The Three Crowns
In Italy, for a long time, many dialects coexisted orally but only ecclesiastical Latin predominated in writing. Certainly, some regions - Umbria for example - saw the appearance of texts in the vernacular, but this was nothing compared to the linguistic revolution that was to take place in Tuscany, the cradle of Florentine, also known as Tuscan, the ancestor of Italian as we know it today, and above all the cradle of the Three Crowns, these major poets, the first of whom is so famous that only his first name is sufficient to identify him. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265. Raised in a family of the lower nobility, orphaned by his mother and then his father, he married Gemma, to whom he had been destined since he was 12 years old, but it was his chaste and almost silent love for Beatrice that would permeate his entire work. His muse, whom he met in 1274 and did not see again until nine years later, died in the prime of life in 1290. The deep despair into which Dante sank inspired him to write La Vita Nuova, an almost mystical ode to the passion of love. The poet will then try to experiment in his Rhymes, and will become the most fervent representative of the Dolce Stil Novo current, this "new soft style" which intellectualizes the feelings and invites to refinement. After love comes politics, and with it the long exile that will lead Dante to flee Florence where he had been condemned to the stake. On this endless road, he will devote himself to writing, writing De Vulgari eloquentia, an unfinished treatise in which he will study the different dialects and will make the wish of a unitary and unifying vulgar language. He will devote himself then, until the end of his life, in 1321 in Ravenna, to his masterpiece, the Comedy which, only after his death, will be qualified of Divine. This long poem of one hundred songs is divided into three parts: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. It tells the story of Dante's spiritual misguidance and his path to redemption, following in the footsteps of Virgil and Beatrice. The success was immediate and such that The Divine Comedy allowed the Tuscan to spread far beyond the regional borders.
History is teasing and likes to repeat itself. Our second "Crown", Francesco Petrarca, was born in 1304 in Arezzo, his family having had to flee Florence because of the political relations that the father had with Dante. Petrarch, as we call him in French, lived in Carpentras, Montpellier and above all in Avignon where he also experienced the shock of a platonic love with Laura whom he saw for the first time on Good Friday, April 6, 1327. As with Beatrice, some doubt the very existence of this young woman, but she inspired some of the most beautiful sonnets he composed in his retreat in Vaucluse. His major work, the Canzoniere, was written in Tuscan but the man, a diplomat and humanist, also used Latin for his historical writings, including Africa, which brought him fame and the laurel crown of poets in his time. At his death, in 1374, he left the Trionfi unfinished.
His friend Boccaccio, also a great admirer of Dante, was born in 1313. His relationship with women was equally complex, oscillating between admiration for his muse and first love, Flammetta, which is found in several of his works, a frank eroticism, and a real misogyny that is felt particularly in one of his stories, Il Corbacccio (The Raven). But Boccaccio has gone down in history above all for the Decameron, the "book of ten days". It is certainly the great plague of 1348 that gave him the idea of this collection (of one hundred short stories) which features seven young women and three elegant men who lock themselves in the church of Santa Maria Nuova to escape the epidemic, and pass the time by telling stories, from the most tragic to the most sensual. Boccaccio was to prose what Dante was to poetry, a precursor.
The Quattrocento
In the fifteenth century, Quattrocento for Italians, Florence welcomed many writers, Lorenzo de' Medici, known as the Magnificent, the humanist Angelo Politian, the statesman Donato Acciaiuoli, to name but a few, but history has remembered above all Nicolas Machiavelli, whose patronymic has become an adjective. Born in 1469 in an old Florentine family, the man was educated as a humanist, receiving all the classical culture of the time. Engaging in a political career, he quickly climbed the ranks and was appointed secretary of the Chancellery of Florence in 1498. This faultless career did not prevent his relegation and imprisonment when, in 1513, he was accused of plotting against the Medicis. It is by writing that Machiavelli will try to regain their good graces and it is to Lorenzo II de Medici that he will dedicate The Prince, a manual explaining how to reach power and how to keep it, even if it means using morally condemnable levers. This political treatise had been inspired in part by Caesar Borgia, whom he had met during one of his diplomatic missions. When the book was published, the writer's body was already lying in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence.
Decidedly important, the year 1469 was not in vain either in Venice, the Serenissima, which was then experiencing a period of splendor. Two German brothers, Jean and Wendelin of Spire, take advantage of it to ask for an immense privilege: the installation then the monopoly (during five years) of the printing office, what they obtain and allows them to make leave press Epistolae ad familiares of Cicero. John lost his life a few months later while the second work, The City of God, by Saint Augustine, did not have time to dry. At this point, the story diverges: competition or, on the contrary, precious help from an apprentice who suddenly gains in stature, the fact remains that a new character appears at Wendelin's side: Nicolas Jenson. This Frenchman, most likely trained in Mainz by the inventor of movable type, Gutenberg, printed De Evangelica preparatione by Eusebius of Caesarea in 1470. Contrary to what one might think, the book, already at that time, benefited from a buoyant market, all the more so as Jenson accepted to treat all genres, Greek and Latin classics, legal or medical booklets, and exported as far as Germany. After joining forces with Joannes de Colonia to create La Compagnia, it is said that their company, a veritable industry, produced almost half the books in Venice! After them, others would come, and the city would remain in the 16th century the leading producer of printed works in Europe.
Paradoxically, few authors were born in Venice. On the other hand, many drew their inspiration from the city and decided to settle there, interested in the diffusion that the printing tools promised, like Peter the Aretin, born in Arezzo in 1492. A fine political strategist, he did not use flattery like Machiavelli, but preferred threats. He was thus paid to scratch his enemies with his acerbic pen... or to spare those who were ready to buy his silence, according to his good word, which has remained famous: "Pay me and I won't cover you with mud" This "Scourge of the Princes" (although he preferred to call himself "the Divine") has especially left to posterity erotic texts, including the Ragionamenti to be discovered at the beautiful Allia editions. It seems that he lost his life in 1556, succumbing to a last fit of laughter during a Venetian banquet. His contemporary Angelo Beolco, better known under the name of one of his characters, Ruzzante, is of a completely different nature. History does not record precisely the dates and places of his birth and death (around 1496 and 1542), but he was certainly a native of Padua (Veneto). The natural son of a doctor, he received a good education and became the protégé of Alvise Cornaro, a Venetian intellectual and nobleman, who encouraged him to describe the peasant condition. Ruzzante did so wonderfully and his plays earned him a great deal of fame thanks to his ability to put the simplest of people, for once, in the spotlight. Although he is nowadays a little forgotten, some see him as the instigator of the Commedia dell'Arte.
This beautiful effervescence will not resist the austerity of the Counter-Reformation. The Inquisition would get its hands on the printing press: the first list of books to be put on the index was drawn up in 1557. Galileo (Pisa, 1564-Arcetri, 1642) did not escape censorship, and the rigorism was reflected in the language, which was henceforth dictated by the Academy of the Crusca founded in 1582. This forcible classicism will paralyze literature for a long time, which will have no other choice than to become excessive, in an exacerbated lyricism that will be called baroque but which will not be remembered.
Romanticism and Risorgimento
The exile of Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) in France - offended because he was considered too serious by his peers - is perhaps one of them, and the smile that the name of an author whose surname has become part of everyday language provokes, perhaps another. Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725-1798) wrote The Story of My Life in French, but his text remains an essential reference in Venetian literature, the man having lied about many things but never having denied his native city. Published posthumously, blacklisted, available on the streets in doctored versions, it would be simplistic to consider this work only as a list of female conquests, sometimes quite young, when it is also a testimony of a bygone era and of those circles where it was fashionable to use the language of Paris.
If we are to believe the flagship novel of Ugo Foscolo, born in 1778 on the island of Zakynthos (then Republic of Venice), the era is nevertheless entering into Romanticism, even if under his pen, it is still adorned with a classical style and a touch of nationalism. Thus, in The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, it is certainly a question of an impossible love that ends in suicide, but how can one not guess between the lines the despair of Foscolo, who had so long placed his hopes in Napoleon Bonaparte... In The Betrothed, the theme is replayed without the political note: against the background of the great plague and civil war, Lombardy from 1628 to 1630 becomes a mythical setting for the passion of two souls bullied by a jealous lord. The author, Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), did not write this text alone, inspired by his reading of Walter Scott, but the novel attained the status of a masterpiece because he kept reworking it, deeming it appropriate to get rid of the Milanese twists and turns in order to respect Florentine grammar as closely as possible, auguring a Tuscan language that would soon become the national language, but at last revitalizing it. For the Risorgimento, "resurrection" or "rebirth", was well underway, Italy was looking for a common identity and tending towards unification. From a linguistic point of view, this was achieved with a children's book so familiar that one would forget that it contributed so much to the popularization of Tuscan among all Italian children : The Adventures of Pinocchio, which Carlo Collodi (whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini, born in Florence in 1826) published in 1881 as a serial in Giornale per i bambini .
In the 19th century, the renaissance was also synonymous with rebellion against the established order, a trend that was embodied in a literary and artistic movement that developed in northern Italy, in Milan to be precise, the Scapigliatura, which could be roughly translated as "bohemia". If the rejection of norms and aesthetic dogmas, the admiration for Baudelaire, and the frequentation of bars rather than beautiful salons constitute their common points, the authors assimilated to this current follow each one personal ways, which creates an interesting eclecticism. Thus, the precursors Arrigo Boito (1842-1918) and his friend Emilio Praga (1839-1875) tried their hand at theater by writing Le Madri galanti, a comedy in five acts presented for the first time in 1863, and then directed together the newspaper Il Figaro , which would become the spokesperson for the experiments of the Scapigliatura. For his part, Carlo Alberto Pisani Dossi (1849-1910), who wrote most of his work between the ages of 19 and 38, leaned more towards linguistic research, having fun with slang, neologisms, repetitions, digressions and so on. His approach will influence the famous Milanese Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973), as the latter will recognize in La Cognizione del dolore(The Knowledge of Pain, Seuil editions). Soon the pupil would surpass his master, winning the prestigious (and elusive) International Prize for Literature in 1963, the Bagutta Prize and the Viareggio Prize. Gadda's daring style sometimes disconcerted his colleagues and readers, but fortunately it did not discourage the translators, who allow us to discover him extensively in our language(The Adalgisa: Milanese Sketches, The Years, Well-Regulated Mating: Stories...). More discreet, Eugenio Montale (Genoa, 1896-Milan, 1981) is on the contrary a man of few words, perhaps because self-taught, he knows how to show himself humble, probably because the time is tense and lets predict that a new wave of censorship is on the way. Despite his discretion, Montale was spotted in 1925 with Os de seiche. Fifty years later, he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
A teeming 20th century
The 20th century opened with the Futurist Manifesto , which appeared on February 20, 1909 in the French newspaper Le Figaro and was signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who died in Bellagio in 1944, after as many trips as wanderings, particularly political ones, since his support for Fascism eventually distanced him from those he had federated. Nevertheless, this current exalting the speed, the machines, in short the modern world, will have had the merit to show to which point the Northern Italy was sensitive to the literature of avant-garde. An openness that will be confirmed and affirmed by tending towards fantasy, the absurd and even surrealism, especially with Dino Buzzati (Belluno, 1906-Milan, 1972), the author of the collection of short stories The K and the novel The Desert of the Tartars, Italo Calvino (Cuba, 1923-Siena, 1985), close to the Ulysses movement, who won all the votes with The Perched Baron, and of course the playwright Dario Fo, born near Varese in 1926, who mixed inspirations (from Chaplin to the Commedia dell'arte via Bertold Brecht), humor and commitment, and was awarded a well-deserved Nobel Prize in 1997.
However, the twentieth century did not lend itself only to laughter, however subversive it may be, the Second World War having been a real shock. Two writers - that everything opposes - are associated to him: one born in Tuscany in 1898, the other in Piedmont in 1919. The first is the sulphurous Kurt-Erich Suckert, better known by the name he chose for himself, Curzio Malaparte, because "if Bonaparte ended badly, my name is Malaparte and I will end well. Journalist and war correspondent, former fascist turned communist on his deathbed in 1957, madly in love with Tuscany and owner of an extraordinary villa in Capri, occasionally a bit of an affabulator, he is one of those writers whose biography is as enjoyable to read as his work. Kaputt and La Peau, both about the war, are major novels, violent and moving, and his Secret Diary (1941-1944), published in 2019 by La Table ronde, refines the discovery of a man as mysterious as he is fascinating. At the other end of the spectrum, Primo Levi, is equally moving with If This Is a Man, which describes his deportation to Auschwitz in February 1944 and his survival inside the extermination camp. Upon his return, Primo Levi seems to resume a normal life, he writes this first text with the support of Lucia, his future wife, whom he has just met, works, becomes a father for the first time in 1948. However, it is impossible for him to forget the horror, as the world around him seems ready to do, so he begins to militate. If he is a man is reedited in 1958, translated into English and then into German, he begins to write The Truce, which recounts his journey to return to Italy and is published in 1963. He finally benefits from being listened to and recognized, the press talks about him but, in spite of everything, this year is marked by the signs of a depression from which he will never come out. Primo Levi continued to write, to travel, to give conferences, to make sure that the unthinkable and the insurmountable would not be forgotten. He lost his life in 1987 in a fall from a staircase that many thought was voluntary.
The death of Cesare Pavese, many years earlier, on August 27, 1950 in Turin, had left no room for doubt: he had committed suicide, which will be confirmed by a letter, the last sentence of his last novel, Death will come and it will have your eyes, and a note in his diary that will be published two years later under the title The Business of Living. A short life, barely 42 years old, and yet an immense, dense and eternal work. Piedmont will be mourned again in 2016 when one of its most illustrious natives, Umberto Eco, who had been born 84 years earlier in Alexandria, died in Milan. In 1980, the publication of his first novel, The Name of the Rose, propelled him to the top of all the charts, a worldwide success reinforced six years later by a very successful film adaptation. With an insatiable culture and curiosity, and a sense of humor that made him accessible, he left an important body of work composed of both novels(Le Pendule de Foucault, Le Cimetière de Prague) and essays(De la littérature, Comment voyager avec un saumon). Equally erudite and above all a fervent admirer of Pessoa - which explains why he ended his life in Lisbon in 2012, and not in his native Tuscany - Antonio Tabucchi also left a void, to be filled by reading his sublime novels such as Nocturne indien, Requiem, Pereira prétend. Fortunately, a new generation has not been slow to take over and confirm that, decidedly, Northern Italy is a land of writers. Without aiming to be exhaustive, we can mention Alessandro Baricco, well known for Silk , but awarded the Prix Médicis Étranger 1995 for his first novel(Castles of Wrath). Paolo Cognetti, born in Milan in 1978, also received this award. In The Eight Mountains he confessed his love for the Aosta Valley. Finally, in 2008, Paolo Giordano from Turin became the youngest recipient of the prestigious Strega Prize, being only 26 years old when he published The Solitude of Prime Numbers.
