Nazareno Caldarelli (who used the pen name Vincenzo Cardarelli) was born on I May 1887 in Tarquinia, Italy, and was the son of Giovanna Caldarelli Romagnoli and Antonio Romagnoli. After his mother and father went their separate ways (when he was too young to remember). Cardarelli knew a short idyll with his sweet and loving stepmother, who soon died. "Il mondo mi allevò" (The world raised me), he once said, referring to the following years of wandering from house to house in Tarquinia. In the bitterness of his childhood is to be found not only the origin of Cardarelli's ambivalent relationship to his loved-hated birthplace but also a certain harshness and sullenness of character. Prevented by his father from attending school past the fifth grade. Cardarelli, who, in his own words (in Il sole a picco [The Sun Sheer Above, 1929]), had "il bacillo della cultura e della letteratura...