Born in Alfonsine, near Ravenna, and active in Rome and Milan, Monti was the leading Italian poet of the Neoclassical age. He did not read ancient Greek: his Iliade, published in 1810, is a verse rendering in the blank hendecasyllables of Italian epic, built on existing Latin and Italian versions, and it became the Iliad most generations of Italian schoolchildren learned. Its opening, “Cantami, o Diva, del Pelide Achille”, is the one Sons of Troy set to music in Cantami, o Diva!
About Monti
