The Three Crowns
It is not a truism to say that the birth of a literature coincides with the affirmation of a language, and this is all the more true in Italy where different dialects coexisted orally, but where only ecclesiastical Latin predominated over written language. From the 13th century, in Umbria with Francis of Assisi and then at the court of Sicily on which Frederick II ruled, works in vernacular languages appeared, called vulgar, the first steps of the revolution that saw the light of day in Tuscany, the cradle of Florentine, or Tuscan, the ancestor of Italian as we know it today. This linguistic revolution is embodied in the Three Crowns, three major figures in world literature: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265. Raised in a family of the little nobility, orphaned by a mother and then a father, he married Gemma, for whom he had been destined since he was twelve years old, but it was his chaste and almost silent love for Beatrice that would permeate all his work. His muse, whom he met in 1274 and only saw again nine years later, lost his life in the prime of his life in 1290, and the deep despair in which Dante's dark despair inspired La Vita Nuova, an almost mystical ode to passionate love. The poet then tried his hand at experimentation in his Rimes, and became the most fervent representative of the Dolce Stil Novo current, according to the consecrated expression itself taken from his later writings, whose precursor was Guido Guinizzelli of Bologna. The "new soft style", which Dante explores with his lifelong friend Guido Cavalcanti, intellectualizes feelings and promotes refinement. After love comes politics, and with it the long exile that will lead him to flee Florence where he is condemned to the stake. On this endless road, Dante devoted himself to writing, writing De Vulgari eloquentia, an unfinished treatise in which he studied the various dialects and made the vow of a unitary vulgar language, then devoted himself until the end of his life, in 1321, to Ravenna, to his masterpiece, the Comedy, which long after his death was qualified as Divine. This long poem of a hundred songs is divided into three parts, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. It tells the story of Dante's spiritual error and his path to redemption, following in Virgil's footsteps and then Beatrice's. The success was immediate and such that La Divine Comédie allowed Tuscany to spread well beyond regional borders.
History is teasing and likes to repeat itself. Francesco Petrarca was born in 1304 in Arezzo, his family having had to flee Florence because of the father's political relations with Dante. A first journey that would be followed by many others, Petrarch, as we call him in French, lived in Carpentras, Montpellier and especially in Avignon where he too experienced the shock of a love without hope of concretization in the person of 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 will always inspire him with some of the most beautiful sonnets he composed in his retirement from the Vaucluse. His major work, the Canzoniere, is written in Tuscan, but the man, a diplomat and humanist, also used Latin for his historical writings, including Africa, which in its time brought him the glory and laurel crown of poets. When he died in 1374, he left the Trionfi unfinished.
His friend Boccaccio, also a great admirer of Dante, was born in 1313. His relationship with women is equally complex, oscillating between admiration for his muse and first love Flammetta, which is found in many of his works, eroticism, which he does not hesitate to evoke using the charms of Venus and that of the nymphs, and misogyny in one of his stories, Il Corbacccio, Le Corbeau. But Boccaccio made history above all for the Decameron, the "book of ten days". It was certainly the great plague of 1348 that gave him the idea for this collection of a hundred short stories, which features seven young women and three elegant men locking themselves in the church of Santa Maria Novella to escape the epidemic, passing the time by telling themselves stories, from the most tragic to the most sensual. Written in Italian, this book made Boccaccio for prose what Dante was to poetry, an innovator.
From the 15th to the 19th century
In the 15th century, the Quattrocento for Italians, Florence welcomed many writers, Laurent de Médicis known as Le Magnifique, the humanist Ange Politien, the statesman Donato Acciaiuoli, to name but a few, but posterity has retained above all Nicolas Machiavelli, whose patronymic has generated an adjective of common use. Born in 1469 into 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 rose through the ranks and was appointed Secretary of the Florence Chancellery in 1498. This faultless course did not prevent him from being relegated and imprisoned when, in 1513, he was accused of having previously plotted against the Medicis, who then returned to power. It is through writing that Machiavelli tries to regain their good graces and it is to Laurent II de Médicis that he dedicates Le Prince, a manual explaining how to access governance and how to preserve it, even if it means using morally reprehensible 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 resting in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence
Pierre l'Arétin (1492-1556) was also a fine political strategist, although instead of flattery he used the threat of his particularly sharp pen. Do we not owe him the maxim: "Pay me or I will cover you with mud", which seems to have been well heard by the powerful of his time, they who were also willing, from time to time, to finance satirical sonnets against their enemies? If the "Divine", as he called himself, had a social life that one imagines to be eventful, it was through his sulphurous writings that he was hated and worshipped. His Ragionamenti has overcome the centuries and translations, and can be found in our bookshops at the very beautiful Allia editions. He also wrote comedies, but also some pious books! Legend has it that "The Plague of Princes" literally died laughing at an obscene joke, which would probably have amused the man whose life alone is a novel.
Much more serious, the Accademia della Crusca was formed in 1583. Its five founding members, from the Florence Academy, had a linguistic ambition and the subject of study was Tuscany, in all its purity. In 1612 the first Italian dictionary was published. A few years later, in 1633, a fierce bibliophile, Antonio Magliabechi, was born, who bequeathed the 28,000 books he had patiently collected upon his death. This collection forms the basis of the Florence Central National Library.
The Renaissance is certainly over and the 18th century witnessed the burning of Tommaso Crudeli's works in Piazza della Signoria by the Inquisition, while Castruccio Buonamici decided to leave the Church to pursue a military career, but it was not until the 19th century that we heard a more familiar name again: Carlo Collodi. Pinocchio's father, Carlo Lorenzini, was born in Florence in 1826. Son of servants, destined for the priesthood, he dropped out of school and then embarked on a path of journalism, particularly musical and theatrical criticism - sometimes satirical. Despite two interruptions to participate in the wars of independence, the man collaborated throughout his career in several capacities, but also worked at the censorship office, which allowed him to read what was then written for the Tuscan scenes and to satisfy his passion for the theatre. At the dawn of his fifties, he turned to children's literature following a request to adapt the Contes de Perrault into Italian. Forced, it is said, by gambling debts that he must honour, Carlo having become Colloni with a somewhat dissolved private life, the first chapters of The History of a Puppet appeared in 1881 in the Giornale per i bambini. If Pinocchio's adventures end in his suicide, the editor's insistence allows the series to be extended. Two years later, gathered in a book, the episodes of the life of the little wooden puppet whose nose lengthens with each lie meet with considerable success.
The new breath of the 20th century
Carlo Collodi died suddenly in 1890, the same year that his contemporary Giosuè Carducci became a senator. The poetry of the latter, influenced both by the tranquility of his Tuscan childhood and by the drama that affected his family, his father having killed one of his sons by accident before committing suicide, is mainly interested in the history of Italy, which certainly explains why it is not well known abroad, although his barbarian Odes were published in French by the BNF. His poetic works, which he reorganized in 1901 under nine themes, earned him the first Nobel Prize for Italian literature. Sick and weakened, the poet and teacher could not seek his distinction and died the following year, in 1907
Like a breath of renewal, the very young 20th century was marked by the emergence of the futurist movement that praised and advocated modernity. Aldo Palazzeschi (1885-1974), who preferred to adopt his grandmother's name and abandon that of his father, Giuriani, followed the impetus given by Filippo Marinetti and published successively L'Incendiario in 1910 and Il codice Perià in 1911. Although he was fully involved in the Florentine journal Lacerba, which also hosted Guillaume Apollinaire's Manifesto of Futurist Anti-Tradition, Aldo Palazzeschi took a step back for political reasons at the beginning of the Great War. His isolation did not prevent him from writing and in 1934, his novel Les Sœurs Materassi was a success and was later adapted for the cinema. Despite the fame and admiration of the avant-garde of the 1960s, the writer and poet preferred his solitude. Some of his works have been translated into French by Gallimard Publishing.
The new century also sees the sulphurous Kurt-Erich Suckert, better known by the name he chose for himself, Curzio Malaparte, live and die because "if Bonaparte has ended badly, I am called Malaparte and I will end well". Journalist and war correspondent, former fascist turned communist on his deathbed in 1957, mad lover of Tuscany and owner of an extraordinary villa in Capri, he is one of those writers whose pleasure in reading the biography equals that of the work. Kaputt and La Peau, both about the war, are major, violent and shocking novels, 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. In addition, anyone interested in the rise of fascism in Florence can try Vasco Patrolini's Chronicle of the Poor Lovers (Albin Michel Publishing) (1913-1991), or watch the eponymous film.
One of Italy's most admired contemporary writers was born near Florence, but it was in Japan that she spent part of her childhood, experiencing the hell of a concentration camp. Then will come Sicily and finally Rome where she runs away to join her father. Dacia Maraini, who was also Alberto Moravia's partner, puts all her energy into literature, writes for the theatre, tries her hand at poetry and collaborates in magazines such as Nuovi Argomenti or Il Mondo. His first novel, La Vacanza, appeared in 1962 and was published by Grasset in French the following year. The recognition of her talent also goes through Marianna Ucria's The Silent Life, a magnificent portrait of an 18th century deaf-mute girl married to her much older uncle, who will find refuge in her library and freedom in the ideas of the Enlightenment. Feminist, Dacia Maraini? Perhaps a little bit, she participated in 1973 in the founding of the Teatro della Maddelena, which was run exclusively by women. An assertive female voice that we certainly enjoy discovering in translation in Le Bateau pour Kôbé and most recently with Mur de nuit.
It is impossible to conclude this overview of Tuscan literature without mentioning Antonio Tabucchi, born in 1943 near Pisa, and who died in his homeland of heart, Portugal, in 2012. A great admirer and ferryman of Fernando Pessoa's work, the former professor and also director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon, is the author of magnificent novels that Bernard Comment is gradually translating for Gallimard. Indian Nocturnal, Prix Médicis étranger 1987, tells the story of a man wandering in search of a friend in India, its author presents it as a long insomnia, and the journey, however dreamlike it may be, is carried by a refined writing like no other. On the other hand, this is the reality that prevails in Pereira prétend, an emblematic work of the opposition to totalitarianism, in which Antonio Tabucchi evokes the censorship and oppression of the Salazarist regime in Lisbon in 1938. The novel was adapted into a comic strip published in 2016 by Sarbacane.
