Born Today June 19: Francesco Dall'Ongaro

1808-1873

Nineteenth century Italian writer Francesco Dall'Ongaro was born on this day in Mansuè in the Kingdom of Italy (now the town of Veneto). Dall'Ongaro originally undertook the education to take holy orders to become a priest, but he instead became deeply interested in (political) journalism, eschewed his orders and took up political activism in Trieste. He, and his fellows, were "revolutionaries" agitating for the over throw of empirical rule and replace it with a secular republic. As time went old, he became more and more involved in active politics. He was eventually involved in in the movement that founded the Roman Republic. That republic was extremely short-lived, after which Dall'Ongaro fled to Switzerland where he continued political journalism and opinion publications in the revolutionary vein. He would eventually make his way through France, and on the Belgium, before returning to his native Italy in 1860.  During his exile in Europe, he was writing, publishing and corresponding the whole time.  Upon his return to Italy, he took up a position of professor of literature in Florence, was a collaborator with Niccolò Tommaseo and a frequent correspondent with Dumas.  He then transferred to a position in Naples, which is where he died at the age of 64 on the 10th of January. During his lifetime, though he was known in Europe almost exclusively for his political writings, he also penned novels, poems and plays. There have only been a handful of films that have had screenplays adapted from his work, the first of which was the Italy 1907 short Venetian Baker; or Drama of Justice (Il fornaretto di Venezia).  This is in fact the only work that has been rendered into film; and all of the productions have been Italian. It was filmed one additional time during the silent era, some seven years later, by Leonardo Films: Il fornaretto di Venezia (1914). The work was not filmed again until 1939 (25 years later); it was obviously the first time the work was rendered into sound and it had a wide theatrical release in it's home country (film information here). It was filmed again in 1952 and it was most recently in 1963. There are currently no up coming projects featuring Dall'Ongaro's work. I can find no information on his burial.

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