"A Forgotten Voice for the Oppressed: Edoardo Giacomo Boner and His Poetic Crusade for Armenia" an article by Carlo Coppola
This article by Carlo Coppola was published on July 30, 2025, in the magazine "In Città" directed by Papàs Antonio Calisi at the following link: "ArteCultura e Sociale Edoardo Giacomo Boner: Intellettuale siciliano tra cristianesimo e vaghezza d’Oriente".
In the rich tapestry of late 19th-century Italian literature, a singular figure emerges from the mists of time: Edoardo Giacomo Boner, a Sicilian poet and Germanist whose voice rose in defense of the oppressed peoples of the East. His 1897 collection Musa Crociata (“Crusading Muse”) stands as a poignant testament to a civic commitment that transcended national borders and gave poetic form to the suffering of humanity—most notably, the Armenian tragedy.
Born on February 29, 1864, in Messina to a Swiss father and an Italian mother, Boner embodied from birth a cosmopolitan spirit that would define his life and work. His multicultural upbringing, combined with the financial hardship that struck his family in 1883, forged an intellectual deeply attuned to the pain of others.
“The awareness of belonging simultaneously to several different worlds,” as critic Luciano Zagari aptly described him, perfectly captures Boner’s unique sensibility. In his life and work, traditional Sicilian roots met the ideals of a newly unified Italy, while classical heritage coexisted with the northern European literatures he studied as a Germanist.
After teaching German in Catania, Boner became lecturer in German language and literature at the University of Messina in 1893. In 1906, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Rome—a promising academic career cut short by the devastating earthquake that struck Messina on December 28, 1908, while he was visiting his hometown.
Musa Crociata, published in 1897 by the Turin-based house Roux Frassati, represents the pinnacle of Boner’s poetic output. The title alone reveals the ambition behind the work: a poetic “crusade” against the injustices of the time, waged with the tools of 19th-century civic verse.
A disciple of Mario Rapisardi, the famed poet from Catania, Boner adopted a style of poetry that was grand, didactic, and engaged—rejecting what he saw as the “hollow priesthood of form” embraced by emerging decadentist movements. His poetry aimed to educate, to denounce, and to uplift—a moral and civic instrument in the tradition of Foscolo and Manzoni.
But what made this “muse” a crusader? The answer lies in both the historical context and the poet’s distinctive moral compass.
The 1890s were marked by one of the darkest episodes in modern Armenian history: the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, in which hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed in the Ottoman Empire. The atrocities shocked European public opinion. For an intellectual like Boner—steeped in the values of European humanism and acutely sensitive to the plight of oppressed nations—silence was not an option.
His background in German studies provided him with a deep understanding of the political and cultural dynamics of Central and Eastern Europe, where national and religious tensions often exploded into violence. For many European intellectuals, Armenia—a Christian nation caught in the vise of Ottoman rule—symbolized the clash between civilization and barbarism, between Christianity and Islam.
Boner, with his “humanitarian idealism opposed to the brutality of realpolitik,” could only side with the victims. His poetic “crusade” was both literary and moral, artistic and political. It was the crusade of a southern Italian intellectual who looked East not with colonial ambition, but with solidarity.
Boner stands as a “bridge figure”—a cultural go-between whose multicultural identity allowed him to connect disparate worlds. The son of a Swiss immigrant who became Sicilian, a Germanist teaching in southern Italy, a poet who gave voice to distant suffering—Boner embodied the tensions and aspirations of a rapidly changing age.
His focus on the Armenian cause was part of a broader commitment to the oppressed, a hallmark of many progressive thinkers of his era. Yet in Boner’s case, this solidarity was deeply personal, shaped by firsthand experience of economic uncertainty and social instability.
Today, more than a century after his untimely death, Edoardo Giacomo Boner deserves renewed attention—not only as a witness to his times, but as a model of the engagé intellectual. His Musa Crociata speaks to an era in which poetry was invested with a civic mission, when art refused to turn away from the tragedies of history.
Boner’s attention to the Armenian question foreshadowed a sensitivity that would become central in the 20th century, particularly after the 1915 genocide laid bare the vulnerability of minority peoples in the age of nation-states. Through his humanitarian verse, Boner had already sensed what many would later realize: the fate of the oppressed cannot be met with indifference by Europe’s thinkers and artists.
In an age like ours—scarred by new tragedies and renewed oppression—the example of this Sicilian-Swiss poet who raised his voice for distant Armenians reminds us that true culture knows no borders, and that silence is never an option for those entrusted with the gift of speech.
Bibliografia essenziale:
- Boner, Edoardo Giacomo, Musa crociata. Versi, Torino, Roux Frassati & C., 1897 (disponibile in versione digitalizzata presso Internet Archive).
- De Lollis, C., “E. G. Boner”, in R. Università degli Studi di Roma. Annuario dell’anno scolastico 1908-1909, pp. 237-238.
- Rapisardi, M., Epistolario, Catania 1922, pp. 451-452.
- Zagari, Luciano, “BONER, Edoardo Giacomo”, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 11, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma 1969.
