The Italian Language

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The Rise of Florence

In the XII century the Tuscan dialect began to stand out due to the central position of Tuscany, the commercial importance of its most important city, Florence and the decline of Sicilian, following the Angevin conquest of Sicily. As Tuscany had been off the road taken by the Barbarians on their way to and from Rome, the language spoken there had not been so influenced as in it had been in other regions of Italy and tended to depart less in morphology and phonology from classical Latin, therefore harmonising best with the Ancient culture.

In the 1200s, as Florence’s commercial importance grew, the language was used much more for commerce than for anything else. Even so writers emerged whose interests were not entirely confined to the mercantile. Among these we can cite Brunetto Latini (1220-1294), who, during his six years of exile in Paris, became a link between that country and Tuscany. He wrote both in French and in the Florentine vernacular. The writers of The Dolce Stil Nuovo (1270-1310), which in theory continued the Provençal tradition, considering themselves as belonging to the Sicilian school of poetry of Frederick II (1194–1250), the Holy Roman Emperor, can be traced back to Latini’s influence. In practice its main writers went their own way, using their knowledge of science and philosophy to achieve their ends. Among its main writers we can cite Guido Cavalcanti (before 1258-1300) and Dante. Some members of the merchant classes were inspired to write tales in the vernacular. We can cite Dino Compagni (d. 1324), who wrote about local conflicts, and Giovanni Villani (d. 1348), who took wider events as his subjects.

		The pre-eminence of the Tuscan dialect and its transformation into the Italian language can be assigned to the rise of three great writers who lived and worked in Florence in a period of just over a century (1265-1375). It should be noted that they wrote not in the Italian language, but in the Vernacular. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321): Dante’s Comedy (later given the epithet Divine), one of the great works of world literature, was written in the vernacular an not in Latin, as might have been expected. He believed it was possible to use the popular language as a literary language and had already defended this argument in two unfinished treatises: De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio.
An Allegorical Portrait of Dante by an anonymous XVII century Italian painter. National Gallery of Art, Washington

Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374): Petrarch, though born in Arezzo, was of Florentine stock, as his father was at the time in exile from Florence. He was a passionate admirer of ancient Roman civilization, being the first to be crowned poet laureate since Ancient times. He was one of the great early Renaissance humanists, creating a Republic of Letters. His philological and Latin writings as well as his translations from Latin into the Vernacular were highly respected, but it was his love poetry, written in the Vernacular tongue, that made his name live until our days. His Canzoniere had enormous influence on the poets of the XV and XVI centuries.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75): Boccaccio, a man from the rising commercial classes, is the author of the Decameron. It consists of one hundred stories told by characters who are also part of a story that provides the setting for the whole, much like The Arabian Nights. The work was to become a model for fiction and prose writing, influencing writers as far as England and where Geoffrey Chaucer’s (Ca 1343-1400) Canterbury Tales is consciously moulded on Boccaccio’s model. Boccaccio. the first to write a commentary on Dante, was a friend and follower of Petrarch