Raffaele Cominelli

Raffaele Cominelli, penultimate descendant of an ancient and noble family from Salò, was born on 29th September 1893 and after his youth spent in the seventeenth-century family palace in Cisano, he attended the University of Pisa where he graduated in Literature with a thesis on Petrarch.

Already during his university experience, marked by numerous travel to several Italian cities of art mentioned in various of his lyrics, he devoted himself to poetic composition which saw his first work published in the collection "The Eagles" printed and published in 1920 in Florence by La Nave, a publication that contains passages dating back to 1912 as well.

Strongly tried by a chain of family mourning, with the premature death of his parents, due to the illness of the two twin sisters, as well as, in the Great War, of his beloved brother Rosi (Rosario), Raffaele Cominelli sees his detachment from the outside world to take refuge. in the ancestral home of Cisano, in a yearning sadness for the painful absences of loved ones and in a fatalistic and irreversibly pessimistic vision of one's condition and the future.

His profound literary studies and his poetic production, uninterrupted throughout his existence, became the only expressive modalities aimed at the outside.
Nonetheless, his writings, organized in numerous collections that he publishes and submits to the evaluation of others by sending them to competitions and to illustrious Italian scholars, show a clear skepticism and regret of the past but also his innate role as a detached and attentive observer of the evolution of society , of costumes and people and that he sees in continuous distortion outside the reassuring doors of his own building.

The attachment to one's origins, to the value demonstrated in the last centuries in many areas by one's ancestors,
the strong bond to his own places of childhood and maturity, are demonstrated in the sublimation of a human and cultural richness that is far too hidden and unrecognized which finally becomes concrete in his own testamentary wills that give rise to the birth of a Foundation in his name, in memory and safeguarding the family's works of art, his poems, and the value of the values of the ancient Sanfeliciana and Valtenesina countryside.