Papini was one of the most talked-about and controversial intellectuals of the first two decades of this century. The grand provocateur of Florentine culture and founder, with Prezzolini, of La Voce, the magazine that marked a unique and fervent period in literature, Papini’s life epitomizes that of a whole generation about to enter the deadly arena of the First World War. He was the pioneer, the reckless agitator of a muddled ideology of anti-bourgeois rebellion, but also the poet singing of a return to an archaic and simple scale of life.


The Failure, an autobiography that Papini published in 1912 when he was just thirty years old, charts the first period of his life, from his childhood to the symbolic moment when he reaches maturity. It has the readability of an epoch-making document and is a comprehensive testament to the idealistic exasperation of certain intellectuals that would, only a short while later, drive some of them to subscribe blindly to Italy’s ghastly nationalist and fascist movements.

‘The country that appeals to me is my own country Tuscany, where I learnt to breathe and to think; a poor, grey, bare, circumscribed region, lacking luxuriance and bright colours, lacking perfume and pagan garlands, yet so intimate, so friendly, so well suited to sensitive natures, to the hermit mind. A monkish, Franciscan country, rude and black, where one is conscious of the skeleton of stone beneath the green sod, where the great, dark, lonely hills rise suddenly as if threatening the peaceful, fertile valleys at their base. The sentimental country of my childhood this, the lean, dry Tuscan country, with its granite, its honest, common flowers, its bold cypresses and sturdy oaks and rough brambles- how much more beautiful it has seemed to me than the famed regions of the south, with their palms, their oranges and prickly pears, their white dust and fierce summer!’ pp48-49