From praise to romance
A poet, a writer, a playwright: in three centuries and three men, Lombard literature asserts its talents and reveals its aspirations. The poet Bonvesin della Riva was born in Milan around 1240. In a manuscript miraculously found at the very end of the 19thcentury , he describes his city with love and grandiloquence, an eagle among birds, going so far as to find evidence of his city's supremacy in the spelling of its name. Doesn't the "L", for example, confirm its height and nobility? And isn't the "O" a sign of perfection? Charming even in its exaggeration, De magnalibus urbis Mediolani is also a valuable source of information on a bygone era. Bonvesin was a member of the Order of the Humiliated, whose mission it was to collect taxes, so he counts the gates, the bell towers, the doctors, the trumpeters, and above all he describes the people he meets, the 200,000 Milanese who then inhabit a booming metropolis, going so far as to tell us what they eat and to confide in us a famous chestnut recipe. Bovesin tried his hand at political allegory in Disputatio mensium, and returned to cooking with his advice on table manners in De quinquaginta curialitatibus. The writer is Baldassare Castiglione, who in the 16thcentury published what today would be considered a bestseller, Le Livre du courtisan. Born in the marquisate of Mantua, Castiglione's nobility and intelligence enabled him to find his place at the court of Urbino, where he rubbed shoulders with the beau monde (his portrait by Raphael can still be admired in the Louvre), fought a few battles and succumbed to impossible passions. Then, in 1528, on the eve of his death the following year, he published his resoundingly successful manual of savoir-vivre in Venice. In the form of humanist conversations, this book advocated an ideal: like the knight of the Middle Ages, who knew how to combine arms and letters, Castiglione's courtier did his utmost to reconcile the values and virtues dear to the Renaissance. Finally, the playwright is Carlo Maria Maggi (1630-1699), not to be confused with his terrorist namesake. His career is fundamental for two reasons. The first is that his involvement with the theater gave rise to a character, Meneghino, a mocking little barber whose invention is certainly much older, but who, thanks to Maggi, took his first steps on the Commedia dell'arte stage in the play I consigli du Meneghino (1697). The second was his use of dialect, which the Accademia della Crusca, which was devoted to linguistics and praised Tuscan, hardly approved of, but which had a notable influence on many of his peers. Carlo Porta (1775-1821), for example, undertook nothing less than a Milanese translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, a project he later abandoned, without losing his reputation as a champion of his native tongue, as his mastery of bosinada, the traditional poetic art that lasted until the beginning of the 20th century, was widely respected. Struck down at the height of his fame by an early death, he left behind a friend and great lover of Italy, Stendhal, and was mourned in verse by Tommaso Grossi (1790-1853). Tommaso Grossi outlived him by some thirty years, only part of which he put to good use in his work, since his marriage in 1838 sounded the death knell for his writing career, and he returned to his profession as a notary. He nevertheless had time to make his mark on his era, with his epic poem I Lombardi alla prima crociata and his historical novel Marco Visconti, whose French translation is freely available on the BNF website. From a purely literary point of view, his friendships seemed to be more fertile than his loves, and he shared his admiration for the Romantic movement with one of his companions who had sheltered him on his arrival in Milan, the indisputable Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873). If you haven't read The Betrothed, you won't know how lucky you are, nor the promise of happiness to come. A landmark work of Italian literature, this novel tells of a love desperately thwarted by a jealous lord. Against the backdrop of the great plague and civil war, Lombardy from 1628 to 1630 becomes a mythical setting for the passion of two souls that readers will never forget. Manzoni was not a man of one text alone - he also wrote poetry, tragedies and essays - but his historical drama, inspired by his reading of Walter Scott, is unique in that he never ceased to rework it, deeming it appropriate to get rid of excessively literary turns of phrase in order to respect the Florentine language as closely as possible, thus auguring a more accessible Tuscan that would soon become the national language. For the Risorgimento, "resurrection" or "rebirth", was underway, as Italy sought a common identity and moved towards unification. The work of Giuseppe Parini, who lost his life at the same time as the 18thcentury , became one of the emblems of this revival. His book Il Giorno, an ironic description of an aristocrat's day, had already won him great popularity during his lifetime, and continued to inspire after his death. He had been welcomed into the Accademia dei Trasformati, one of the highly sought-after gatherings of intellectuals and artists of the time, whose mission was to circulate and deepen ideas in the age of Enlightenment.
A new era
In the middle of the 19th century, this trend was embodied in a literary and artistic movement that developed in northern Italy, in Milan to be precise: Scapigliatura, which could be loosely translated as "bohemia". While the rejection of norms and aesthetic dogma, admiration for Baudelaire, and the frequentation of the bouges rather than the salons constitute their common ground, the authors assimilated to this movement each followed their own personal path, creating an interesting eclecticism. For example, the pioneering Arrigo Boito (1842-1918) and his friend Emilio Praga (1839-1875) tried their hand at theater, writing Le Madri galanti, a five-act comedy first performed in 1863, and then editing the newspaper Il Figaro, which became a mouthpiece for Scapigliatura experiments, while Carlo Alberto Pisani Dossi (1849-1910), who wrote most of his work between the ages of 19 and 38, leaned more towards linguistic research, featuring slang, neologisms, repetitions, digressions and tutti quanti. This approach would influence Milan's Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973), as the latter would acknowledge in La Cognizione del dolore, and in which the pupil would soon surpass the master, winning the prestigious (and elusive) Prix International de Littérature in 1963, as well as the Prix Bagutta and Prix Viareggio. Gadda is one of the great Italian writers of the twentiethcentury , although his own research into language may have baffled both his peers and his readers. Forced to abandon his studies following the death of his father, and having already endured a financially precarious youth, he enlisted in the Great War but was taken prisoner, an experience he recounts in Diary of War and Captivity. On his return to Milan, a second bereavement - that of his beloved brother - plunged him into infinite turmoil. He left again, then returned, and finally had the opportunity to devote himself fully to his first love, literature. Playing with pastiche and different registers, adding puns and dialect terms, Gadda's work is nevertheless largely available in French, and the work of his translators is to be commended.
The 20th century opened with the Futurist manifesto, published on February 20, 1909 in the French newspaper Le Figaro and signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a man who died in 1944 on the shores of Lake Como, after as many journeys as political wanderings. This movement exalted speed, machines - in a word, the modern world. Marinetti added a touch of war, which ultimately isolated him from those he had federated. Nevertheless, thanks to Marinetti, Lombardy once again proved its openness to avant-garde movements, and, like other Italian provinces, saw the birth and death of major writers throughout the new century. To name just three, Eugenio Montale, of course, a poet born in Genoa in 1896 but who spent his last thirty years in Milan. The youngest of many siblings, born into a family whose parents were shopkeepers, Montale was self-taught. Considered Italy's greatest poet, his career was atypical and unassuming, which shows just how great was his talent, which first came to the fore in 1925 with Os de seiche. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975, as was Dario Fo, born near Varese in 1926, in 1997. It was in the theater that Fo evolved. After attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera, where he studied directing, Dario Fo soon displayed his willingly scathing sense of humor and his taste for caricature. Inspired by Feydeau as much as Chaplin, by Commedia dell'arte as much as Bertold Brecht, he is both amused and committed. A rich career to be discovered by reading Mystère bouffe, Faut pas payer! or L'Apocalypse différée or à nous la catastrophe. Finally, how can we forget that Dino Buzzati, born in Veneto in 1906, spent his entire career working for the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera. His realistic writing, honed by his profession, resonated with astonishing acuity, and his world-famous short stories and novels never hesitated to add a touch of the fantastic to highlight the absurdity of existence.
