Pace Pasini


Pace Pasini was an Italian marinist poet and novelist. He is best known as the author of the Baroque novel L'historia del cavalier perduto, which may have been a source for Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, and combines chivalric, picaresque, and political themes.

Biography

Pace Pasini was the son of Pietro, a descendant of a family originally from Valle Sabbia, who had moved to Schio and then to Vicenza, where he was ascribed to the Noble Council of the city. In the mid-seventeenth century - around the time of Pace's death - a member of the Pasini family from Vicenza figured among the merchants of silk and thick cloths.
After completing his grammar studies in Vicenza, Pace attended the University of Padua, where he devoted himself to the study of law. He soon neglected his legal studies and took an interest in the new science - he corresponded with Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler - and above all in philosophy. He followed the university lessons of Cesare Cremonini, a follower of Pietro Pomponazzi's neo-Aristotelian rationalism who questioned the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and other Catholic dogmas.
Pace was a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, one of the most active and lively Venetian Academies of the seventeenth century.
Following a dispute, Pace and his brother killed the lawyer Roberto Malo and seriously injured his brother. In March 1624 Pace was sentenced to five years of exile in Zara, later reduced by about half.
On 25 July 1630 he was appointed vicar in Barbarano and on 8 July 1635 he was appointed vicar in Orgiano.
Pace Pasini died in Padua in the second half of 1644.

Works

  • Pasini's Rime, characterized by a conventional conceptismo, have appended to them the Trattato de’ passaggi dall’una metafora all’altra e degli innesti dell’istesse, one of the earliest theoretical discussions of Baroque style.
  • In a careful comparative study the critic Giovanni Getto analyzes points of contact between Pasini's Historia del Cavalier Perduto, and Manzoni's masterpiece. The similarities are striking. There is the story of a kidnapping: the gentlewoman Luciana Lucia's name may well be an echo) is carried off to the castle of the terrible Strappacuori. There is the description of a flight which bears some resemblance to Renzo's. There are several other analogies, both lexical and plot-related. A series of details, Getto correctly calls them, but sufficient to permit him to hazard the hypothesis that here at last is the anonymous manuscript Manzoni so often refers to.