Mario Pratesi was born in Santa Fiora in 1842. Following the early death of his mother, his father directed him toward a military career, which he soon abandoned. After moving throughout Tuscany, he embarked on an academic career that took him to Viterbo, Terni, Milan and Pisa. In this environment, he was able to deepen his reading repertoire, which, alongside the classics and the study of Dante, included Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, and Percy Shelley. Upon being appointed superintendent of education, he moved to Belluno and then to Florence. Here, relieved from financial hardship yet dulled “by bureaucracy,” he was able to conceive and publish his most significant works, where the relationship between provincial literature and a realism derived from Manzoni became essential trends.

After producing some of his most famous and successful works between 1890 and 1900, Pratesi continued to write travel prose and numerous short stories published in Nuova Antologia between 1905 and 1920. However, choosing to live in partial isolation and largely forgotten by contemporary critics, he decided to retire to the Florentine countryside, where he died in 1921. By critically engaging with naturalism and contemporary Tuscan authors, he developed a narrative style in L’Eredità (1889) and Il Mondo di Dolcetta (1894) which focused on representing social conflicts and expressing a tragic sense of life. The backdrop of works where local chronicles accompany historical analysis is often “the dark and funereal air of Maremma, between Val d’Orcia and Santa Fiora.” What Luigi Baldacci described as “a strongly light and dark naturalism in stark contrast to the moderate realism of other writers” became the defining stylistic trait of Pratesi’s work, which found its true dimension in “rejecting the Arcadian idyll.”

While Grosseto reminded the author of his brief and partial engagement with provincial theatres and parlours—where, for instance, he first experienced “the deep revelation of Verdi’s notes”—the Maremma landscape remained an enduring source of inspiration. Thus, in L’Eredità, the description of the settlement visible from Poggio Sole recalls aspects of the Amiata landscapes, “with its decrepit houses (…), the black bell towers that toll the hours with such grave slowness (…), the hidden convents near the walls (…), and the walls that rise and fall among the olive trees due to the varying slopes of the fields.” A village whose faded presence evokes a time of “a combative and noble life (…) wholly enclosed within the terrors of conscience and enraptured in an ideal.”

Similarly, in Ritratti d’Italia, a later work collecting occasional pieces and writings that blend travel reportage with memoir, the prose dedicated to Monte Labbro becomes an indirect “celebration” of his youthful years spent on Mount Amiata. That place, “set on the edge of the dark Maremma,” opened onto “the deep darkness of the motionless woods crossed by the silent road.” Again, using a register that skillfully mixes religious and descriptive tones, his view of familiar territories reveals, in the constant clash between civilisation and nature, the dominance of “that intense and widespread green of the forests covering the vast mountain (…) which only a wizard or an invisible spirit” could have conjured “from the depths of the earth.”

But here, as Pratesi himself states, precisely because “nature, like fortune, art, and history, loves contrasts and refuses the monotony of forms,” a mountain rich in springs and shadows like Amiata inevitably gives way to “a poor, dark, barren mountain, shaven like the Calvary painted by certain 14th-century Sienese artists in their austere panels!” His portrait then takes on an even darker and more sentimental tone when he lingers on the relentless movement of the Fiora River, “the natal river, which lost itself in the bluish gorges, among other equally barren mountains, from where Maremma exhaled its sadness.”

In the depths of the Amiata forests, was it truly possible, Pratesi wonders—between rhetorical flourish and sincerity—”to be swept away in the vanity of a presumptuous and passionate dream, ignoring the cold, venal, snarling, skeptical, and relentless reality of facts and interests?” The answer is destined to be lost in time. The hope for spiritual and moral renewal fades as personal experience also reveals harsh realities, not just idealised sublimations. For, in the sincerity of his lyrical confession, the author does not forget that:
“There in the Maremma, illness seized me, And for nine months, I languished in the hospital.”