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Updated: June 18, 2025
He has a great imagination: there is a noble intention in all he does. The pages which now follow, taken from Salvini's Autobiography, are presented with the permission of his publishers, the Century Company, New York. The Bon and Berlaffa Company, in which my father was engaged, alternated in its repertory between the comedies of Goldoni and the tragedies of Alfieri.
In the early sixties of our own century I was no more conscious of his realism than he was himself a hundred years before; but I had eyes in my head, and I saw that what he had seen in Venice so long before was so true that it was the very life of Venice in my own day; and because I have loved the truth in art above all other things, I fell instantly and lastingly in love with Carlo Goldoni.
This is one of those queer Italian inns, which carry you away at once into a scene of Goldoni. It is part of some palace, where nobles housed their bravi in the sixteenth century, and which the lesser people of to-day have turned into a dozen habitations.
What he wanted to do was to annoy the abbe, who was by no means what Passano called him, but on the contrary, a wit and a poet; and if he had been acquainted with the requirements of the stage he would have written better plays than Goldoni, as he had a greater command of language. I told Passano, for civility's sake, that he ought to get his Chiareide printed.
But the caffè in itself is in many respects a specialty of Venetian life, and has been so since the days of Goldoni. The readers of his comedies, so abundantly rich in local coloring, will not have failed to observe that the caffè plays a larger part in the life of Venice than is the case in any other city.
But the moral attitude and gesture of Alfieri happened to be just those which were rarest in the eighteenth century in all countries, and more especially rare in Italy; and they were the moral attitude and gesture which the eighteenth century absolutely required to become the nineteenth, and which the Italy of Peter Leopold and Pius VI. and Metastasio and Goldoni absolutely required to become the Italy of Mazzini and Garibaldi, the Italy of Foscolo and Leopardi: they were the attitude and the gesture of single-mindedness, haughtiness, indifference to one's own comfort and one's neighbours' opinion, the attitude and gesture of manliness, of strength, if you will, of heroism.
Each tragedy he composed went through a triple process of composition, and received frequent polishing when finished. Goldoni dashed off his pieces with the greatest ease on every possible subject. He once produced sixteen comedies in one theatrical season.
The third period, extending from the close of the seventeenth century to the present time, includes the development of Italian literature, its decline under French influence, and its subsequent national tendency, through the writings of Metastasio, Goldoni, Alfieri, Parini, Monti, Manzoni, and Leopardi.
The victorious argument by which she subdued my heart was, that at that moment Diderot was in distress. Besides the storm excited against the 'Encyclopedie', he had then another violent one to make head against, relative to his piece, which, notwithstanding the short history he had printed at the head of it, he was accused of having entirely taken from Goldoni.
Dialect is the elf rather than the genius of place, and a dwarfish master of the magic of local things. In England we hardly know what a concentrated homeliness it nourishes; inasmuch as, with us, the castes and classes for whom Goldoni and Gallina and Signor Fogazzaro have written in the patois of the Veneto, use no dialect at all.
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