Questione della lingua

1305) put forward the view that the language of literature should be based on no single dialect, but should draw on the best elements of all, to achieve the universal quality to which he aspired as a stylistic ideal (though in practice he himself wrote in an enriched form of his own Florentine variety of Tuscan).

[4] Fuller and better organized than earlier dictionaries, the Vocabolario provided a model for the Académie Française and projects in Germany and Spain; but it excluded many technical and scientific terms and was characterized by an archaizing purism.

[3] After a largely unchanged second edition (Venice, 1623), the third (Florence, 1691) drew on more modern authors, listed more scientific and everyday terms, and marked some words as archaic.

[6] Another contribution to the debate came from the Jesuit writer Daniello Bartoli who, in his famous Il torto e 'l diritto del non-si può (1655), argued against the restrictive and prescriptive principles of the Vocabolario della Crusca in favour of openness based on educated good taste and judgement.

[10] Girolamo Gigli tried to prove the superiority of Sienese over Florentine Italian in a polemical Vocabolario cateriniano (published in 1717 with the works of St Catherine of Siena).

[3] Cesari represents the most extreme form of reaction against French influence on Italian, and against the ‘corrupting’ modernist positions of Cesarotti's Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue, in favour of the linguistic ‘purity’ of 14th-century Tuscan texts.

[3] Ascoli understood that the problem could no longer be solved artificially by imposing a model, if Italian was to become the spoken and written possession of the whole nation, instead of the preserve of an educated elite.

The solution lay therefore not in trying to persuade people to accept Florentine or any other model, but in raising the nation's general level of education and allowing the process of natural selection to take its course.

This is substantially what has happened, and as a result, the language has actually become less rather than more Florentine since Unification, because of the influence of Rome in government administration and the media, and of Northern Italy in the economic life of the nation.