'Fare gli itagliani' in the Bolognese countryside. Some notes on language, literature and cultural history in postunification Italy
'Fare gli itagliani' in the Bolognese countryside. Some notes on language, literature and cultural history in postunification Italy
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博洛尼亚乡村的“Fare gli itagliani”。
DOI:
10.1080/02614340.2010.11917484
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发表时间:
2017
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Bonsaver G
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Bonsaver G
Rather than a village, Croara is better described as a smattering of farmhouses on the hills south of Bologna which gradually rise into the Appennines. At the time of Italy’s unification, the local economy was predominantly agricultural and the practice of sharecropping (mezzadria) resulted in peasants being scattered in farms built and owned by landowners. The farms were often inhabited by a single or extended family, large enough to work on a particular estate (hence the many abandoned farms which mark today’s mechanized farmland in vast tracts of Italy). Croara is the place where the subject of these notes was born, in August 1881, and where he lived until he decided to turn his life around and move to Florence. His name was Gaetano Pilati, little known even among historians of modern Italy, despite his political militancy, his business career, his involvement in the fight against Fascism and his eventual assassination on 3 October 1925. In those years, the distance between the countryside of Bologna and the city of Florence was not only geographical but could also be measured with a cultural yardstick. Equally with a linguistic one. This is linked to an issue which had to be tackled when working on a biographical study of Gaetano Pilati. As a son of peasants growing up in the 1880s, what was his knowledge of standard Italian? What was the connection between the dialect which he absorbed and spoke throughout his youth and the official and written medium he had to learn in order to become an active member of the Italian nation? It is an issue which concerned the majority of Italians. When Italy was “made” and became Regno d’Italia, in March 1861, around 75% of its population might have heard the news but certainly did