Giuseppe Compagnoni, Veglie di Tasso, prima edizione Italiana (Milan, 1803)
First Italian edition, with the text of Tasso’s “memoir” recorded in thirty-four dramatic diary entries, in which Tasso declared his love-sickness for Leonora d’Este, princess of the house of d’Este. This was a legend that permeated Europe, though without any evidence to support it, during the late Romantic period. In these accounts of Tasso’s “visions,” the Ferrarese Duke Alfonso II was presented as a cruel tyrant bent on crushing romantic love by locking the love-mad Tasso away in the hospital of Sant’Anna, and keeping him far from his daughter, the princess.