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Ippolito Nievo (; 30 November 1831 – 4 March 1861) was an Italians writer, journalist and patriot. His Confessions of an Italian is widely considered the most important novel about the Italian Risorgimento.
By the end of February everything at Palermo was completed, and Nievo was eager to return. He departed from Sicily on March 4th, 1861, boarding the steamboat Ercole. There were about eighty persons on the Ercole and a certain quantity of military stores. What happened on the voyage is not exactly known. Certainly the Ercole was never seen again. According to one account, the ship foundered in a violent gale some twenty miles from Capri. The Ministry of War, on the other hand, said that a fire broke out during the journey. No wreckage and no bodies were ever certainly found.
He was nevertheless mainly a prose writer, producing many novelle (collected as Novelliere campagnolo (1956) and three historical novels— Angelo di bontà (1856), set against the background of the decline and fall of the Republic of Venice, Il conte pecoraio (1857), set in contemporary Friuli after 1855, and Le confessioni di un ottuagenario (published posthumously in 1867 and later retitled Confessioni di un italiano) which returns to the setting of Angelo di bontà.
His political writings include Venezia e la libertà d'Italia, published anonymously after the disappointing armistice of Villafranca in 1859, an important Frammento sulla rivoluzione nazionale, and two accounts of the Garibaldi expedition. All this is in addition to journalism, an extensive correspondence, a comedy ( Le invasioni moderne, written in 1857), and translations from Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, Lermontov, and Greek popular poetry. In Studii sulla poesia popolare e civile massimamente in Italia (1854) Nievo lays down the distinctively post-Romantic premises of his subsequent fiction, demanding that the writer should be socially and politically engaged, and alert to developments in other European literatures and cultures. At the same time he asserts the decisive role of the lower classes in the construction of a new national identity, and recognizes the importance of dialects and dialect culture.
His novelle are based partly on his personal experiences and emphasize the harshness of peasant life, contrasting it with bourgeois ease and problematizing the issue of the contribution of the peasantry to the formation of the new Italian state. His clear-eyed realism qualifies the religious element in his writing and distinguishes his work from that of Manzoni, to whom he is in other ways much indebted. Though he is by no means a Positivism, in some ways he strongly anticipates the verismo of Giovanni Verga, particularly in his use of dialect and often irregular Italian.
Written between December 1857 and August 1858, the work is in twenty-three chapters. Nievo died before it could receive its final editing. Nievo himself did not find a publisher, and it was only in 1867, six years after the writer's death, that the novel was published under the title Confessioni di un ottuagenario ( Confessions of an octogenarian). The author's original title, by which the book is now generally known, was Le Confessioni d'un italiano, but this seemed to be too "political" for the times.
The novel is both historical (its background is events in Italy in the last decades of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century) and psychological, being based upon the memories of "Carlo Altoviti", the main character and first-person narrator. A poor relation a feudal Venetian family, Carlo Altoviti tells of the castle in which he grew up, of his turbulent love for Pisana, the daughter of a local countess, and of his final peace in maturity.
The chapters dealing with Altoviti's boyhood experience are particularly impressive. Through the character of Carlo Altoviti his own experience and that of his grandfather, a Venetian patrician, Nievo succeeded in recreating a vivid picture of a vanished society. Confessions of an Italian is widely considered the most important novel about the Italian Risorgimento.
An extensive archive of Nievo's correspondence has been preserved, such as 72 letters to the love of his early years Matilde Ferrari. In the last years of his life, Nievo was in love with Caterina Curti Melzi, a noble woman from an ancient Lombard family. Her relative Pier-Ambrogio Curti also was a close friend of Nievo.
The Italian Regia Marina ("Royal Navy") destroyer was named in his honor.
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