Born in Vasto in 1860, to a wealthy family of merchants, Luigi Anelli demonstrated his witty streak very early on, founding his first newspaper at just 18 years old.
At 25, he published the first edition of his “Ricordi di Storia Vastese” in Naples. Having returned to his hometown, at the age of 35 he took over the typography, which would later become Tipografia Anelli, with which he printed both historical research works and dialect poems and comedies.
After taking up the role of Italian teacher at the renowned Royal Technical Institute of Vasto, he was also appointed director of the municipal archaeological museum, which at the time was housed in the palace of the former royal sub-prefecture, or in the convent of San Francesco, which it would then be destroyed by the landslide of 1956.
We owe Anelli the reorganization of the collections, and their enrichment of the relevant numismatic collection, which he collected, catalogued, and donated to the municipality.
He died at the age of 84, during the English occupation, in the last months of the Second World War.
Luigi Anelli is remembered today for the very important contribution he made to the history and culture of Vasto, in two distinct forms.
On the one hand, we owe to him the search for new original historical sources, in particular the discovery of the chronicle of Fra Serafino Razzi, on the history of Vasto in the years 1576 and 1577, and the Chronicle of Vastese of the seventeenth century by Don Diego Maciano.
Also to Luigi Anelli, we owe the monograph “The city of Vasto in 1799”, on the events of the Vasto Republic, from the Jacobin insurrection to the Sanfedist repression.
Furthermore, Anelli was probably the greatest dialect poet in the Vasto language. His 40 sonnets are still an unsurpassed example of freshness, invention, and rhythm.
Furthermore, the dialect used by Anelli is that of the people, full of references to rural life and the everyday life of the early twentieth century. It can be said that his dialect work constitutes the model of the Vastese language, which the numerous followers who still write in the vernacular today drew upon, without reaching it.
