Dear Readers,
A December discussion of the Dante connection to our “Bella Lingua Italiana” continues and is quite timely as it was 1861 when “Grazie” to Garibaldi, Italy was unified and the Italian Peninsula needed and official Italian Language. If you do the math, you will notice that next year 2011, Italy will be celebrating its 150th Birthday and some Italian Consulates worldwide, together with participating Italo- American organizations such as the Museo Italo-Americano in San Francisco, have already held “launch parties” to kick off the upcoming 2011 celebrations.
As you may recall, after reading the book and seeing the movie Eat, Pray and Love I wrote: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), a great Italian poet, was indirectly responsible for giving Italy its beautiful Italian language. I knew Dante had written the “Divine Comedy”, and had heard that Italian was the beautiful language of Dante, but it was only last month while reading the 2006 best-seller Eat, Pray and Love by Elizabeth Gilbert in anticipation of the movie adaptation starring Julia Roberts, that I finally understood the Dante connection to our “Bella Lingua Italiana”: in Eat, Pray and Love Gilbert explains in part why Italian is the most beautiful language in the world: “To understand why, you have to first understand that Europe was once a pandemonium of numberless Latin-derived dialects that gradually, over the centuries, morphed into a few separate languages – French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian [...].
The dialect of the most prominent city gradually became the accepted language of the whole region. Therefore, what we today call French is really a version of medieval Parisian, Portuguese is really Lisboan, Spanish is essentially Madrileno [...] The strongest city ultimately determined the language of the whole country. Italy was different [...]. For the longest time, Italy wasn’t even a country. It didn’t get itself unified until quite late in life (1861) and until then was a peninsula of warring city-states dominated by proud local princes or other European powers. Parts of Italy belonged to France, parts to Spain, parts to the Church, parts to whoever could grab the local fortress or palace.
All this internal division meant that Italy never properly coalesced, and Italian didn’t either [...] For centuries Italians wrote and spoke in local dialects that were mutually unfathomable. A scientist in Florence could barely communicate with a poet in Sicily or a merchant in Venice (except in Latin, of course, which was hardly considered the national language). In the six- tenth century, some Italian intellectuals got together and decided that this was absurd. This Italian Peninsula needed an Italian Language, at least in the written form, which everyone could agree upon. So this gathering of intellectuals proceeded to do something unprecedented in the history of Europe: they handpicked the most beautiful of all the local dialects and crowned it ITALIAN. And it worked...
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Now from long-time reader Ambassador (ret.) Robert Pastorino of St. Helena, Calif., comes word that getting the “Intellectuals” to accept the Tuscan dialect as the official language of Italy was not easy as many of them strongly supported Latin. “Signor” Pastorino wrote me an interesting letter about the formation of the Italian language, which I would like to share in part with you: “I am writing about A. Germonio an important Savoyard diplomat/cleric of the late 16th century who served in the Roman Curia and later as a Savoy Ambassador to Spain. Ambassador Germonio never shirked from taking positions on the tough, contentious religious, political, and social issues of the day, even when he might have been in minority.
He could take positions, which were doomed to be defeated. But, Germonio was not to be deterred. One of these issues was just about decided when Germonio got into it when he was still young in the early 1570 – the issue of a national language to be used in Italy. At the beginning of the 1500s, Italy was a hodge-podge of states, duchies, dependencies, free republics, marquisates, kingdoms and the Papacy’s temporal power, ranging from Rome to Florence, to Genoa, to Savoy, to Lucca, to Milan, to the Serenissima Venice, to Sicily, and many others, all squabbling with each other and jealous of their own interests and power; one of those subjects of conflict was language, and the myriad of dialects spoken around the peninsula. Latin was still in use; it hadn’t died or disappeared.
Then there were the dialects which all Italians spoke every day, and which were off springs of Mother Latin combined with Germanic languages which had invaded the peninsula since the fall of the Roman Empire. The debate on the language question became its most intense around1500 when Italy was being invaded on all sides by foreigners. Latin had not disappeared in the millennium since the fall of Rome. It was still in great use, and in two distinct forms. The language of Cicero and Virgil of Augustan Rome was still used in the elite universities and courts. It was the refined literary Latin that could be used for a handsome sermon, a eulogy, a polished letter, or in both state and church careers.
This was the Latin of the Humanists, which had rebelled against the practical Latin in use in favor of that language of Cicero and Virgil. The other Latin, still used extensively, had evolved to suit new situations and circumstances, much changed from Caesar’s time. This “practical” Latin of the Renaissance offered a rich, specialized vocabulary for the technicalities of the law and intellectual argument and served for learned treatises, legislation, and legal records. After the issue of Latin for everyday use was decided, but later discarded, the debate turned to which of the dialects would be chosen and promoted.
It came down to basically three dialects: 1) the Roman Curial and Courtly language being used in Rome and the Vatican, like that used by Dante, which would provide language for the educated, traveled men of the upper classes; 2) the more archaic language espoused by Pietro Bembo, which was the language of Petrarch and Boccaccio, purer, more literary, more romantic; or 3) the language of the Florentines of the early 1500s.
The Florentines argued that theirs was the only dialect that was the peninsula’s recognized vernacular for literary endeavor and a direct line, which linked the language of the 14th century masters to the 16th century urban Tuscany, especially Florence. One Florentine, Giambattista Gelli wrote what had the old masters written in modern mid- 15th century times, they would have used Tuscan dialect because of the value of living speech and its superior development. Germonio weighed in on the debate late, when it was really resolved and the Florentine dialect was well on its way to becoming the “national language”. But weigh in he did, and he would not be deterred.
First, he heartily and strongly supported and promoted Latin. In the early 1500’s, many Italian scholars and literary figures fought to preserve Latin as the dominant literary and learned language. Even those not supportive of the language of the time of Cicero fought to retain and sustain some form of Latin. Germonio made the continued use of Latin an emphasis in one of the first major books that he wrote, Pomeridiane Sessiones which was published in Torino in 1580. It has more than 200 pages and is entitled in English “Afternoon Sessions” which is a compilation of one of the classes he taught. (Evidently, at that time lectures at the Universities were held in the afternoon).
The subtitle of the book in English was “In which the opponents of the Worthy Latin Language Defend that which the Hetruscum (Tuscan) dialect only now brings together, but also present it courageously”. Parts of the book try to demonstrate the superiority of Latin over the vernacular, which by that time was rapidly taking over Italy by both the intellectuals and the everyday folk. He calls Latin “threatened” by the vernacular of the day, and he tried to sustain its fame, superiority, and value. To make a long, complicated story short, the Tuscan dialect, really the dialect of Florence, won out, although with many elements of the other dialects, and for that matter with words of Latin and other countries.
