SOURCE: Higgins, David H. “Commentaries & Notes.” In Giosue Carducci: Selected Verse, pp. 227-63. Warminster, U.K.: Aris & Phillips Ltd., 1994.

In the following commentary, Higgins provides extensive background information to some of Carducci's best works.

A Satana

Written in September 1863 (although not completed until its publication two years later), the poem was recited first at a dinner-party amongst friends as a toast (brindisi). ‘To Satan’ sums up pungently and colourfully Carducci's progressive principles (what he later called his ‘razionalismo radicale’). It is, in effect, a challenging manifesto of his most deeply felt convictions and cherished beliefs, which he occasionally modified, but never really abandoned over the following forty years. Here ‘Satan’ stands for ‘le due divinità … la natura e la ragione,’ which represent for Carducci all those worthwhile things which the Church, in the Italy of his day, seemed to him to belittle, oppose or denounce: physical love, beauty...