In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Rime by Giovanni Della Casa
  • Francesco Venturi
Giovanni Della Casa. Rime. Ed. Stefano Carrai. Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 2014. xlviii + 276 pages. ISBN 9788857522876.

The most authoritative twentieth-century expert on the Italian Renaissance, Carlo Dionisotti, ranked Giovanni Della Casa as the most prominent poet of the generation born at the beginning of the Cinquecento. Aside from gaining considerable popularity throughout Europe thanks to his book of manners, the Galateo, Della Casa already received high appreciation for his verse from his contemporaries and profoundly impacted the development of poetic language in the second half of the sixteenth century. Despite his great reputation, his perfectionism and extremely self-demanding attitude prevented him from putting any of his writings into print and he was even said to have ordered all his works to be burnt whilst on his deathbed. After partial and restricted circulation, Della Casa’s Rime, together with the Galateo and the Oration for the Emperor Charles V, were published in Venice in 1558, two years after his death, by his loyal secretary Erasmo Gemini. Encompassing fifty-nine sonnets, four canzoni and one sestina, the collection stands out due to the austere, classicist style and restraint of the lyrics when compared to the overflowing, and often mediocre, books of rhymes in vogue at the time.

Around fifteen years ago, Della Casa’s poems enjoyed an extraordinary boost of interest as they were almost simultaneously edited with extensive commentaries and notes in 2001 and 2003, by Giuliano Tanturli (Parma: [End Page 294] Guanda) and Stefano Carrai (Torino: Einaudi) respectively. Both works were based upon the critical text provided by Roberto Fedi in 1978 (Roma: Salerno), but differed substantially in their philological evaluation of the posthumous print. With sound arguments, Carrai rejects the predominant idea that Della Casa ever left a fully concluded and polished collection and gives evidence that significant changes and editorial handlings were most likely made by Gemini after his death. This is demonstrated by the mass of substantive variants that separate the print from the two codices Magliabechiano VII 794 and Chigiano O VI 80, in which the poet sought to assemble his lyrics until the final months of his life. The structural arrangement and sequencing also vary noticeably insomuch as three sonnets recorded within the Chigiano manuscript are inexplicably excluded from the print and the two final compositions appear in reversed order. However, Carrai does not go as far as to propose a new critical edition, acknowledging the historical importance of the 1558 print, which has since constituted the vulgate text and determined the work’s reception over the centuries.

A revised and updated version of Carrai’s commentary has now been conveniently published in a fine volume within the brand new series of annotated Italian literary texts by Mimesis (Milano-Udine), under the direction of Carrai himself, Carlo Caruso, and Luca Danzi. The blend of scientific rigor and readability makes the volumes of the series accessible to a varied, cultured audience and not exclusively to scholars. Erudite, illuminating introductions contextualize each of Della Casa’s poems, offering detailed frameworks and taking into account the textual variants. The audacious use of enjambment and hyperbaton continuously breaks the correspondence between syntactic and prosodic phrasing rendering Della Casa’s poetry not only grave and inherently dramatic, but also convoluted and arduous. All those passages that might prove disorienting for the non-specialist reader are singled out and accurately paraphrased in the notes, which are exhaustive without being prolix or redundant. What distinguishes Carrai’s commentary and makes it a momentous addition to previous studies is the painstaking deciphering of the complex inter-textual web of the lyrics. References are traced to Latin and vernacular classics, but Carrai also detects conspicuous borrowings and reminiscences from a number of still neglected sixteenth-century poets, such as Bernardo Tasso, Francesco Maria Molza, Giovanni Guidiccioni, and Annibal Caro, to name but a few.

Careful attention is also paid to the structural coherence of the book through meticulous scrutiny of the connections between the texts. The invocation to the Muses in the proemial sonnet already testifies to the unity and sequential order imposed to the book. As Carrai perceptively points out, Della Casa...

pdf

Share