What surprises the Greek reader of Carducci's poetry is the breadth and depth of his Greek education. I have included four of his poems about Homer here, while there are references to him in dozens of others along with poems about Apollo, the Greek Revolution, the Muses, etc.

Carducci believed in what Francesco Petrarca, the other great Italian poet of the Renaissance, had said five centuries earlier: the reorganization of the modern world must be based on Greco-Roman education. For this reason, Carducci was a fierce opponent of the Judeo-Christian religion, which he considers foreign to the ideals of Italians and rejects unequivocally.

He sees it as harmful and contrary to human nature, and from this opposition and conviction is inspired his famous hymn 'To Satan,' perhaps the best-known and most beautiful of his poems. Carducci's 'Satan' is not the 'evil spirit' of theologians but the very creative principle of life: it is Dionysus, the emotions, the senses, and the Epicurean joys that make man an integral part of nature and a product of the natural becoming.

'Satan' is scientific progress and progress is synonymous with light. In the beginning, by his own admission, he conceived the poem as an ode to Apollo. In short, it is the well-being of the ancients and the antithesis of the rigidity of Christianity, which is based on death and the denial of the senses, in the dim light of monasteries and the darkness of graves.