Mario Rapisardi

As a boy, he was taught "grammar, rhetoric and the Latin language" by two priests and "a psicontologico mixture that he thought was philosophy" by a friar. To please his father, he then unwillingly took the usual course in jurisprudence, but never wanted to take the laurea in that or any other faculty. He wrote at this time "there is nothing noteworthy in my life, unless it is this, that - for good or ill - it formed me, destroying the wretched and false education I had received [up to then] and instructing and educating me, in my own way, to be outside whatever school, whatever sect, scornful of systems and prejudices".
He began his poetic career at fourteen with an ode to Saint Agatha, in which he dared to recommend the freedom of his fatherland (then under the Bourbon regime), and in 1863 published a volume of verses under the title Canti. In 1865 he came to Florence for the first time, returning there often later in his life. There he got to know Giovanni Prati, Niccolò Tommaseo, Atto Vannucci, Pietro Fanfani, Andrea Maffei, Giuseppe Regaldi, Erminia, Arnaldo Fusinato, Francesco Dall'Ongaro, Terenzio Mamiani and other "illustri e buoni", as he later called them. Also in Florence he published his La Palingenesi in 1868, recommending a religious revival for humanity. It got good reviews, and Victor Hugo read it and wrote to Rapisardi, saying "...[it is a] noble poem. You are a forerunner".
In 1870 he was appointed to teach Italian literature at the University of Catania. In the spring of 1876, Pedro II d'Alcantara, Emperor of Brazil, stayed in Catania as a guest of Francesco Di Bartolo, who had portrayed him in a work that is now untraced. Di Bartolo accompanied him to the university, where the emperor attended incognito one of Rapisardi's lectures on the…

1858 - Ode to sant'Agata
1863 - Canti, a volume of verses
1872, Pisa - Le ricordanze, collection of lyric verses
1875, Florence - Catullo e Lesbia
1877, Milan - Lucifero, praising Rationalism's triumph over Transcendence.
1879, Milan - Translation of Lucretius's De rerum natura
1885, Catania - Giustizia, collection of social-reform poetry.
1884, Catania - Giobbe, poem expressing the accents of human pain.
1887, Catania - Le poesie religiose, advocating religion of a pantheistic mould.
1888 - Duetto, a social-reform poem for which he was tried by the magistrate of Venice.
1889, Naples - Translation of the works of Catullus.
1892, Palermo - Translation of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.
1894 - The poem Atlantide, a biting satire and work of caricature about the literati of the day.
1897 - Translation of the Odes of Horace.
1902 - L'asceta and other poems.

(in Italian) Italian WikiSource has material related to Mario Rapisardi
(in Italian) Italian WikiQuote has material related to Mario Rapisardi