Torquato Tasso
Poet
Sixteenth-century Italian poet who is most remembered for a 1580 work entitled La Gerusalemme Liberata.
His mother died under mysterious circumstances when he was young.
He suffered from mental illness and was confined to an asylum in St. Anna for seven years.
He was born into a noble family in Sorrento and was the son of poet Bernardo Tasso.
His stay in a mental institution was the subject of Lord Byron's poem "The Lament of Tasso."