(Not even close to) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know... about the Sicilian School, the ritmo cassinese, and the beginnings of vernacular literature in Italy, including Neapolitan. |
In
that same period between 500 and 1000—after the
Empire, but while Latin and classical traditions were
officially being kept alive in Italy—the peninsula was
also very much alive with popular traditions and
vernacular language in the form of story-tellers,
improvisational troupes of actors, popular
celebrations of religious festivals, etc. Almost none of this was
written down (or, at least, written down and handed
down to us), but there is enough from around the
year 1200 to prove the concept that the common
language of the common people could produce real
literature.
The Ritmo Cassinese
In the mid-1100s, there are examples in various parts of Italy of written language that may be seen as “early Italian.” One of the best-known of these is the so-called ritmo cassinese. “Ritmo” (rhythm) refers to the rhyming scheme of the lines of verse; “cassinese” is the adjective from “Cassino,” meaning the abbey of Monte Cassino where the document was found and still resides. It is a lay allegorical poem written at the end of the twelfth century in what many commentators call “Apulian” dialect; in the context of Italy of the year 1200, that meant “Southern.”
The Sicilian
School
That term refers
to the poets who, in the mid-1200s, produced the
first body of literature in a more or less uniform
vernacular Italian. The term is also misleading
since it might be mistaken to mean that the language
was what today we would call “Sicilian dialect.”
That was not the case; Dante reminds us in his
famous defense of vernacular language, De Vulgari
Eloquentia (finished around 1305), that
“…the royal throne was in Sicily…[thus]… whatever our
predecessors wrote in the vulgar tongue was called
Sicilian.” Thus, the poets
of the “Sicilian School” were not necessarily present in
Sicily; “school” refers to the poetry, itself, produced
over a much broader area, including Tuscany, and
influencing later generations of Italian poets and
authors, including Dante. Holy Roman emperor, Frederick
II, from his court in Sicily purposefully guided the
choice of a more central Italian dialect for the
“school” in an attempt to strengthen his influence on
that part of Italy and to create a pan-Italian
language—an imperial language, if you will—as opposed to
the “universal Catholic” Latin. This happened in the
middle of the Guelf-Ghibelline clashes over the power of
the empire versus the power of the Church and reflected
Fredrick’s hostility towards the Church.
(I am glossing over
a debate about the traditional view that
vernacularization in 1200-1300 in Italy was a
manifestation of a new pre-Renaissance spirit of freedom
against the authority of the church. Indeed, some
authors (Kristeller, bibliography below) point out that
vernacular language was often promoted in the most
backward feudal courts while Latin was promoted in free
republics such as Venice.)
Thus, in the mid-1200s,
poets (including Frederick II, himself) produced a body
of love poems largely derived from the earlier tradition
of poetry in Provence. One member of the school, Giacomo da Lentini
is credited by scholars with inventing the sonnet, a
literary form later perfected by Petrarch. The last
important poet of the school was Guido delle Colonne
(d. after 1288), who was also the author of the Latin
prose work Historia Trojana and who was
praised by both Dante and Chaucer. By the last 25 years
of the 1200s, a number of regional dialects had thus
been adjusted towards a central Italian variety in the
search of a vehicle for literature.
Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia was revolutionary
in defending the common everyday language of the people.
(Amusingly, he had to write it in Latin; in other words,
“Stop writing in this language you are now reading.”) Yet, it was also a simple
recognition of what had already been going on for almost
a century—a standard vernacular language had coalesced
around the dialect of Tuscany, and Dante recognized
that. (Note, however, that both Dante and his great
admirer, Boccaccio, felt Latin to be superior to the
vernacular. For example, Boccaccio praised Dante’s
decision to write the Commedia in the volgare for the benefit of his fellow
citizens who had been “abandoned by the learned,” but,
at the same time, Boccaccio also says in his Comment of the Comedy that the work would
have been “richer and more sublime” in Latin (in
Gravelle, below). Boccaccio, of course, chose vernacular
Tuscan (with some portions in other dialects, including
Neapolitan) for his own Decameron
finished around 1353).
Dante was certainly not modest about his own role in the formation of modern Italian; not only does he put himself in the company of Virgil and even Homer (Purgatorio, canto 4) in the Divina Comedia, he cites himself (Purgatorio, canto 24) as one of the founders of the Dolce Stil Novo ("sweet new style"), the literary movement that helped shape the future language of Italy. Surely, some reactionary literary critic in mid-1300s (yes, they have always existed!) must have thought, Just who does this Dante Alighieri fellow think he is?!
Neapolitan
In his recorded anthology of the Neapolitan Song, Roberto Murolo (below) presents “Canto delle lavandale del Vomero” (Song of the Washerwomen of Vomero) from ca. 1200 as the first example of a song text handed down to us in the Neapolitan vernacular:
Tu m’aje prommiso
quatto moccatore
Oje moccatore. Oje moccatore
Io sò benuto se, io so benuto
Se me lo vuò dare,
me lo vuò dare...etc.
It is not remarkable that such early texts come
down to us in many dialects throughout Italy. It is
another question, however, from whether or not there
is traceable literature from the same period.
Unfortunately, there is a considerable gap in our
knowledge of Neapolitan as a literary language after
the appearance of early “Italian” (which was still
called “Tuscan” in some cases as late as 1700!). It is
not until the late 1400s that a number of names appear
in Naples: primarily Pier
Antonio Caracciolo, mentioned in various
sources as a “dialect” poet, and his contemprary
Jacopo Sannazzaro
(1458-1539). Apparently, nothing has survived of the
works of Caracciolo, and we know him from secondary
mention alone. Sannazzaro, on the other hand, is known
as one who wrote primarily in both Latin and “vernacular
Tuscan.”
Thus, it seems that for the two centuries between the Divine Comedy and 1500, there must been have a conscious decision on the parts of authors to choose either “Tuscan” or “dialect”, depending on the circumstances)—which is also to say that dialect was not overwhelmed by a standardized Italian, not in Naples, nor anywhere in Italy. And that is to say that regions in Italy have always existed—and continue to exist—in what linguists call a state of “diglossia”—i.e. the use of different varieties of the same language depending on social and political circumstances (including prestige, usually attached to the standard literary version). By 1600, dialect in Naples was firmly entrenched as a vehicle for literature, poetry and theater. For example, Giambattista Basile’s (1575-1632) Il Pentamerone (in dialect) is the first published collection of European fairy tales. With some fluctuation, depending on the age, Neapolitan has remained a strong literary language since that time.
Bibliography: