De’ Vizj De’ Letterati. [On the Vices of Men of Letters].

De' Vizi dei Letterati — published in English as On the Vices of Men of Letters (1828) — is a work of elegant satirical moralizing by Giuseppe Manno (1786–1868), the Sardinian-born Italian magistrate, politician, and historian who rose to become President of the Senate of the Kingdom of Sardinia and later of the unified Kingdom of Italy, and who was widely regarded in his time as one of the most cultivated and intellectually distinguished public servants of the Italian Risorgimento era. Born in Alghero, Sardinia, into a noble family, Manno graduated in Civil and Canon Law in Cagliari in 1804 before moving to Turin in 1817, where he was appointed First Official of the State Secretary for Sardinian Affairs and subsequently became personal secretary to King Charles Felix in 1821. On the Vices of Men of Letters, published early in his literary career, belongs to a venerable tradition of Italian literary self-criticism stretching back through Leopardi and Alfieri — a tradition that turns the instruments of humanistic learning against the vanities, jealousies, affectations, and intellectual dishonesty of those who practice it, producing a genre of moral essay that is at once satirical and self-implicating. For Manno, a man who occupied simultaneously the roles of practicing lawyer, senior statesman, historian of Sardinia, and man of letters, the vices he catalogued were observed from the inside, lending the work a credibility and ironic self-awareness that purely external criticism could never achieve.