Mario Luzi, the celebrated Italian poet “who caused a storm earlier this year by comparing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to Mussolini,” has died at his home in Florence at the age of 90. As a Reuters wire story notes, Luzi was “regarded as one of the greatest poets of his generation,” and he was “regularly promoted as Italy’s prime candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and could barely disguise his disapproval when the Italian playwright Dario Fo unexpectedly won the award in 1997.” Luzi was a senator in the Italian parliament, and after his attack on Berlusconi many on the right called for him to be “stripped of his senatorship.” But, says the Reuters report, “politicians of all persuasions heaped praise on him at his death.”