The University of Melbourne offers a three-week study abroad program on Italian Cultural Studies in partnership with ISI Florence, and this year it brought thirteen enthusiastic students here in Florence. Prof. Matt Absalom, who led the program, and the students arrived on June 30th. While in Florence, they had the opportunity to learn in class but also to visit some of the landmarks of our beautiful city, accompanied by local professors who helped them absorb as much knowledge as possible.
One of the learning opportunities they had was a lecture delivered by Prof. Tommaso De Robertis on the History of Italian Language at Palazzo Bargagli, one of the two buildings of ISI Florence. The professor took students through the history of the language from the Middle Ages until the present day. He explained how Italian evolved from the Latin used in the Middle Ages to the one spoken today, tracing the historical evolutions that took place in Italy through the centuries and analyzing how the language reflected those developments. He then focused on the crucial role of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the so called “tre corone” (“three crowns”) of Italian literature, who provided the foundation for the development of the modern Italian language. In fact, when Italy became a unified nation in 1861, the Italian language as we know it today didn’t exist yet, but it was rather a plethora of different dialects. It thus became necessary to define what the official Italian language would be. Discussions on this had started back in the Renaissance, when the “questione della lingua” (“language question”) arose: which dialect should be chosen to become the Italian language? Three different positions emerged:
This last position ended up being the definitive one – in particular, the Tuscan vernacular (the one used by Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio) was selected as the new Italian. To spread the knowledge in the whole peninsula, the Grand Dukes of Tuscany promoted the establishment of various academies and intellectual circles where Florentine vernacular was cultivated and fostered, while in 1612, the first dictionary of Italian language was published by the Florentine Accademia della Crusca.
It is the Accademia della Crusca, still active in Florence, that the students also had the chance to visit, to learn more about the development of the Italian language throughout the centuries. Here they were welcomed by Prof. Federigo Bambi and Mariella Canzani – Bambi is a professor of legal history at the Università di Firenze, specializing in the history of legal language, and thus appointed as an academic of the Accademia della Crusca, while Canzani has been collaborating with the academy since 2000, initially in the library and later on various projects combining linguistics and informatics. They showed the class the conference room, where they gave them a presentation on the history of this important institution, starting from the structure where it is hosted, which is a beautiful sixteenth-century villa, to the development of its activities through the last five centuries or so.
They explained that the villa also features one of the most beautiful gardens in the city, which is adorned with flowers in spring to recreate Botticelli’s famous Primavera painting in the Uffizi Gallery. The villa was expanded under Cosimo I de’ Medici (then duke of Tuscany) in the 1500s; after the Medici, it passed to the House of Lorraine in 1737. Before its expansion, the Medici used it as a temporary residence for young women who could then be married to Medici family members. It served as a school in the 1920s and as a military hospital during World War II. Since 1974, the villa has been the headquarters of the Accademia della Crusca, which previously had other locations.
The students were then taken to the picturesque Sala delle Pale, where Bambi and Canzani explained how the name “Crusca” originated. Around 1570, scholars used to gather here to discuss language in a non-serious manner, forming the “brigata dei crusconi”, because “cruscata” meant something non-serious and humorous. Among these 6 men was Leonardo Salviati, who decided to formalize this group into an academy, officially founded on January 25, 1583. This birthed a symbolism related to flour, where the true language is the good flour obtained through the processing and removal of the bran (which is called “crusca” in Italian). The emblems of the academicians are baker’s peels (“pale” in Italian), bearing their nickname, a scroll with a motto, and an image. Salviati was the one who established that the language used by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio should set the standard for the first Italian dictionary in 1612, which served as a model for lexicography all over Europe at the time.
The class then had the opportunity to see the beautiful library, and the adjacent “sala dantesca”, where academics are working on the “Vocabolario Dantesco”, a project aimed at facilitating the full understanding of Dante’s language. There, Bambi and Canzani showed the students an original copy of the fifth edition of the Accademia’s dictionary, which started in the 1800s, but was interrupted in 1923 by Giovanni Gentile, Minister of Education at the time. This interruption marked a new phase for the Accademia, whose primary function used to be the creation of the dictionary, which was, however, a highly expensive endeavor, both in terms of time and money. Since then, the Accademia della Crusca has focused on publications on language, language studies, and language monitoring, which it continues to do today. It receives state funding for scientific publications and manages three scientific journals.
Lastly, the University of Melbourne students also had the chance to meet Prof. Vera Gheno, a sociolinguist and translator from the Università di Firenze who collaborated with the Accademia della Crusca for about 20 years. She gave a lecture at Palazzo Rucellai (the ISI Florence headquarters) on how languages change and adapt to today’s world, with an emphasis on inclusive and genderless language. The lecture started with a general overview on the relationship between language and reality, focusing on how these are always entangled. As Prof. Gheno explained, the way we perceive reality and the language we use are always interconnected.
She then moved on to cover the issue of genders in different languages, as there are different types of languages based on if and how they recognize genders: for instance, Finno-Ugric languages are genderless, Scandinavian languages and English are natural gender languages (nouns don’t have a gender, but pronouns do), while Italian, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish are languages that have a grammatical gender (both nouns and pronouns have a gender). Therefore, for those languages that are not genderless, discussions are in place on how to use a language that is as gender neutral as possible.
In the Italian language, the neutral gender doesn’t exist, and even objects and concepts have a gender. When it comes to people, though, Italian is somehow obliged to use masculine or feminine – and this may lead to problems when we are talking about a heterogenous group, which may include men, women, and queer people. Another issue is the generalized use of the masculine form even for names of women’s jobs (such as “ministro” rather than “ministra”). In these cases, some more progressive experts are trying to find solutions to make the language more inclusive or neutral.
We are happy to say that the Melbourne students were enthusiastic about all these opportunities to learn more about the Italian language and culture directly from its birthplace. They are now ready to go back to Australia with a wealth of valuable knowledge and an unforgettable experience!