Deprived of recognition and legal protection — copyright would only be established decades later — his work was altered without his consent, and his voice nearly erased.

Yet The Orphic Songs endure.

This original Italian edition preserves the raw power of Campana’s vision: a poetic descent into the depths of consciousness, a hymn to beauty and fracture, and one of the most haunting expressions of twentieth-century European literature.

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Description

Campana’s Canti Orfici is not merely a book, but a wild invocation — a tempest of images birthed from the loss and resurrection of a vanished manuscript. When the original pages were stolen, he did not surrender; instead, he summoned from memory a dream-laced reconstruction, like an oracle recalling forgotten rites. In 1914, in the quiet shadows of Marradi, he gave life to a slender folio of Orphic Songs — an incantation of wandering visions, where night becomes a living presence and landscapes bleed into the psyche.

This is a poetry forged from insomnia and reverie, where the terrain of the inner world stretches into foreign cities, restless seas, and the infinite dusk of the soul. The verses and prose intertwine like restless spirits in a nocturnal pilgrimage: dream and memory coalesce, myth and reality blur, and the voice of the poet — fierce, fragile, and unbound — chants the music of a consciousness that refuses to be silent.

In Canti Orfici, the act of writing itself becomes an odyssey — a passage through bewilderment, illumination, and the mythic heart of night. It is a testament to a poetic spirit that sees beyond the horizon, surrendering to the ecstatic rhythms of the unknown.

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Book details

  • Genre:poetry
  • Sub-genre:General
  • Language:Italian
  • Pages:96
  • eBook ISBN:9781609846633