This book establishes the role of French writer Charles Baudelaire in the formation of paradigms of modernity in Italian poetry between 1857, the year of publication of Baudelaire’s highly influential collectionLes Fleurs du Mal, and 1912, when the first anthology of Futurist poetry,I poeti futuristi, was published in Milan. It focuses primarily on Baudelaire’s influence on the poetry of the Scapigliatura, a long-underrated movement which in the 1860s introduced a thematic and formal modernity into Italian literature, paving the way for Futurism and the twentieth-century avant-garde....