Adolfo Mezzanotte

Adolfo Mezzanotte was an Italian writer from Perugia, born in 1812 and dead by 1833. The surviving record available online is slim, but library and catalog sources agree on those dates and connect his name above all with Olimpia; ossia, L'orfana della Selleide.

That novel was published in Milan in 1834, shortly after his death. The title page identifies him as "perugino," and the book is dedicated to his father, Antonio Mezzanotte, with affectionate thanks for an upbringing shaped by literature and the arts.

Olimpia is set in Epirus among the Suliote mountains and draws on the emotional, heroic style of early Romantic fiction. Even from the small amount that survives about him, Mezzanotte comes across as a young author with ambitious literary interests whose reputation now rests on a rare, posthumously published novel.