Savino de Bobali Sordo

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Savino de Bobali (in Italian) or Sabo (Savko) Bobaljević (in Croatian) nicknamed "Sordo" (Deaf), was born in 1530 in Ragusa (today Dubrovnik), in the Republic of Ragusa.

[edit] Life

Born into the local nobility, he became at 20 a member of the Great Council of the Republic of Ragusa and set about fulfilling the dutires that fell to him as an aristocrat.

With Amalteo and Nascimbeni he founded a literary academy, the "Accademia dei Concordi". The members met in the Palace of Customs (Palazzo Sponza), to read their rhymes.

This palace was also the meeting place for other important Raguseans, as Luciano Ghetaldi, Natale Tudisi, Marino Costa (also member of the Accademia dei Confusi of Viterbo), Marino Darsa, Domenico Ragnina, Niccolò Primi, Luca Sorgo, the poetess Giulia Bona, Michele Monadi.

Bobali contracted syphilis at a young age. Because of his condition he had to move to his castle in Stagno (today [Ston]) near Ragusa, where he spent segregated the most part of his life. Here he was concerned to poetry and studying. He complained in his poems, of his physical condition that did not allowed him to live according to his impetuous nature. He wished to travel: he was fascinated by Italy, but he was never able to go there.

Bobali is remembered also as a patient: his disease was studied by one of the most celebrated doctors of his time. When he was 30, his disease was described by the Portuguese doctor Amatus Lusitanus (João Rodriguez), in a work published in 1560. Here it is wrotten of a patient sick of siphilis, who complaines of vertigos and disturbs of hearing, unconscious that it was just his ruleless way of life the reason of his health problems, so he went forward without limits, until he become totally deaf.

Bobali died in Stagno (today Ston) in 1585, at the age of 55 years.

[edit] Works

He was non-conformist, disobedient and rebellious; when, because of his health condition, he finally decided to move to the countryside, he began a travel into meditation and in his own soul. Therefore, giving vent to his ripped intimity, he fulfilled the poetic space with very personal reflections and conflicting tensions, in a way not experienced yet. He was an undisciplined Petrarchist, he went beyond the classically conventions: he was the poet of the pain, of the contrasts, of the intense emotions, a careful explorer the opposites. Bobali was the first true mannerist in the Dalmatian poetry. He, recycling common literary themes, fulfilled with freshness and with force, the musicalities of the previous centuries. He subjugated them with the erupting expressivity of a voice of sorrow and happiness.

He wrote in Italian and Slavic. His Croatian verses were collected by his friends, and they were first published with the title "Rime amorose, pastorali e satiriche del magnifico Savino de Bobali Sordo, Gentiluomo Raguseo", by Aldine Press in Venice in 1589, four years after his death. The collection was reprinted in Ragusa in 1783.