Pasquale Dessanay
Pasquale Dessanay - Daniela Spoto 2023, © CCIAA NU

Pasquale Dessanay

Pasquale Dessanay (b. Nuoro, 1868–d. Uras, 1919) was an Italian poet.

He began secondary school in Nuoro but had to drop out because forced to find a job. 
He first worked in the court clerk’s office and then in the record’s office.

In 1890, when he was twenty-two, Dessanay debuted as a poet with his first poetry collection, Neulas (Fog).
He did not publish any further collections of his poems after this early debut, occasionally publishing them instead in Sardinian magazines like Stella di Sardegna and Vita Sarda, but for the most part condemning his poetry to the spoken form.

Dessanay’s poetic turn, his work becoming increasingly free from Arcadian stylistic features and references to Italian lyric poetry, won him the title of poet of Nuoro realism and ‘scapigliatura’.
He ruthlessly criticised local civil, ecclesiastic and administrative corruption and passionately defended the poorest and weakest segments of society.

In the short poem ‘Sa morte de Pettenaiu’ (the death of Pettenaiu), published in Canti plebei, he describes a greedy, corrupt priest, entirely alien to the virtues of generosity and mercy associated with his role.

In 1896, Dessanay wrote the libretto for the opera Rossella, based on the novel Don Zua by Ballero, in collaboration with the composer Priamo Gallisay. The work was a flop and broadly ignored by critics after its debut in 1897.

Anti-monarchy, he spent a few months in prison in 1900, accused of having praised regicide, since, after the assassination of King Umberto, he wrote a few lines on a marble plaque expressing satisfaction with the event.

Towards the end of his life, Dessanay found himself involved in some unfortunate matters that forced him to leave Nuoro. He moved to the area of Oristano, settling first in Terralba and then Uras, where he died when he was just over fifty years old.