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Page 1: Italian poets and writers

A GLIMPSE INTO THE

ITALIAN LITERARY HERITAGE

Italian Poets and Writers

Page 2: Italian poets and writers

The ORIGINS

The Aeneid A book for all the times and all people

Virgil's Aeneid is as eternal as Rome itself, a sweeping epic of arms and heroism--the searching portrait of a man caught between love and duty, human feeling and the force of fate.

Aeneas flees the ashes of Troy to found the city of Rome and change forever the course of the Western world--as literature as well.

Filled with drama, passion, and the universal pathos that only a masterpiece can express, the Aeneid has influenced writers for over 2,000 years.

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Twelve Books rooted in Classicism

Publius Vergilius Maro (October 15, 70 BC – September 21, 19 BC)

Virgil is traditionally ranked as one of Rome's greatest poets.

His Aeneid, modeled after Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, is considered the national epic of ancient Rome.

Virgil's work has had wide and deep influence on Western literature, most notably the Divine Comedy of Dante, in which Virgil appears as Dante's guide through Hell and Purgatory.

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‘THE THREE CROWNS’

THE WORKS OF  PETRARCH, DANTE AND BOCCACCIO IN THE 1300S FORESHADOWED THE DRAMATIC CHANGE WESTERN CIVILIZATION WAS ABOUT TO UNDERGO AND REVOLUTIONIZED LITERATURE EVEN BEFORE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRINTING PRESS.  

THIS WAS AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THE CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL TRANSFORMATION SWEEPING EUROPE.

Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio

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They were scholars, admirers of the humanism and were determined to bring it into their world. Their most profound impact is how they helped influence the rebirth of knowledge Europe was beginning to experience.

Who we are as a culture — how we think and what we value

— was influenced by these three men.

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‘Dante’ -Durante degli Alighieri- ‘the Supreme Poet’ (c. 1265–1321)

Dante was born in Florence. The exact date of birth is unknown, although it is generally believed to be around 1265. This can be deduced from autobiographic allusions in La Divina Commedia.

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), guided by the Roman poet Virgil and Paradise (Paradiso), guided by Beatrice, the subject of his love and of another of his works, La Vita Nuova.

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While the vision of Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and knowledge to appreciate.

Purgatorio, is the most lyrical and human of the three, and also introduces the reader to many poets who according to Dante are spending eternity in limbo ;

Paradiso, is the most heavily theological and has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).With its seriousness of purpose, its literary stature and the

range — both stylistically and subjectwise — of its content, the Comedy soon became a cornerstone in the evolution of Italian as an established literary language.

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Italian‘la langue de

Dante’Dante was more aware than most earlier Italian writers of the variety of Italian dialects and of the need to create a literature, and a unified literary language, beyond the limits of Latin writing at the time; in that sense he is a forerunner of the Renaissance, with its effort to create vernacular literature in competition with earlier classical writers.

Dante reconciled his humanism with devotion to the Catholic Church.   Dante’s Divine Comedy does not contradict Catholic theology. The punishments fit the crimes, and Paradiso is true love through union with God, deeper any human or romantic love.

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The Next Generation

Francesco Petrarca (1304 - 1374 )

But while Dante railed against those who had been unjust and corrupt, Petrarch went deeper through introspection and his belief that God gave humans intellect and creativity for each person to use to improve their experience of life.   He remained a devout Catholic, but his shift of focus from the Church to the Greeks and Romans and their humanism helped begin a process that ultimately would undermine the church.

“Petrarch changed the world through his poetry”

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)

The story line of Boccaccio’s Decameron shows one reason everything was about to change .

Like his friend Petrarch, Boccaccio did not see any contradiction between his faith and humanism.    His literature nonetheless broke with traditional forms, even as his stories were based on old folk tales.

Boccaccio’s stories and language were often lewd and risque. In Italy during the time of the Black Death, a group of seven young women and three young men flee from plague-ridden Florence to a deserted villa in the countryside of Fiesole for two weeks. To pass the evenings, every member of the party tells a story each night, except for one day per week for chores, and the holy days in which they do no work at all, resulting in ten nights of storytelling over the course of two weeks. Thus, by the end of the fortnight they have told 100 storiesThroughout Decameron the mercantile ethic prevails and predominates. The commercial and urban values of quick wit, sophistication, and intelligence are treasured, while the vices of stupidity and dullness are cured, or punished.

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Alessandro Manzoni The Making of a

NationAlessandro F. T. Manzoni (7 March 1785 – 22 May 1873) was an Italian poet

and novelist.

He is famous for the novel The Betrothed (I

Promessi Sposi) (1827), generally ranked among

the masterpieces of world literature.

The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language.

The Betrothed an Historical Novel

Round the episode of the Innominato, historically identified with Bernardino Visconti, the first manuscript of the novel I Promessi Sposi began to grow into shape, and was completed in September 1823.

The work was published, after being deeply reshaped by the author and revised by friends in 1825–1827, at the rate of a volume a year; it at once raised its author to the first rank of literary fame. It is generally agreed to be his greatest work, and the paradigm of modern Italian language.

In 1822, Manzoni published his second tragedy, Adelchi, turning on the overthrow by Charlemagne of the Lombard domination in Italy, and containing many veiled allusions to the existing Austrian rule.

With these works Manzoni’s literary career was practically closed. But he laboriously revised The Betrothed in Tuscan-Italian, and in 1840 republished it in that form, with a historical essay, Storia della Colonna Infame, on details of the 17th century plague in Milan so important in the novel. He also wrote a small treatise on the Italian language.

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A BRIEF OUTLINE OF MODERN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN LITERATURE

THE NOBEL LAUREATES OF

ITALY

Italian Nobel Prize Winners

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Giosuè A. G. Carducci (1835 –1907) was an Italian poet and teacher. In 1906 he became the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Grazia Deledda (1871 – 1936) was an Italian writer whose works won her the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1926. Deledda's whole work is based on strong facts of love, pain and death upon which rests the feeling of sin and of an inevitable fatality.

Carducci (1906) and Deledda (1926)

"not only in consideration of his deep learning and critical research, but above all as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces"

Prize motivation

"for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity

picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general".

Prize motivation

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Luigi Pirandello (1867 –1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet and short story writer. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901 –1968) was an Italian author and along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century.

Pirandello( 1934) and Quasimodo ( 1959)

Prize motivation: "for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art"

Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40

plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are

often seen as forerunners for Theatre of the Absurd.

Prize motivation: "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times"

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Eugenio Montale (1896 –1981), widely considered the greatest Italian lyric poet since Giacomo Leopardi, was awarded the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Dario Fo (24 March 1926) is an Italian actor-playwright, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter and political campaigner, and recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature

Montale (1975) and Fo (1997 )

Attentive to the effects of history, Montale's poetry stands out as congenial to spirits that are aware of the consequences of the second world tragedy, which the writer saw as temporary reflections of an evil without origin and without end, according to a parable which makes him belong to the more conscious part of the European intellect

Prize motivation: "for his distinctive poetry which,

with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values

under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions“

Dario Fo is the most widely performed contemporary playwright in world theatre.

Much of his dramatic work depends on improvisation and comprises the recovery of "illegitimate" forms of theatre, such as those performed by giullari (medieval strolling players) and, more

famously, the ancient Italian style of commedia dell' arte.

The Swedish Academy praised Fo as a writer "who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity

of the downtrodden".