The genesis of literature in Italy was, by comparison with developments in other countries of western Europe, singularly retarded. Though there are evidences that an Italian vernacular existed as early as the 9th century, there is no substantial body of literature that can be dated before the 13th, and even the first fragmentary literary glimmerings do not appear before the 12th. The explanation of this postponement is to be found, of course, in the persistence of Latin, which was, for historical and indeed geographical reasons, firmly entrenched in Italy. It seems clear that the educated class in the early Middle Ages regarded their vernacular simply as a spoken form of Latin, a language which they considered the only vehicle fit for literary expression; even Dante originally justified the use of the vernacular for only very limited and specific purposes. As a result of this unbroken Latin tradi^ tion, Italian literature did not go through the primitive phase seen in French or Spanish, for example, and hence there is no Italian Chanson de Roland and no Italian romancero. As another result, Italian literature has borne from its earliest days a strongly marked classicism, not only in the narrow sense of adherence to classical principles of style, but also in the broader sense of respect for tradition.

The grip of Latin was broken by two distinct literary forces, representing two different  human impulses—the courtly love of ladies and the popular religious revival. Be¬hind both these forces lay social and political causes: the rise of an articulate middle class and the beginnings of na¬tional consciousness.

Early Vernacular Poetry. Under the impact of the courtly love tradition, of Provencal origin, the Latin domination was shattered in the late 12th and early 13th centuries by Sordello, Alberto di Malespina, Lanfraneo Cigala, and other Italian poets who adopted Provencal as the vehicle of their amorous lyrics or political satires. The same courtly tradition was at work in what is called the Sicilian school, which flourished at the court of Frederick II (1194-1250), with the difference that here the language used was Italian. Though this Italian was a somewhat stilted idiom, the poets of the Sicilian school, who were by no means all Sicilians, tried from the outset to free themselves from dialect peculiarities and to express them¬selves in an ideal Italian. The language was as yet un¬formed, and the tradition of these poets was aristocratic and foreign; nonetheless, lyrics such as those of Pier delle Vigne, Jacopo da Lentini, who is said to be the inventor of the sonnet, and Rinaldo dAquino can still be read with plea¬sure. In their influence on subsequent Italian verse, how¬ever, these early Sicilian poems were more important for their form than for their substance.

Another and equally important use of the vernacular mani¬fested itself in Umbria. The religious impulse, fused with a search for simplicity and a love for nature, came to new life in central Italy and was stimulated by the activities and example of Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), its splendid embodiment. St. Francis’ Cantico delle creature (variously called “Praises of God’s Creatures” and “Canticle of the Sun”) is one of the most important examples of early Italian vernacular poetry. The succeeding generation produced on this pattern a number of Laudi, or “Praises,” a type of religious poetry in which lyric and dramatic elements were mingled. The ablest and most affecting of the school is Jacopone da Todi (c. 1230-1306), a Franciscan himself, whose dramatic defense of his beliefs and deep mystic sin¬cerity made a great impression on his contemporaries. There were many others of the same school, and the Laudi, though in a limited way, did much to make Italian poets and in¬tellectuals aware not only of the existence and possibilities of the vernacular but also of the vigor of a native inspiration that had about it none of the imported mannerisms of the court.

Tuscan Poetry. It was, however, in Tuscany that the vernacular came truly into its own. In the middle of the 13th century a group of Tuscan poets flourished who were aware of the formal and aristocratic graces of the Sicilians and their Provencal predecessors, and yet felt as well some¬thing of the sincerity of the Umbrian religious fervor. Out¬standing in this group were Guittone d’Arezzo (1230-1294), Chiaro Davanzati, and Guido Guinizelli (c. 1230-1276), with whom the dolce stil nuovo (“sweet new style”) begins. This school was characterized by a graceful combination of idealism, intellectualism, and spontaneity of expression. Its leading exponents were Guido Cavalcanti (c.1250-1300); Cino da Pistoia (1270-1336); and Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), who gratefully acknowledged his indebtedness to Guinizelli. At the same time a more realistic type of lyric, foreshadowing the manner of later satirists, also arose. Fol-gore da San Gimignano, for example, made of his calendar of youthful activities a kind of social commentary, and Cecco Angiolieri (C.1250-C.1312) had a gift for trenchant and coarse satire equaled only by some passages in Dante’s Divina commedia {Divine Comedy). In the field of didactic verse the Tesoretto (“Little Treasure”) of Brunetto Latini (C.1220-C.1294), the revered teacher of Dante, deserves men¬tion. It has been said with good reason that Dante united all the emotional and literary tendencies of his predecessors. Indeed, in his Divina commedia alone, he illustrates not merely the interplay of all the crosscurrents outlined above, but also the persistence of a purely Scholastic and dogmatic theme which had continued as the major intellectual pre¬occupation of the late Middle Ages—the harmonizing of revealed Christianity with Aristotelian science.

Beginnings of Prose. The 13th century came to witness the beginnings of Italian prose as well as the florescence of the lyric, and in the field of prose, too, Dante was a pioneer. His Vita nuova (New Life) is a collection of lyrics written with a lengthy prose gloss for which Dante chose to employ the vernacular on the advice of his friend Guido Cavalcanti. Other prose of the period followed the medieval pattern: there were translations not only from the Latin but also from Marco Polo’s Milione and Brunetto Latini’s Li livres dou tresor (the “Book of the Treasure”) (both originally in French), compilations and compendiums of tales or facts, such as the Cento novelle antiche and the Libro dei sette savi (“Book of the Seven Sages”), and the more original Composizione della terza of Ristoro d’Arezzo. History is
represented by the arid and sometimes fanciful Storia di Firenze of Ricordano Malespini, the more authentic and per¬ceptive chronicle of Dino Compagni belonging more properly to the following century. Drama, which had assumed a primitive form in the Laudi, ultimately evolved into a form called the sacra rappresentazione, or “sacred presentation.”

Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The 14th century was dominated by the great triumvirate, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and with them Italian literature came into a pre-eminence that was destined to last through the 16th century and to have incalculable influence on the intellectual and literary life of the Western world.
Dante actually belongs to the history of the culture of Western man rather than to any nation. His Divine Com¬edy gives permanent and majestic expression to the currents and preoccupations of the Middle Ages—didactic, doctrinal, encyclopedic. It fuses, too, the secular motifs of the age; the threads of the amatory conventions of courtly love, the satiric postures of earlier vernacular writings, the idealiza¬tion of knightly virtues are all woven into the philosophical-theological tapestry. At the same time, the poem looks for¬ward, and the syncretism that permits the author boldly and ingeniously to populate his Comedy with figures from the ancient world and to establish a new and more perceptive appreciation of the classical tradition gives a new direction to the literature of the West. Allegory, realism, and doctrine are artfully interwoven and a personal experience is univer¬salized in a manner previously beyond the grasp of creative writers.

Dante’s interests were wide, focusing, for all his concern with the hereafter, on the problems of life on earth. Politics is a consistent concern of the Comedy no less than of the De monorchia, and both as artist and patriot Dante had a passionate interest in the capacity of the Italian language to capture human experience. Aside from the magnitude of his genius and accomplishment, he is important for having made the vernacular the vehicle for intellectual and philo¬sophic discussion no less than lyric expression. He showed that the new language was capable of conveying the most re¬fined shades of meaning, and by his skill in handling it he guided the uses of the new tongue somewhat away from popular inspiration, and reinforced the older or Latin tradi¬tion of intellectuality.

Petrarch (1304-1374), although very different in tempera¬ment from Dante, is a figure who looms just as large in world literature; in the eyes of his contemporaries and im¬mediate successors he counted far more than his fellow Tuscan. In his Canzoniere, the famous sonnet sequence inspired by his unrequited love for a woman named Laura, he refined the lyric tradition of the troubadour poets, com¬bining elegance and clarity with a new note of wistful melancholy. Reflecting the restlessness and uncertainties of his century—which was for Europe a time of trial marked by the Hundred Years War, the dislocation of the papacy in Avignon, and the Black Death (1348)—Petrarch gave moving expression to the self-consciousness and introspection that distinguish the modern man from the medieval man. Direct imitators of his manner followed him in Italy, France, Spain, and England, and the indirect inheritors of the tradi¬tion are almost past counting.

The effect of Petrarch’s Latin works was, if anything, more profound. His letters, of which there are more than 600, comprise a history of 40 years of Italian life and give us a thorough, generally honest self-portrait of an unusual and versatile mind. The devotion to the classical tradition and certain Roman authors, particularly Cicero, evident in the letters and in the other Latin works, makes Petrarch the true founder of humanism. Although a man of unques¬tionably devout Christian belief, he had little use for the philosophy of the Middle Ages and indeed regarded the immediate past with distaste. He had a great interest in the world about him, the beauties of nature, the accomplish¬ments of man, the character of human life. Convinced that he lived in wretched times, he yet held that the world could be a happy place to live in and all the better for the study and cultivation of letters. His outlook profoundly influenced the course of Euro¬pean culture. The trajectory of his own career, in the course of which he man¬aged to live indepen¬dently and with com¬plete freedom of ex¬pression even though subsidized by various princely patrons, was the first example in European history of the independent man of letters, and for all the differences in points of view, he is the forerunner and model of such vari¬ous writers as Machi-avelli, Montaigne, and Rousseau.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), lacking the spiritual and moral grandeur of Dante and the insinuating grace of Pe¬trarch, was more versatile than either and, for the impact of his masterpiece, the Decameron, hardly less important. His epic, the Filostrato, set a new fashion that was taken up by Chaucer, and the octaves in which it was sung later served Ariosto and Tasso. His pastorals, notably the Ninfale fie-solano, stand at the fountainhead of that swelling stream; his satiric Corbaccio also left its inheritance. But it is the Decameron that truly endures. Throughout these 100 tales, drawn from all kinds of sources, runs a thread of tolerance, good-natured acceptance of the world and of the demands of nature, and a consistent skepticism on matters of dogma, whether religious or social. From one point of view the book is the assertion of the ethic of the bourgeoisie—prac¬tical, shrewd, and, if unidealistic, at least decent and demo¬cratic. Renegades, rogues, and faithless wives are allowed to speak in their own defense, and their eloquence is shat¬tering to the medieval complex of rigid forms and credos. As in the case of Dante and Petrarch, it is the writer’s own gifts that assure his world its immortality; the tales are told in a crisp, economical style, yet with a certain ele¬gance that reveals the classical preparation of the author. The Decameron was the inspiration of the talented story¬tellers of the Renaissance and is still widely read.

Other 14th-Century Writers. As might have been expected, works written by lesser writers of the century showed the influence of the great triumvirate. The Divma commedia was imitated in the Dittamondo of Fazio degli Uberti (died 1367), and the Quadriregio (“Four Kingdoms”) of Federigo Frezzi (died 1416); neither work is read now¬adays, and the same may be said of the more lively, some¬what ill-natured semi-parody, L’acerba (literally, “the bitter poem,” perhaps with reference to the sourness of its doctrine and style) by Cecco d’Ascoli (1269-1327). A like neglect has befallen the imitators of Petrarch (Petrarchisti), who were already abundant by the end of the century. The story¬telling tradition of the Decameron was a more fruitful vein, however. The Pecorone (1378; English translation, 1897) of Giovanni Fiorentino and the novelle of Giovanni Sercambi (1347-1424) are, while clearly inspired by Boccaccio, not with¬out merits of their own, and the most original genius of the last third of the century, Franco Sacchetti (C.1335-C.1400), also owes something to Boccaccio, though his novelle have a duly recognized originality and freshness. Sacchetti’s verse, too, stands out from the field of lesser rhymesters. Two other figures should be noted in the twilight of this great century: Antonio Pucci (died 1390) of Florence, a versatile writer remembered for his capricious compendium Zibaldone, his comic verses, and his rhymed descriptions and observations on events of his time; and the ardent St. Catherine of Siena (1347-13 80), whose letters are pervaded by religious faith and studded with practical political commentary. The tradition of distinguished historical writing, initiated by Compagni, was maintained by Giovanni and Matteo Villani, whose chronicles cover the history of Florence down to 1363.