Dante
Alighieri (statue in Naples)
 Between the fall
of the Western Roman Empire and about the year 1000,
there existed in Europe a kind of “universal
Catholic culture” (a phrase used by a number of
sources); it was sustained by the official and
scholarly use of Latin, even in the face of
vernacular (meaning “of the people”) languages that
were developing throughout the territories of the
former Empire. These vernacular tongues would one
day be known as Spanish, French, Portuguese,
Italian, etc.—i.e., the large family of modern
“Romance” languages. It is not surprising that
residual Latin should have remained strongest in
Italy, at the center of the empire, even as that
empire disintegrated. Even the Lombards, the “barbarian” invaders who
had invaded Italy many centuries earlier (569 b.c.)
quickly absorbed both the religion (Christianity)
and the language (Latin) of the territory they had
subjugated. Thus, in Italy, the appearance of
literature recognizable as early Italian comes about
a century later than similar literature in early
French or early Spanish (here, using for comparison
the years 1150-1200, when both La Chanson de Roland for French and El Cantar de Mio Cid for Spanish appeared).Italian high school students who study the history of their own language will generally tell you that Francis of Assissi’s Canticle of the Sun—the beginning of which reads: Altissimu, onnipotente bon Signore,/Tue so' le laude, la gloria e l'honore et onne benedictione…— is among the “first works of literature written in the Italian language.” A moment’s reflection, however, reveals that to be circular reasoning. Since there was no Italian language in 1225, when that poem was written, it couldn’t have been written “in Italian.” That statement is really shorthand for something like, “written in a vernacular neo-Latin dialect (Umbrian) that was very close to the Tuscan variety of Dante’s Divine Comedy (finished around 1320) that then became the basis for modern Italian.” In that same period between 500 and
1000—after the Empire, but while Latin and classical
traditions were officially being kept alive in
Italy—the peninsula was also very much alive with
popular traditions and vernacular language in the
form of story-tellers, improvisational troupes of
actors, popular celebrations of religious festivals,
etc. Almost none of this
was written down (or, at least, written down and handed
down to us), but there is enough from around
the year 1200 to prove the concept that the common
language of the common people could produce real
literature.
In mid-1100s, there are examples in various parts of
Italy of written language that may be seen as “early
Italian.” One of the best-known of these is the
so-called ritmo cassinese. “Ritmo”
(rhythm) refers to the rhyming scheme of the lines of
verse; “cassinese” is the adjective from “Cassino,”
meaning the abbey of Monte Cassino where the document
was found and still resides. It is a lay allegorical
poem written at the end of the twelfth century in what
many commentators call “Apulian” dialect; in the
context of Italy of the year 1200, that meant
“Southern.” The
Sicilian School That term refers to the
poets who, in the mid-1200s, produced the first
body of literature in a more or less uniform
vernacular Italian. The term is also misleading
since it might be mistaken to mean that the
language was what today we would call “Sicilian
dialect.” That was not the case; Dante reminds us
in his famous defense of vernacular language, De Vulgari
Eloquentia (finished around 1305), that
“…the royal throne was in Sicily…[thus]… whatever our
predecessors wrote in the vulgar tongue was called
Sicilian.” Thus, the
poets of the “Sicilian School” were not necessarily
present in Sicily; “school” refers to the poetry,
itself, produced over a much broader area, including
Tuscany, and influencing later generations of Italian
poets and authors, including Dante. Holy Roman
emperor, Frederick II,
from his court in Sicily purposefully guided the
choice of a more central Italian dialect for the
“school” in an attempt to strengthen his influence on
that part of Italy and to create a pan-Italian
language—an imperial language, if you will—as opposed
to the “universal Catholic” Latin. This happened in
the middle of the Guelf-Ghibelline clashes over the
power of the empire versus the power of the Church and
reflected Fredrick’s hostility towards the Church. (I am glossing over a debate about the traditional
view that vernacularization in 1200-1300 in Italy was
a manifestation of a new pre-Renaissance spirit of
freedom against the authority of the church. Some
authors (Kristeller, bibliography below) point out
that vernacular language was often promoted in the
most backward feudal courts while Latin was promoted
in free republics such as Venice.) Thus, in the mid-1200s, poets (including Frederick
II, himself) produced a body of love poems largely
derived from the earlier tradition of poetry in
Provence. One member of the school, Giacomo da Lentini
is credited by scholars with inventing the sonnet, a
literary form later perfected by Petrarch. The last
important poet of the school was Guido delle Colonne
(d. after 1288), who was also the author of the Latin
prose work Historia Trojana and who
was praised by both Dante and Chaucer. By the last 25
years of the 1200s, a number of regional dialects had
thus been adjusted towards a central Italian variety
in the search of a vehicle for literature. Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia
(finished around 1305) was revolutionary in defending
the common everyday language of the people.
(Amusingly, he had to write it in Latin; in other
words, “Stop writing in this language you are now
reading.”) Yet, it was
also a simple recognition of what had already been
going on for almost a century—a standard vernacular
language had coalesced around the dialect of Tuscany,
and Dante recognized that. (Note, however, that both
Dante and his great admirer, Boccaccio, felt Latin to
be superior to the vernacular. For example, Boccaccio
praised Dante’s decision to write the Commedia
in the volgare for the benefit of his
fellow citizens who had been “abandoned by the
learned,” but, at the same time, Boccaccio also says
in his Comment of the Comedy that the
work would have been “richer and more sublime” in
Latin (in Gravelle, below). Boccaccio, of course,
chose vernacular Tuscan (with some portions in other
dialects, including Neapolitan) for his own Decameron finished around 1353). Dante was certainly not modest about his own role in the formation of modern Italian; not only does he put himself in the company of Virgil and even Homer (Purgatorio, canto 4) in the Divina Comedia, he cites himself (Purgatorio, canto 24) as one of the founders of the Dolce Stil Novo ("sweet new style"), the literary movement that helped shape the future language of Italy. Surely, some reactionary literary critic in mid-1300s (yes, they have always existed!) must have thought, Just who does this Dante Alighieri fellow think he is?! Neapolitan In his recorded anthology of the Neapolitan Song, Roberto Murolo (below) presents “Canto delle lavandale del Vomero” (Song of the Washerwomen of Vomero) from ca. 1200 as the first example of a song text handed down to us in the Neapolitan vernacular: Tu
m’aje
prommiso quatto moccatore Thus, it seems that for the two centuries between the Divine Comedy and 1500, there must been have a conscious decision on the parts of authors to choose either “Tuscan” or “dialect”, depending on the circumstances)—which is also to say that dialect was not overwhelmed by a standardized Italian, not in Naples, nor anywhere in Italy. And that is to say that regions in Italy have always existed—and continue to exist—in what linguists call a state of “diglossia”—i.e. the use of different varieties of the same language depending on social and political circumstances (including prestige, usually attached to the standard literary version). By 1600, dialect in Naples was firmly entrenched as a vehicle for literature, poetry and theater. For example, Giambattista Basile’s (1575-1632) Il Pentamerone (in dialect) is the first published collection of European fairy tales. With some fluctuation, depending on the age, Neapolitan has remained a strong literary language since that time.
Bibliography:
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