Giambattista Marino

Italian poet and adventurer Giambattista Marino (1569–1625) was deemed “the king of his age,” and his very name came to define the style of an epoch: marinismo, a shorthand summation of the bizarre inventiveness and ornate excesses of Baroque poetry. In and out of jail, and escaping an assassination attempt by a rival, Marino spent a good part of his life in Northern Italy and France before returning to his birthplace of Naples. His most famous work, L’Adone (Adonis), stands as one of the longest Italian epics ever written, and for two centuries was deemed a monstrous epitome of Baroque bad taste.