While yet a student at Pisa, when on a visit to his home during the vacation, he fell in love; and his poetic talent first developed itself in verses addressed to the beautiful and noble girl who was the object of his affection. She died soon after, and he lamented her death in poetry; but the exact moral discipline to which he subjected his inclinations reproached him for giving himself up to the influence of passion; and he burnt all his love poetry, and made a resolution, which he kept to the end of his life, of dedicating his genius to the celebration only of moral and sacred subjects.
After a residence of five years at Pisa, having taken the degree of doctor of laws, he returned to Florence, and was placed under Giovanni Federighi, a jurisconsult of eminence, that he might add to his theoretical, a practical knowledge of law. At the age of thirty-two, he married Anna, the daughter of the marchese Capponi. Soon after his father died; and, freed from all restraint, he followed the bent of his disposition, by retiring into the country, where he spent the greater part of each year in domestic retirement, devoting himself to the education of his two sons.
Hitherto his poetic merits were unknown beyond the limits of a small circle of friends; but public events called his genius to higher flights. The Turkish army overrunning Hungary, laid siege to Vienna, and filled Christendom with alarm. The enthusiastic piety of Filicaja added to the natural disquietude inspired by such a disaster; and while the fate of the war was in suspense, and afterwards, when victory drove the infidels from the gates of the capital of Austria, he poured out his terrors and his exulting triumph in odes, which breathe a pure and elevated lyric spirit.
At the time when he wrote, Italian poetry had received a check from that unfortunate propensity men have to shackle the free course of genius by rules and precedent. There was a distinction made between the poetic and prosaic style; the former was founded upon Petrarch, and it became a law to use no expressions but such as had his authority. The language of Italian verse was thus becoming, as it were, a dead idiom; repeating itself, and incapable of any original expressions. Filicaja disdained these shackles, and revivified his poetic diction by transfusing into it many elevated and energetic modes of speech, hitherto reserved for prose only. Facility, dignity, and clearness are his characteristics; and the grandeur of his ideas gives force to the originality of his expressions; which, emanating spontaneously, as they did, from a mind full of his subject, found an echo in the hearts of his readers.