Luigi Pirandello

Born on June 28, 1867, in a district called Caos, from the Sicilian word for "trousers," after the shape of a nearby ravine, outside Agrigento in Sicily, Luigi Pirandello grew up in a family of passionate Garibaldian patriots. His father Stefano had joined the Expedition of the Thousand; his mother Caterina had been exiled to Malta as a child. The family's wealth came from sulphur mines, and young Luigi worked in the mines one summer, an experience that fueled later stories. He studied philology at the University of Rome and then at the University of Bonn, where he earned his doctorate in 1891 with a thesis on the dialect of Agrigento. In 1894, his marriage to Antonietta Portulano was arranged by their fathers as a business alliance between sulphur-mining families. When the mines flooded in 1903, destroying both families' fortunes overnight, Antonietta suffered a mental breakdown from which she never recovered, she became pathologically jealous, accusing Pirandello of incest with their daughter, and he cared for her at home for sixteen years before she was committed to an asylum in 1919. This experience of living with madness, of watching identity dissolve, became the obsessive theme of his work. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), in which six incomplete fictional beings invade a theatrical rehearsal demanding that their story be told, scandalized audiences at its Roman premiere, provoking fistfights in the theater, and revolutionized modern drama. Henry IV (1922) and Each in His Own Way (1924) deepened his inquiry into the instability of identity. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. He died of pneumonia on December 10, 1936, in Rome.

On 10 May 1921, Six Characters in Search of an Author opened at Rome's Teatro Valle. The audience, confronted with actors and characters colliding onstage, decided this was madness and began shouting 'manicomio,' asylum. A riot broke out. Pirandello and his daughter fled through a back alley, hecklers chasing them to a waiting taxi.