The Accademia della Crusca in Italy: past and presentdi Arturo Tosi
21 ottobre 2016
Most Italians still associate the name of the Accademia della Crusca with a mission to safeguard the best models of the Italian language. Indeed, many believe that the purest form of their national language is spoken in Florence, where the academy has its headquarters. Certainly for most Europeans who are well acquainted with Italy, old Florentine developed into modern Italian not so very differently from the way in which their own national language emerged; i.e. through hegemonic use by the ruling classes and the cultural prestige of one variety – usually that spoken in the capital – ensuring that it was gradually elevated to become the ‘standard’ form. However, the Italian linguistic situation is very different from that of other major European nations and is quite unique in Europe for a number of reasons (Tosi, 2005). First, the political unification of Italy did not take place until the middle of the nineteenth century (Barański and West, 2001). Second, the so-called ‘dialects’ of Italy are, in fact, Romance languages in their own right and not varieties of standard Italian (Maiden and Parry, 1997). Third, the transformation of Florentine into Italian, and its diffusion against a background of linguistic diversity in the Peninsula, has been a long and difficult process (De Mauro, 1970).
The debate about which models would be appropriate for a language, rich in multi-regional literature but without a national community of speakers, has lasted four centuries, from the Renaissance until Unification, and took the name of the questione della lingua (Richardson, 2001). Although the dispute appeared to be academic in nature, in practice it involved scholars and scientists from a variety of different disciplines. So much so that the philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), pointing out the deep cultural and social issues involved in these discussions, summarised the disputes with the famous comment: “Every time the question of the language surfaces, in one way or another, it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore: the formation and enlargement of the governing class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relationships between the governing groups and the national-popular mass, in other words to reorganize the cultural hegemony” (Gramsci, 1929-35).
Since its foundation, the Crusca Academy has had a leading role in this process, imposing a rigid linguistic purism based on Florentine; its original programme wasinformed by a concept of language purity selecting only the best models from the past for literature (Woodhouse, 1995). In the following centuries, however, when new demands for a common language, both written and spoken, shared by the entire people of Italy, were combined with the idea of national unity, it inevitably attracted criticism from those who saw the natural evolution of language constrained by the straightjacket of anachronistic norms. This explains the wealth of derivatives from the name Crusca, introduced to deride the pedantic attitudes of the academy (cruscare, cruscheggiare, cruscata, cruscheria) or the affected language of its academicians (cruschesco, cruschevole, cruscantissimo, cruscaio, cruscante, cruscheggiante) (Battaglia, Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, 1964).
The first dictionary of any modern language
Today we need to contextualise the origin of the Accademia della Crusca, in the days of the Italian Renaissance, when convivial pleasures and intellectual exercises were the common pursuit of learned societies (Chambers and Quiviger, 1995). Many of these urban academies were created in Tuscany and their members often adopted ironic denominations such as the Intronati (the Bewildered Ones, in Siena) and the Umidi (the Wet Ones, in Florence). In 1582, five members of the latter decided to form a new society, calling themselves Crusconi, i.e. people with a passion for cruscate (nonsense). However, the direction of their programme changed, once they admitted Lionardo Salviati, a distinguished literato who was a great admirer of Boccaccio and an author of a treatiseon Florentine. Salviati was convinced that the superior softness of this language (dolcezza incomparabile) gave such a supreme pleasure (dilettazione) to all those who spoke it that it would soon spread throughout the Italian Peninsula as a matter of consensus rather than coercion (imperio).
When Salviati persuaded his fellow academicians to adopt this linguistic vision, he also succeeded in changing their name from Crusconi to Accademici della Crusca (from a diary entry by Pietro de’ Bardi (1582) quoted by Migliorini, 1960). This new name was more pertinent to their mission, as the symbolism suggested that good language is like flour obtained by removing the chaff (crusca) from the grain, i.e. by refining it. Under the leadership of Salviati, the Crusca Academy embarked upon a work programme consisting of a careful inventory of Florentine, taking as models the texts of the most acclaimed writers of the past, mainly Petrarch for poetry and Boccaccio for prose.
This approach adhered to the thesis put forward by Pietro Bembo from Venice, whose preference for archaic Tuscan had dominated the debate in the previous century for two reasons. On the one hand, the great Tuscan writers of the past were considered indisputably the most elegant. On the other hand, because of the declining cultural prestige of Tuscany, the language of the new generation of Tuscan writers no longer elicited the same respect in the other cultural centres of Italy. The language codified by the academy had to be learnt through study, just like Latin was learnt by imitating classics: something that was normal at a time when writers did not write for the common people, and the common people did not read works of literature. Carlo Dionisotti, one of the greatest scholars of Italian, describing the cultural atmosphere of Florence when the Accademia della Crusca was set up, concluded that the Tuscan language did not actually conquer the rest of Italy, rather the rest of Italy conquered the Tuscan linguistic heritage in order to regulate it (1967).
Salviati died in 1589 but his project “del modo di fare un vocabolario” (‘how to compile a vocabulary’) was formalised in 1591 and, a year later, some 1300 entries for the letter ‘A’had already been completed. After two decades, during which some fifty literati and academics alternated between methodological discussions and the work of selecting and defining entries, the first great dictionary devoted to any modern language was published in Venice (1612). The aim of the dictionary “was not to present the usage of writers and of cultured people objectively, but to provide the norm to which this minority should conform in their writings” (Lepschy and Lepschy, 1977). A second edition followed in 1623, also published in Venice and this, too, was consistent with the principle of not including contemporary writers, either Tuscan or those writing in Tuscan from other regions. More significant was the positive attitude towards the language of science and, in particular, the neologisms of Galileo Galilei, a member of the academy himself from 1605. Committed to the use of Italian rather than Latin to reach a wider audience, the scientist was not involved in the writing of new entries but he was consulted by the editors for the definitions of new words, e.g. meccanico (mechanic), occhiali (spectacles), cannocchiale (telescope). That the new edition was still bound by archaic choices was evident in the exclusion of the works of one of the most popular Renaissance poets, Torquato Tasso: not a Tuscan himself, but a brilliant writer of that language, whose Gerusalemme Liberata was celebrated as a masterpiece throughout Europe.