Emilio Praga, together with Arrigo Boito, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti and Giovanni Camerana as well as the painters Daniele Ranzoni and Tanquillo Cremona founded
the Scapigliatura movement in the mid-19th century; its characteristics: a deep-rooted aversion to the sentimentalism and conformism of late Romanticism and a conviction that the only valid subject of poetry was "truth". In the end, however, the group failed to create a new poetic movement and remained purely avant-garde writers in revolt, in both life and art, against middle-class conformism, "official" literature, the patriotism of the Risorgimento and all other forms of social and literary convention.