Federigo Tozzi was born in Siena in 1883. His education was irregular, and his youth and adolescence were restless, largely due to frequent conflicts with his father, a manager of a Sienese tavern. Despite a turbulent academic career, Tozzi began frequenting the Intronati Library in 1898, where he shaped his self-taught education by reading both classical and contemporary works, from Petrarch to De Amicis, and from Sterne to Goldoni and Ibsen.

After a brief stint in politics and work, including joining the Italian Socialist Workers’ Party in 1901 and marrying Emma Palagi in 1907, Tozzi intensified his reading, focusing on specific themes such as Lombroso, Darwin, and Buchner. This period also marked frequent moves between Siena (and his father’s estates) and Rome, where his wife lived and worked. Following his father’s death and the liquidation of his inheritance, Tozzi finally moved to Rome in 1914 to strengthen his literary connections. There, he mingled with literary figures such as Grazia Deledda, Goffredo Bellonci, Sibilla Aleramo, and Marino Moretti and officially launched his literary career while engaging in journalistic work.

With the end of World War I, a period of heightened productivity for Tozzi, he continued writing for Il Messaggero della Domenica and the culture section of Il Tempo. Between 1917 and 1920, he published a collection of prose, Bestie, and two novels, Con gli occhi chiusi (With Closed Eyes) and Tre croci (Three Crosses), both considered cornerstones of his work. Tozzi sought to systematize his literary output with revised editions of Tre croci and the proofreading of Il podere (The Farm), but this effort was cut short by his death from pneumonia in 1920.

In Bestie, the lyrical tone transforms the Maremma landscape into a space imbued with regret and memory: “And all these houses in the village, standing there for reasons unknown; with roads stretching far into the Maremma of Grosseto and toward Siena; and the roads lose themselves in the valleys after ten or fifteen kilometers, waiting silently.”

Particularly evocative is the description of his father’s old house in Pari:
“Amid the dense thickets of wild boars, the house of jagged stones, with a staircase that shifted beneath one’s feet, built from stones taken from the river.” In Con gli occhi chiusi, this crumbling structure is destined to be forgotten. The parallel between youthful memories, the utilitarian pettiness of Rosi (the protagonist’s father), and childhood recollections of the Maremma becomes clear: “And Rosi thought of his narrow village as if it no longer existed, or at least only for others: his memories of youth carried the same weight as theaters and newspaper illustrations, which he despised with scorn—silly pastimes for idlers with money to waste.”

In Il podere, the protagonist Remigio struggles with the economic challenges of managing an old farm left by his father. He is portrayed as exhausted, much like a “gaunt and weak calf, one of those calves brought from the Maremma.” His inability to manage the property defines him as a degenerate son in his family dynamic: “When a farm passes into the hands of a new owner who isn’t a fool, it soon begins to change in ways visible to experts and eventually to everyone.” The farm, a paternal symbol, becomes a harbinger of death due to its asymmetric relationship: “He looked at the farm, stretching down along the Tressa, where darkness had already fallen. And it seemed to him that death was there; that it could reach him, like the wind that made the cypresses creak.”

As familial hatred and discord, born of an indissoluble tangle of psychological and material motivations, seep into the relationship between brothers, the parallels between father and son emerge in the connection to the Maremma: “As children resemble their fathers, and flesh is born the same from flesh, so do souls from souls.”