Pietro Citati (Florence, 1930) is a famous Italian writer and literary critic.

He has written critical biographies of Goethe, Alexander the Great, Kafka and Marcel Proust as well as a short memoir on his thirty-year friendship with Italo Calvino.

In Kafka, Pietro Citati has the great writer declare: "'I am like you, I am a man like you, I suffer and rejoice as you do, like a meticulous and buoyant angel, a being who lives far away in a world that did not belong even to him."

From 1973 to 1988, he contributed to the cultural section of Corriere della Sera and has been the literary critic for la Repubblica between 1988 and 2011, before returning to write for Corriere della Sera.

Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdʒakomo leoˈpardi]; June 29, 1798 – June 14, 1837) was an Italian poet, essayist, philosopher, and philologist. Although he lived in a secluded town in the ultra-conservative Papal States, he came in touch with the main thoughts of the Enlightenment, and, by his own literary evolution, created a remarkable and renowned poetic work, related to the Romantic era.

Giacomo Leopardi was born of a local noble family in Recanati, in the Marche, at the time ruled by the papacy. His father, the count Monaldo Leopardi, was a good-hearted man, fond of literature but weak and reactionary, who remained bound to antiquated ideas and prejudices; his mother, the marquise Adelaide Antici Mattei, was a cold and authoritarian woman, obsessed over rebuilding the family's financial fortunes, which had been destroyed by Monaldo's gambling addiction. At home, a rigorous discipline of religion and savings reigned. However, Giacomo's happy childhood, which he spent with his younger brother Carlo Orazio and his sister Paolina, left its mark on the poet, who recorded his experiences in the poem Le Ricordanze.

Carlo Emilio Gadda (November 14, 1893, Milan – May 21, 1973, Rome) was an Italian writer and poet. He belongs to the tradition of the language innovators, writers that played with the somewhat stiff standard pre-war Italian language, and added elements of dialects, technical jargon and wordplay.

Gadda was a practising engineer from Milan, and he both loved and hated his job. Critics have compared him to other writers with a scientific background, such as Primo Levi, Robert Musil and Thomas Pynchon--a similar spirit of exactitude pervades some of Gadda's books.

Carlo Emilio Gadda was born in Milan in 1893, and he was always intensely Milanese, although late in his life Florence and Rome also became an influence. Gadda's nickname is Il gran Lombardo, The Great Lombard: a reference to the famous lines 70-3 of Paradiso XVII, which predict the protection Dante would receive from Bartolomeo II della Scala of Verona during his exile from Florence: "Lo primo tuo refugio e 'l primo ostello / sarà la cortesia del gran Lombardo/ che 'n su la scala porta il santo uccello" ("Your first refuge and inn shall be the courtesy of the great Lombard, who bears on the ladder the sacred bird").

General Fernando Figueroa (1849, Ilobasco – 16 June 1919) was President of El Salvador from March 1, 1907 to March 1, 1911. He was the last in a series of military rulers who had ruled the country since the 1880's.

He had six children and eventually two of his grandchildren would become important figures in the political landscape. Fabio Castillo Figueroa became one of the leaders in the early days of the leftist guerrilla movement and Alfredo Avila Figueroa went on to become the youngest mayor of the city of San Salvador and later on, governor of the province of San Salvador.

Umberto Bossi (born September 19, 1941) is an Italian politician, former leader of the Northern League, a party seeking autonomy or independence for Northern Italy or Padania. He is married to Manuela Marrone and has four sons (one of which was from his first wife).

Umberto Bossi was born in 1941 in Cassano Magnago, in the province of Varese, Lombardy. He graduated from scientific high school (liceo scientifico) and later began studying medicine at the University of Pavia, though he did not get a degree. While there, in February 1979 he met Bruno Salvadori, leader of the Valdotanian Union.

Before becoming a politician, Bossi was a sympathiser of the Italian Communist Party in his early years. After the death of Salvadori in a car accident during the summer of 1980, Bossi began focusing more on Lombardy. After two years, the autonomist Lega Lombarda was born. In that period Bossi met his second wife, Manuela Marrone.

The Lega Lombarda would later seek alliances with similar movements in Veneto and Piedmont, forming the Northern League, of which he is still the federal secretary. He became the undisputed and unchallenged leader of the party, a position that he has maintained to this day, even after a serious stroke.