Chronology 1867-1917

• 1867. Pirandello was born on June 28, in the “Chaos” villa, near Girgenti.

• 1887-1881. He enters the literature faculty; he attend this for three years and in 1889 continues his studies in Bonn, where he graduates in Romance Philology.

• 1894. He marries Maria Antonietta Portulano, daughter of his father's partner.

• 1897. He moves to Rome, where he teaches Italian Stylistics up to 1922.

• 1901. He publishes “L’Esclusa” on the paper <<La Tribuna>>. Tales, reviews and critical papers are published on magazines and newspapers in the following years.

• 1904. He is forced to give private lessons and to ask for money for his literary collaboration due to the cad economic conditions of his family.

• 1909. The collaboration with the <<Corriere della Sera>> newspaper starts and it will end  two days before his dead.

• 1913. He publishes “I vecchi e i giovani”.

• 1916. He publishes the novel “Si gira...” (it will be re-published in 1925 as “Quaderni di Serafino Giubbo operatore”).

• 1917. The play “Il Berretto a sonagli” is performed (in a dialectal version) with the famous actor Angelo Musco in Rome and the play “Il Piacere dell’onestà” with    Ruggero Ruggeri in Turin.

Created by Fabrizio Priori

Chronology 1921-1936

• 1921. “Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore” is performed in Valle Theatre on May 9. It is a failure but on September 27 in Manzoni Theatre in Milan it gets a good success.

• 1922. The play “Enrico IV” is also successfully performed in Milan  (Ruggerro Ruggeri is the protagonist). “Sei personaggi in cerca d’ autore” and other plays are successfully performed in London, New York, Paris, Madrid, etc. 

• 1924. With a letter, that is published on <<L’Impero>> newspaper, he asks Mussolini to join the Fascist party.

• 1925. He meets Marta Abba, a very popular actress, who will be his favourite actress for ever.

• 1926. He publishes the novel “Uno, Nessuno e Centomila”. After founding his acting company, he spends some years on tour. In 1929 he stays in the U.S.A. for shooting the movie "As you like me"  (“Come tu mi vuoi” in Italian), with Greta Garbo.

• 1931. He pronounces in front of the Academy of Italy his official speech for the celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the publication of “I Malavoglia” by Giovanni Verga criticising D’Annunzio’s literature that was a significant component of fascism.

• 1934. He receives the Nobel Prize.

• 1936. He dies, for pneumonia on 10^th December, in Rome.  

His Life

The activity of Pirandello is revolutionary because on the one hand he attacks values, institutions and rules, so embodying the critic conscience of the literary and philosophic Decadentism. But this “revolution”, on the other hand, results in a regular life, very middle-class style aiming at tranquillity and avoiding any official events. 

Pirandello was born in Girgenti on June 28, 1867, one year after the Third Italian Independence War, from a well-off family. After he had completed the high school, he attended the literature faculty of Rome university and then he took the degree at the university of Bonn where he lived for a short period as a teacher of Italian. After marrying a Sicilian woman, he moved to Rome where he taught up to 1922, and at the same time he devoted himself to literature. 

In 1934 Pirandello received the Nobel Prize and in 1938 he died in Rome. It is very important to underline Pirandello’s patriotic culture coming from his family environment, which is evident in the novel “I Vecchi e i Giovani”, in which it is evident the disappointment for the Italian political situation of the late 19th century, especially for the conditions of southern Italy. 

Then Pirandello lives this historical disillusion that puts himself together with two authors that dominated the cultural setting in the end of the century: Verga and Carducci. In 1904 a financial collapse reduces his wife in a psycho- physical condition that will get worse later, leading her up to internment. The situation of his wife will set him into contact with a hard-fought life and, above all, with the logic of madness. These elements will become fundamental in his work. In 1924 he demands the membership card of the fascist party and in 1926 he underwrites the manifest of the fascist intellectuals written by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile. It is difficult to reconcile this adhesion with the values expressed by his art, which seem opposite in comparison to those proclaimed by the fascism. We refer above all:

• to his refusal for any nationalistic rhetorical,

• to his constant polemic against the social convections that impose a painful mask to men,

• to his denounce of the crisis of the family, in opposition to the rhetoric with which the fascism treated this institution.

Probably his adhesion is referable to his political disappointment that led many authors to a misunderstood sense of the order and that often combined itself with antidemocratic positions. However, Pirandello never took an active part in the political life of the country and he always escaped the official events. His life ended in 1936 when still fascism didn’t get the dramatic turning-point of the alliance with Nazism, which resulted first in the introduction of the racial laws in Italy, then in the tragedy of the Second World War.

by Di Pinto Giovanni and Ronzoni Martina