Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni was an Italian critic and poet. Crescimbeni was a founding member and leader of the erudite literary society of Accademia degli Arcadi in Rome.
Giovanni Morelli was an Italian art critic and political figure. As an art historian, he developed the "Morellian" technique of scholarship, identifying the characteristic "hands" of painters through scrutiny of diagnostic minor details that revealed artists' scarcely conscious shorthand and conventions for portraying, for example, ears. He was born in Verona and died in Milan.
Giovanni Paolo Marana or sometimes Jean-Paul Marana was a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, best remembered for his conviction for failing to reveal a conspiracy to cede the Genoese town of Savona to the Duchy of Savoy.
Giovanni Papini was an Italian journalist, essayist, novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher. A controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century, he was the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism. Papini was admired for his writing style and engaged in heated polemics. Involved with avant-garde movements such as futurism and post-decadentism, he moved from one political and philosophical position to another, always dissatisfied and uneasy: he converted from anti-clericalism and atheism to Catholicism, and went from convinced interventionism – before 1915 – to an aversion to war.
In the 1930s, after moving from individualism to conservatism, he finally became a fascist, while maintaining an aversion to Nazism.
Giovanni Placido Agostino Pascoli was an Italian poet, classical scholar and an emblematic figure of Italian literature in the late nineteenth century. Alongside Gabriele D'Annunzio, he was one of the greatest Italian decadent poets.
