Charles Baudelaire / Pino Daeni | Hymn to Beauty, 1861

From heaven or hell, O Beauty, come you hence?

Out from your gaze, infernal and divine,

Pours blended evil and beneficence,

And therefore men have likened you to wine.

Ada Negri | Autumn rain's soothing melody, 1936

Tonight I heard, between waking and

slumber, a song

soft, hushed, and yet vast just as

the world is vast; and I seemed in sleep

to be sailing on a boat with no oars

on grey seas, inside a blanket of rain.

William Butler Yeats | Non dare mai tutto il tuo cuore / Never give all the heart, 1904

Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

Frida Kahlo | The wounded deer, 1946

Vittorio Matteo Corcos | Belle Époque painter

Vittorio Matteo Corcos (October 4, 1859 - November 8, 1933) was a celebrated Italian Realist painter and portraitist.

Renowned as the definitive painter of the Belle Époque, Corcos became famous for his highly refined, realistic portraits of European nobility, monarchs, and the upper-middle class bourgeois.

He was particularly unmatched in capturing the essence, psychology, and evolving independence of women during the turn of the 20th century.

Giacomo Leopardi | Night-song of a wandering shepherd of Asia, 1829-1830

Around the end of 1829 or the first months of 1830, Giacomo Leopardi composed the Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia / Night-time chant of a wandering Asian sheep-herder.

In writing this piece, Leopardi drew inspiration from the reading of Voyage d'Orenbourg à Boukhara fait en 1820, by the Russian baron Meyendorff, in which the baron tells of how certain sheep-herders of central Asia belonging to the Kirghiz population practiced a sort of ritual chant consisting of long and sweet strophes directed at the full moon.

Samuel Palmer | Cornfield by Moonlight, with the evening star, 1830 | British Museum

Emily Dickinson | La natura usa poco il Giallo / Nature rarer uses Yellow, 1865

La Natura usa il Giallo più raramente

Di ogni altra Tinta -

Lo serba tutto per i Tramonti

Prodiga d’Azzurro

Camille Claudel, l'ossessione di Rodin: "Mia feroce amica.."

"Mia feroce amica"...

Inizia così il grido d'amore disperato di Rodin a Camille Claudel nei primi anni della loro relazione.

Rodin fu presto affascinato da questa allieva che divenne sua assistente, amante e musa, mentre Camille Claudel, esteriormente è rimasta in completo controllo dei suoi sentimenti.

Consumato e tormentato da un amore ossessivo, lui la implora - "in ginocchio" - per facilitare la sua sofferenza dall'inizio alla fine di questa lettera, scritta in uno stile confuso, con la sintassi errata ed ortografia imperfetta.

Paul Éluard | Ti amo / Je t'aime, 1951

T'amo per tutte le donne

che non ho conosciuto.

T'amo per tutte le stagioni

che non ho vissuto, per l'odore

d'altomare e l'odore del pane

fresco, per la neve che si

scioglie per i primi fiori

per gli animali puri che

l'uomo non spaventa.

T'amo per amare.