#peopletoknow 


Democratic and romantic, Carlo Bini was brilliant, intelligent, creative, but restless, indocile and rebellious. He was born of a humble family, in Via delle Galere in Livorno, he attended the college of the Barnabites, where he met Guerrazzi, but was forced to interrupt his studies and unwillingly devote himself to the father's grain and cereal stand, which humiliated and conditioned him throughout the existence, frustrating his political and intellectual aspirations. He continued to study as a self-taught, learning Greek and Latin alone but also German, French and English, translating Byron and Sterne

Together with a group of young people of good will, including Guerrazzi and Mazzini, he founded the Indicatore livornese, political but also literary newspaper, whose motto was Alere flammam, to feed the flame! He directed it with Guerrazzi until the thirties, then they attracted the attention of the Grand Duchy for their proximity to Mazzini and for Young Italy and for proselytism in popular circles. In fact, Bini loved to frequent the humblest districts of the city, mixing with workers and shipbuilders, getting involved in the scuffles in taverns until he was seriously injured. As Mazzini states: "His youth was spent among the rough and quarrelsome people of Venice district." There are those who argue that the arrest was also due to an article written by Bini against the Labronic cultural academy, which, according to him, dealt only with "pranks and rhyming jokes". The Livornese academics sent the echo of their lawsuits for Bini's outrages to the ear of the Grand Duke.

In the Portoferraio prison, where he stayed from September to December 1933, Bini wrote his two main works. The best known is the Manuscript of a prisoner, who remained famous in the Risorgimento memorials as a revolutionary writing for the time, because he claimed the rights of the poor in the same way as Saint Simon, the founder of socialism.

"A firm will of stylistic rigor, with the aim of lightening and raising the material in a romantic arabesque of ironic reflections, fantasies and humor as the one of Sterne, can be seen [...] in the Manuscript of a prisoner (1833) by CARLO BINI from Livorno, but behind the sparkle of that still immature and apparently absent-minded art lies a serious, pensive spirit, worried about social injustices "(Natalino Sapegno)

The other work is Il forte della stella, a single theatrical act of which only a few copies were published.

“Sir, I have never seen justice; so I can't tell you if she is blind, or if she has a lynx sight, or if she wears glasses. I would rather see this matron willingly; I would gladly see her for nothing else, mind you, to kiss her hands. Only I will tell you, that in Livorno a farmer once looking out to a court to ask for justice, was replied harshly: - Outside, outside; here there is no justice. " Carlo Bini, "The Fort of the Star" (pag.226)

Even when he frequented the literary salons, Bini transferred there his Gascon taste, the Labronic irreverence, the sarcasm that mitigated the romantic rhetoric, the ability to transform everyday life into culture - perhaps all characteristics due to his past as a seller - but he was able to enrich them with an intellectual spirit that is anything but provincial, rather European.

In addition to political writings, he also produced private texts, such as the heartfelt letter to his father and the seventy-eight epistles for Adele Perfetti, an adulterer of the bourgeois, his lover for a year, then deceased. Adele's death threw him into despair and turned him away from politics, arousing Guerrazzi's moral indignation.

To revalue him, however, was Mazzini, who wrote an anonymous preface to his writings, after his death, which occurred in 1842.