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 ITALY

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ITALY

language, " which belongs to everj' city of Italy, and seems to belong to none, and by which all the munic- ipal dialects of the Italians are measured, weighed and compared". These dialects fall into three groups:

(1) Ligurian, Piedmontese, Lombard and Erailian, and Sardinian, which form a Gallo-Italian group apart from the vernacular of the rest of the peninsula;

(2) Venetian, Corsican, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Umbrian, and the dialects of the Marches and of Rome, which, though diverging from true Italian, form one system with it; (3) Tuscan. But the national and literary language, the "illustrious vernacular", is one and the same throughout the land. This language is not an artificially formed Italian, stripped of the accidental peculiarities of place and race; out substantially the vernacular of Tuscany, and more particularly of Florence, as established by the great Florentine writers of the fourteenth cen- tury, adopted by those of other districts in the Renais- sance, and formulated by the famous Accaderaia della Crusca, which was founded in the latter part of the six- teenth century.

From the seventh century

onwards, we begin to find

traces in extant documents.

from various parts of Italy, of

the use of the vernacular, in

the shape of forms that an

more or less Italian inserted

into the corrupt Latin of the

epoch. Italian famihar names

of men and Italian names of

places rapidly appear; and,

in a document of 960 in the

Archives of Montecassino, a

whole sentence, four timo;^

repeated, is practically Ital- ian; Sao ko kelle terre, per kellv

fini que ki cotjlene, trenla aniti

le possette parte sancti Benc-

dicti (I know that those lands,

within these boundaries that

are here contained, the party

of St. Benedict has possessed

them tliirty years). A con-

fessio, or formula of confession,

from an abbey near Norcia,

probably of the end of tlic

eleventh century, show.-^ ,,„..>., .,, .,, „,

passages still nearer to the Italian of to-day. Fifty years later we meet literary composition in the vernacular. The inscrip- tion formerly on the cathedral of Ferrara, of 1135, consists of two rhj-ming couplets of Italian verse. Four lines, known as the "Cantilena Bellunese", also in rhj-med couplets, inserted in a fragment of a chronicle, allude to the taking of Casteldardo by the people of Belluno in 1193. In a contrasto (a dialogue in verse between lover and lady) by Raimbaut de V'aqueiras (c. 1190), the lady answers in Genoese to the I'rovenijal advances of the poet. The " Ritmo Lau- rcnziano", a cantilena in praise of a bishop by a Tuscan, and the " Ritmo Cassincse", an obscure alle- gorical poem in the Apulian dialect, are both probably of the end of the twelfth century. To the same epoch belongs a series of twenty-two sermons in a northern Italian dialect mixed with French, published by Wen- <lelin Foerster, which are the earliest extant specimens of vernacular preaching in Italv.

The Thirteenth Century (II /Jwcento) .— The Italians naturally regarded the language and traditions of Home as their own, and still clung to the u.se of Latin while a vernacular literature Mis already flourishing in France and Provence. Italian hterature, strictly

speaking, begins with the early years of the thirteenth century. Among the influences at work in its forma- tion must first be mentioned the religious revival WTOtight by St. Francis of Assisi and his followers, bearing lyrical fruit in the lauda, the popular sacred song, especially in Central Italy. St. Francis himself composed one of the earliest Italian poems, the fa- mous "Cantica del Sole", or "Laudes Crcaturarum" (1225), a "subUme improvisation" (as Paschal RoJj- inson well calls it) rather than a strictly literary production. The growing self-consciousness of the individual states and cities later gave rise to the chronicles and local histories. Provencal trouba- doiu-s, who settled at the petty Courts of Ferrara and Monferrato, or passed southwards into the Kingdom of Sicily, brought the conventions of their artificial love poetry with them. Equally influential with the Franciscan movement, though in a totally different spirit, was the impulse given to letters by the highly cultured, but im- moral and irreligious court of the Emperor Frederick II and his son Manfred, whose King- dom of Sicily included not only that island, but also Naples and all the south of the peninsula. Dante WTote; "From the fact that the royal throne was in Sicily, it came to pass that whatever our predecessors wrote in the vulgar tongue was called Sicilian" (V. E., i, 12). The writers of this Sicilian school were drawn from all parts of Italy. They did not normally use the Sicilian dia- lect, but wrote in a vernacular Cractically identical with what ecame the literary language of the whole nation. Their productions are almost exclu- sively love poems derived from those of Provence. Frederick himself (d. 1250) and his chan- cellor. Pier delle Vigne (d. 1249), wrote in this fashion. Many of these poets, like Ruggiero de Amicis (d. 1246), '\rrigo Testa (d. 1247), and Percivalle Doria (d. 1264), were of high social position, notable in the his- tory of the epoch, dying on the scaffold or the battle- field; but their lyrics are lacking in individuality, conventional, and artificial in sentiment and treat- ment. Noteworthy poets of this school are Giacomo da Lentino, "II Notaro", who was one of the em- peror's notaries in 1233; Rinaldo d'Aquino, a kins- man of St. Thomas, whose lament of a girl whose lover had gone on the Crusade was probably written in 1242; Giacomo Pugliese da Morra, in whom we find a trace of popular realism; and Cielo dal Camo, or d'Alcamo,whose confrasto," Rosa frescaaulcntissima", now held to have been written after 1231, is strongly tinged with the local dialect of Sicily. A more per- sonal note is struck in the pathetic poem of King Enzo of Sardinia (d. 1272), "S'eo trovasse", written from his prison at Bologna, which brings the Sicilian epoch to a dramatic close. The last poet of the Sicilian school is Guido delle Colonne (d. after 1288), who also wrote the " Historia Trojana" in Latin prose, and is mentioned with praise by both Dante and Chaucer.

The earlier Tuscan poets, such as Pannuccio dal Bagno, of Pisa, and Folcacchiero de' Folcacchieri, of Siena (c. 1250), are closely associated with the Si-