Torquato Tasso is the most illustrious personality of Sorrento Peninsula. Even if his trips around Italian courts have linked the author’s name of “Jerusalem delivered” to many other cities.
He was born in Sorrento on the 11th of March 1544 of Bernardo, who was a poet as well, Venetian of Bergamo origins, and of Porzia de’ Rossi, a Neapolitan noble of Tuscan origins. At the time of Torquato’s birth, his parents had moved to Sorrento for only a year, together with their first child Cornelia, born in Salerno, where the Tasso had lived since their marriage in 1536, due to the fact that Bernardo held the post of secretary of the last prince of Salerno, Ferrante Sanseverino. Torquato was still a kid when the prince was banished from the kingdom and deprived of all his substances for having opposed himself, with the Neapolitan nobility, to the viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo, who had brought the Inquisition to the city of Partenope. Bernardo, who had been the ambassador of the prince even abroad and had accompanied him to Germany to plead his cause to the emperor Charles V, followed the fate of this lord and, after having endured the confiscation of the assets, soon had to leave Sorrento, in order to take refuge in Sicily with his family. It was only in 1550 that the Tasso family could return to Naples where they settled in Porzia’s house, under the protection of her mother’s brothers, who later would have been suspected of the death of the stil young woman, in order to take possession of her assets, which her children could never benefit from.
Although he had always kept a sweet memory of it, mentioning it in his mot representative work, apart from the few years of his childhood Torquato no longer lived in Sorrento, except for a short break of a few months in 1577. He returned there, two years after the publication of “Jerusalem Delivered”, in the middle of one of the most troubled periods of his complicated life, after having left Ferrara due to disagreements with the Duke of Este and the court. He took refuge with his, who had lived in Sorrento since when, several years before, she had married a local noble, Marzio Sersale. On the occasion of the wedding Torquato had attended, Cornelia had risked being taken prisoner by the Saracens and that terrible event had considerably affected the young poet. However, that stay with his sister in 1577 lasted only few months, just the time to decide to return again to the court of the Duke of Este. This was the last encounter of Tasso with his home town, which never failed to remember him on important anniversaries and to dedicate days of study with critics and experts of his work.
