The author investigates the genesis of Italian poetic hermetism and its relationship with pure poetry, critical interpretations of this phenomenon in works written by well-known Italian aestheticians and literary scholars of the past century: Benedetto Croce, Francesco Flora, Mario Petrucciani, Giacomo Debenedetti, Giovanni Macchia, Michele Ragola, Giuseppe de Robertis, Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, etc, as well as representative poets of the Italian „hermetic school” Italian – Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo and Mario Luzi. There are tackled the problems of similarities and differences between Italian and Romanian or French hermetism, the „political” issue of Italian hermetism, the correlation between the concept of hermetism and that of neoclassicism, used by some critics to refer to the works of great Italian poets of the twentieth century, difficulties of critical discourse, critical certainties and uncertainties of interpretation of poetic hermetism.