Ugo Ojetti (15 July 1871 – 1 January 1946) was an Italian journalist-commentator and author. He wrote prolifically on a wide range of topics. His output also includes short stories and at least seven novels. Nevertheless, during his later decades he increasingly focused on arts criticism, and it is as an art critic that he is most frequently identified in the more generalist sources. Widely admired for his mastery of language, and especially of Italian, he is also commended by admirers as an exceptionally effective aphorist.
Some of Ojetti’s output was published pseudonymously. His most frequently employed pseudonym, notably during the first decade of the twentieth century, was “Conte Ottavio” ("Count Octavian").
Biography Provenance and early years Ugo Ojetti was born in Rome. Raffaello Ojetti (1845–1924), his father, was an architect and in political terms a man of liberal instincts, with an exceptionally broad cultural hinterland. Raffaello Ojetti also contributed commentaries and criticism on architecture and other arts based topics. Ugo Ojetti's mother, born Veronica Carosi, came originally from Spoleto, and probably died while he was still a teenager. He attended the venerable "Collegio Sant'Ignazio" in Rome and then moved on to the city’s "Sapienza University" from where, in 1892, he emerged with a degree in Jurisprudence. In addition to his Italian language skills, he had by this time mastered English and French, intending initially to become a diplomat. He already faced competing career options, however, and instead launched himself as a political journalist-commentator. In 1894 he linked up with "La Tribuna", a daily newspaper based in Rome, and generally seen as a publication reflecting traditionalist liberalism of the centre-left. It was for "La Tribuna" that Ojetti provided his first regular journalistic contributions, notably from Egypt where he undertook a lengthy reporting assignment to the Luxor excavations. Another newspaper for which he wrote during this early part of his career was the "Nuova Rassegna".
The first book Ojetti's first book was published in 1895 and reprinted in 1898. It brought his written work to the attention of a wider readership. “Alla scoperta dei letterati ...” consists of a series of biographical essays set out as though they were interviews. The approach was not one with which readers, at that time, would have been particularly familiar. The style sits somewhere between well considered literary criticism and reportage. The volume confronts later generations with an opportunity to analyse in some depth the rapidly evolving literary trends of its time. In 1896 Ojetti progressed matters by organising a conference at Venice under the arresting title, “L'avvenire della letteratura in Italia” ("The Future of Literature in Italy"). He himself took the opportunity to present a youthfully idealistic vision of an internationalist literary spirit, unencumbered by the cultural patriotism of Mazzini or Garibaldi and the Risorgimento which, nearly half a century after unification, still provided a rich context for much contemporary thought and writing in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century. The conference, and Ojetti’s ideas presented at it, triggered much comment and not a little discussion among the intellectual classes in Italy.
Journalist-commentator During the final five years of the nineteenth century Ojetti’s articles became widely available and widely read. Between 1896 and 1899 he was writing for Il Marzocco, a new weekly magazine produced in Italy’s former capital, Florence and covering literature and the arts, but also developments in sociology and politics. His contributions were also appearing in “Il Giornale di Roma”, the literary-political Sunday paper “Fanfulla della Domenica” and La Stampa, a daily newspaper produced in Turin, another of the country’s former capitals. Almost certainly his most important newspaper collaboration, which began in 1898, was that with the Milan based Corriere della Sera, a nationally distributed daily newspaper for which Ojetti would continue to write for the rest of his life, serving for 20 months as managing director of the influential publication during 1926/27.Lorenzo Benadusi, Il «Corriere della Sera» di Luigi Albertini, Roma, Aracne, 2012. P. 180.
During the early years of the twentieth century Ojetti was based abroad for much of the time. In 1901 and again in 1902 he reported from Paris for the pioneering Rome-based "Giornale d'Italia" (daily newspaper). Between 1900 and 1905 he was based for approximately six months in every twelve in Paris or London. Between 1904 and 1909 he worked with the weekly illustrated news magazine L'Illustrazione Italiana, taking on a regular column identified by the title “Accanto alla vita” (‘’loosely, “Alongside life”’’). The columns were attributed to an ill-disguised fictional contributor called the “Conte Ottavio”, and Ojetti was able to raise the profile of the column with readers, eventually changing its name to “I capricci del conte Ottavio” ("The Caprices of Count Ottavio"). He also wrote a couple of stage plays, but these failed to resonate with theatre audiences. Family and Florence On 25 October 1905 Ugo Ojetti became engaged to Fernanda Gobba. Fernanda was a niece to the wealthy Umbrian “self-made” industrialist-politician Ferdinando Cesaroni. They married shortly afterwards and moved to Florence. Fernanda came originally from Piedmont, but the couple would, for the rest of their lives, live in or close to Florence. Ojetti would go on to describe himself as Roman by birth and by cultural inheritance, but Florentine by choice. A prominent figure in the city, Ojetti quickly became part of the Florentine intellectual elite, which for reasons of history and habit, was in some ways more internationalist and liberal in outlook than equivalent social networks in Rome or Milan. The decision to move away from Rome, and to not move to the northern media capital of Milan, was an astute one which, helped by his ever more restricted professional focus on the arts, a dimension of human existence in which Mussolini had vanishingly little interest, permitted Ojetti to live out the later decades of his professional life with an element of intellectual and social freedom which would never have been available surrounded by the political hot-house that was Rome. A few years following their marriage (though sources differ significantly as to precisely when) the couple’s only recorded child, Paola Ojetti was born. She would later follow her father into journalism and other literary pursuits. It is not entirely clear whether it was in 1911 or 1914 Ojetti felt able to settle in a more permanent residence, setting up home at the Villa Salviatino, one of the finest country villas in the area, positioned on a hillside directly to the south of Fiesole and enjoying a fine view across over Florence.
War North of the Alps war broke out at the end of July 1914 and less than a year later the government in Rome was persuaded that Italy should join in. The country fought alongside France and England, which meant defiance of treaty obligation dating back to 1882. Nevertheless, for many of those impatient for Italy to win its share of the glory there was much to be celebrated in finding Italians fighting once more against the old northern enemy, Austria, which still featured prominently in popular consciousness as the former colonial power. Ojetti had used the columns of Corriere della Sera during 1914 to campaign for Italian military intervention in a column headed “Esami di coscienza” (loosely, “Examining one’s conscience”). He had denounced German bombing of Reims and indeed teamed up with Gabriele D'Annunzio during the early months of 1915 to visit Reims and inspect the situation by the battlefields for himself. A powerful anti-German speech that he delivered in Florence on 29 November 1914 was published shortly afterwards as a booklet. As soon as Italy became militarily engaged he enlisted for military service, appointed a second lieutenant-engineer in May 1915. Other journalists who enlisted in the Italian army undertook parallel careers as war correspondents, sending reports to the newspapers in the major cities, but Ojetti was destined for a more unusual wartime career, and his journalistic contributions between 1915 and 1918 are restricted to a few stridently forgettable patriotic pieces which became more numerous after his transfer to propaganda work in March 1918. His first assignment following enlistment in 1915 involved providing protection for the many art works and monuments in the city of Venice from Austrian bombing. The Austrians had an air base along the coast at Pula from which 42 air raids reached central Venice during the course of the war. Although the extent of the damage was minor by the standards of later wars, Venice was not unscathed by the bombing. Major art works were evacuated to locations in the surrounding flatlands which were considered less perilous (and less readily identifiable from the air) than Venice itself. Although the extent of the exercise and of Ojetti’s responsibility over it is not entirely clear, it does appear that annihilation of Venice’s rich artistic heritage by Austrian air raids was avoided. Another unusual commission came in March 1918, when Ojetti was appointed “Royal Commissioner for Propaganda over the enemy”. His best remembered task in this role was to compose a short bilingual manifesto addressed to the citizens of Vienna. 350,000 copies were printed on a colourful two sided sheet against a tricolour backdrop of the Italian flag, and they were “distributed”, in the space of five minutes during the morning of 9 August 1918 from the skies over Vienna, by a squadron of nine planes commanded from his own cockpit by Gabriele D'Annunzio. Commentators differed then and subsequently as to the military relevance of the exercise, but it clearly pointed the way ahead in pioneering a new device whereby wars might be conducted using the latest technology during the century ahead.
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