The Three Crowns
It's no 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 in oral form, but where only ecclesiastical Latin predominated in written form. From the 13th century onwards, in Umbria with Francis of Assisi and then at the Sicilian court ruled by Frederick II, works appeared in vernacular, or "vulgar" languages, the forerunners of the revolution that began in Tuscany, the birthplace 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 of world literature: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265. Brought up in a family of minor nobility, orphaned first by his mother, then by his father, he married Gemma, to whom he had been destined since the age of twelve, but it was his chaste, almost silent love for Beatrice that was to permeate all his 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. Dante's deep despair inspired him to write La Vita Nuova, an almost mystical ode to the passion of love. The poet went on to experiment in his Rimes, and became the most fervent exponent of the Dolce Stil Novo movement, according to the expression itself taken from his later writings, whose precursor was Guido Guinizzelli of Bologna. The "new soft style", which Dante explored with his lifelong friend Guido Cavalcanti, intellectualized feelings and advocated refinement. After love came politics, and with it the long exile that led him to flee Florence, where he was condemned to the stake. On this endless road, Dante devoted himself to writing, drafting De Vulgari eloquentia, an unfinished treatise in which he studied the various dialects and vowed to create a single vulgar language. He then devoted himself until the end of his life, in 1321, in Ravenna, to his masterpiece, the Comedy, which, long after his death, would be described as Divine. This long poem of one hundred songs is divided into three parts: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. It recounts Dante's spiritual wanderings and his path to redemption, following in the footsteps of Virgil and Beatrice. The Divine Comedy was such an immediate success that the Tuscan language spread far beyond the region's 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 his father's political relations with Dante. Petrarch, as we call him in French, lived in Carpentras, Montpellier and above all Avignon, where he too experienced the shock of a hopeless love affair 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 the fact remains that she inspired some of the most beautiful sonnets he composed in his Vaucluse retreat. His major work, the Canzoniere, is written in Tuscan, but the man, diplomat and humanist, also used Latin for his historical writings, including Africa, which brought him fame and the poets' laurel wreath. On 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 just as complex, oscillating between admiration for his muse and first love Flammetta, which can be found in several of his works, eroticism, which he did not hesitate to evoke using the charms of Venus and nymphs, and misogyny in one of his stories, Il Corbacccio, The Raven. But Boccaccio is best remembered for his Decameron, the "book of ten days". It was certainly the great plague of 1348 that gave him the idea for this collection of one hundred short stories, featuring seven young women and three elegant men who shut themselves away in the church of Santa Maria Novella to escape the epidemic, passing the time by telling each other stories, from the most tragic to the most sensual. Written in Italian, this book made Boccaccio to prose what Dante was to poetry: an innovator.
From the 15th to the 19th century
In the 15th century, the Quattrocento for Italians, Florence was home to many writers, such as Lorenzo de' Medici, known as the Magnificent, the humanist Angelo Politian and the statesman Donato Acciaiuoli, to name but a few, but posterity has remembered above all Nicolas Machiavelli, whose surname gave rise to a commonly used adjective. Born in 1469 into an old Florentine family, Machiavelli was educated as a humanist, receiving all the classical culture of the time. Embarking on a political career, he quickly climbed the ranks and was appointed secretary to the Florence chancellery in 1498. This faultless career did not prevent his relegation and imprisonment when, in 1513, he was accused of plotting against the Medici, who were regaining power. Machiavelli tried to regain their good graces by writing, and it was to Lorenzo II de' Medici that he dedicated The Prince, a manual explaining how to achieve and maintain governance, even if it meant using morally reprehensible levers. This political treatise had been inspired in part by Caesar Borgia, whom he had met on one of his diplomatic missions. When the work was published, the writer's body was already resting in Florence's Santa Croce basilica.
Pierre l'Arétin (1492-1556) was also a shrewd political strategist, although instead of flattery he used the threat of his particularly sharp pen. Don't we owe him the maxim: "Pay me or I'll cover you in mud", which seems to have been well heard by the powerful of his day, who were also willing, from time to time, to finance satirical sonnets against their enemies? If the "Divine", as he called himself, had an eventful social life, it was his sulphurous writings that made him both hated and adored. His Ragionamenti has survived the centuries and translations, and is now available in our bookshops from the fine Allia publishing house. He also wrote comedies, but also some pious books! Legend has it that "Le Fléau des princes" literally died of laughter on hearing an obscene joke, which would no doubt have amused the man whose life alone is a novel.
Far more serious, the Accademia della Crusca was formed in 1583. Its five founding members, who came from the Florence Academy, had linguistic ambitions and studied Tuscan in all its purity. In 1612, the first Italian-language dictionary was published. A few years later, in 1633, Antonio Magliabechi was born, an ardent bibliophile who, on his death, bequeathed the 28,000 works he had patiently collected. This collection forms the basis of Florence's Central National Library.
The Renaissance was certainly over, and the 18th century witnessed the Inquisition's auto-da-fé of Tommaso Crudeli's works in the Piazza della Signoria, while Castruccio Buonamici decided to leave the Church to embark on a military career. But it wasn't until the 19th century that we once again heard a more familiar name: Carlo Collodi. Real name Carlo Lorenzini, Pinocchio 's father was born in Florence in 1826. The son of servants, he was destined for the priesthood, but dropped out of school before embarking on a career in journalism, particularly in music and theater criticism, some of it satirical. Despite two interruptions to take part in the Wars of Independence, he continued to contribute to a number of titles throughout his career, as well as working as a clerk in the censorship office, which enabled him to read what was being written for the stages of Tuscany at the time, and to indulge his passion for the theater. At the dawn of his fifties, he turned to children's literature after being asked to adapt Perrault's Tales into Italian. Forced, it is said, by gambling debts that he had to settle, and Carlo, now Collodi, having a somewhat dissolute private life, the first chapters of The Story of a Marionette appeared in 1881 in Giornale per i bambini. Although Pinocchio 's adventures initially ended with his suicide, the editor's insistence made it possible to extend the series. Two years later, the episodes in the life of the little wooden puppet, whose nose grows longer with every lie, were collected in a book and met 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 latter's poetry, influenced as much by the quietude of his Tuscan childhood as by the tragedy that marred his family, his father having accidentally killed one of his sons before committing suicide, is mainly concerned with the history of Italy, which certainly explains why it is little known abroad, although his Odes barbares have been published in French by the BNF. His Œuvres poétiques, which he reorganized under nine themes in 1901, earned him Italy's first Nobel Prize for Literature. Ill and weakened, the poet and teacher was unable to collect his prize and died the following year, in 1907.
Like a breath of fresh air, the fledgling 20th century was marked by the emergence of the Futurist movement, which extolled and advocated modernity. Aldo Palazzeschi (1885-1974), who preferred to adopt his grandmother's name and forsake his father's, Giuriani, followed Filippo Marinetti's lead, publishing L'Incendiario in 1910 and Il codice Perià in 1911. Although fully committed to the Florentine magazine Lacerba, which also welcomed Guillaume Apollinaire's Manifeste de l'Antitradition Futuriste, Aldo Palazzeschi distanced himself for political reasons at the start of the Great War. His isolation in no way prevented him from writing, and 1934 saw the success of his novel The Materassi Sisters, later adapted for the cinema. Despite the fame and admiration he enjoyed among the avant-garde in the 1960s, the writer and poet preferred his solitude. Some of his works have been translated into French by Gallimard.
The new century also saw the life and death of 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'll 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 a fabulist, 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. Those interested in the rise of fascism in Florence can also try their hand at Chronique des pauvres amants (published by Albin Michel) by Vasco Patrolini (1913-1991), or watch the film of the same name.
One of Italy's most admired contemporary authors was born near Florence, but it was in Japan that she spent part of her childhood, experiencing the hell of a concentration camp. Then came Sicily and finally Rome, where she ran away to join her father. Dacia Maraini, who was also Alberto Moravia's companion, put all her energy into literature, writing for the theater, trying her hand at poetry and contributing to magazines such as Nuovi Argomenti and Il Mondo. His first novel, La Vacanza, appeared in 1962, and was published in French by Grasset the following year. Recognition of her talent also came with Marianna Ucria's The Silent Life, a magnificent portrait of a young 18th-century deaf-mute, married to her much older uncle, who finds refuge in his library and freedom in the ideas of the Enlightenment. Dacia Maraini a feminist? Perhaps, as she helped found the all-women Teatro della Maddelena in 1973. An assertive female voice that we are delighted to discover in translation in Le Bateau pour Kôbé and more recently with Caro Pier Paolo (2022).
It's impossible to conclude this overview of Tuscan literature without mentioning Antonio Tabucchi, born in 1943 near Pisa, and who died in his native Portugal in 2012. A great admirer of Fernando Pessoa's work, Tabucchi was a teacher and director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon, and the author of some magnificent novels that Bernard Comment is gradually retranslating for Gallimard. Nocturne indien, Prix Médicis étranger 1987, tells the story of a man's wanderings in India in search of a friend. The author presents it as one long insomnia, and the journey, dreamlike as it is, is carried along by a refined writing style like no other. Reality, on the other hand, prevails in Pereira prétend, an emblematic work of 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.
