Salvatore di Giacomo must be put at the head of all dialectical poets of Italy. He is very little known to English readers, because he has been so little translated, save into German. He is the librarian of the National Library of the Naples Museum. The subjects of his poems are drawn from Naples and its people, its beauty and their ardency; the realism of his verse is sober, its sentiments are healthy and true to human nature but to the human nature of a voluptuous, passionate people. He writes of love in all its aspects, and of death, physical, emotional, and mental. He knows the hopes, aspirations, sympathies, longings, customs of his fellow Neapolitans; he knows them when they are ill, when they are happy, and when they are depressed, when they are fortunate and when they are seeped in misfortune, and he puts them into lyrics that they understand and that poetasters praise. His lyrics have been collected into one volume called "Poesie." He has been called the Robert Burns of Italy, and it is likely that he deserves it. It is to be regretted that no one has attempted to render him in English. An Italian poet neglected and almost unknown during his lifetime (1872-1919), whose literary output was very small, is slowly coming to his estate and it is not unlikely that the coming generation will hail Ceccardo Roccatagliata-Ceccardi as one of Italy's greatest modern poets. "Sonetti e Poemi" contains practically all of his verse save a small collection published when he was twenty. CHAPTER III GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO--POET, PILOT, AND PIRATE The most conspicuous name in the annals of Italian literature of the generation now passing is that assumed by a child or a youth when the voice first whispered to him that he had been chosen to announce the coming of a new era, to blaze the way for a new social and national life: Gabriele D'Annunzio. He was born at Pescara in the Regno, March 13, 1863, the son of Francescopaolo D'Annunzio and of his wife, Luisa de Benedictis of Ortona. A studied effort has been made to envelop his birth and parentage in a mantle of mystery, but it has been thwarted. One day of his infancy, in Ferravilla-on-the-Sea, suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind. From that moment the little Annunciator was filled with the gift of verbal expression. He enhanced the endowment by diligent study in the high school at Prato, in Tuscany, where he spent his boyhood. Thus did he acquire an unparalleled mastery of the Italian language. The gods of mythology, the Hellenic heroes and philosophers, the emperors and courtesans of Pagan Rome were the loves of his infancy. After Carducci's "Odi Barbari" exploded his poetic magazine he looked about to find a god and a Greek upon whom to model his conduct. He recalled Dionysus going through the world with Priapus ostentatiously displaying the Phallus, and the die was cast.