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Carducci Museum -Famous Italian Poet - Pisa in Tuscany

Right near Galileo’s house there is another illustrious person’s home (see photo): the poet Giosuè Carducci’s home. This is where the Carducci family lived from 1856 to 1858: the poet’s father, Michele, a medical surgeon, but without a degree, lived here with his wife Ildegonda Celli and their two sons Dante and Valfredo while their firstborn, the poet Giosuè, was a teacher in the nearby town of San Miniato. On the front of the building, number 29, there is a memorial tablet donated by the town as a memorial to the tragic death of the poet’s brother, Dante, killed by his father. Infact the father constantly reproached Dante for his eccessively dissolute ways.

To save the doctor from going to prison, it was made to seem that Dante had committed suicide. These events took place in November 1857. On August 15 1858 Michele, the father, just fifty, also died. Carducci commemorates these tragic events in his famous Funere Mersit Acerbo and in his lines ‘O tu che dormi là su la fiorita collina tosca, e ti sta il padre a canto’ (‘oh you who sleep on the tuscan hill in bloom and your father near you’) but his brother’s death was always presented to the poet as suicide as testified in the song: in memory of D.C. killed by his own hand by iron the IV of November. Today Carducci’s home has been restored and houses a museum exposition recently inaugurated as the ‘Casa Carducci’ Museum.

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