ITALY
246
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-
