Classico: storia di una parola by Silvia Tatti (review)

In his seminal Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Raymond Williams reminded his readers of the need to consider and enlarge the spatial-temporal coordinates every time one delves into the analysis of a word. It seems a fortunate and illuminating coincidence that, almost forty years after the publication of Williams’s Keywords, and in the same year of its new edition, Silvia Tatti published her essay devoted to a word that was not directly considered by Williams (who wrote however about class), with an extremely attentive eye towards the same necessity.

In the second century A.D. the Latin poet Aulus Gellius, in his Attic Nights, supplies the first recorded example of the word classic (classicus) used in a figurative sense: it meant authoritative and excellent, and it was in reference to a writer. The step away from its original meaning indicating the classes (groups) by which the Roman population was divided (based on the land they owned: class is, after all, equivalent to rank in social studies) had been taken. From that literary episode, the word begins its complex journey through the cultural landscape of the Western world. As Tatti recounts, the journey of classico meets a crisis just after its birth: its use during the Middle Ages is unknown, as there are no written occurrences. During the fifteenth century, its presence is often recorded throughout the whole Western Europe. Its modern history had begun. This is the starting point of Tatti’s concise and very effective study of an overused word whose multiple meanings, thanks to her inquiry, can be fully appreciated.

Tatti records the two main acceptations of classic: the first is an atemporal and immutable notion of value; the second is a mutable notion, that has to be explored through different times and spaces in order to identify the sometimes overlapping yet different meanings and the semantic shifts that it underwent (10). Tatti favors the latter approach, as it is clearly the one that can avoid the sterile crystallization of an idea or even its semantic shrinkage. In the four chapters of the book (“La parola nella storia,” “Classico/Classicismo,” “Che cos’è un classico,” and “Questioni aperte”) the readers find, in chronological progression, reflections on the many instances in which the word was employed. From the Quattrocento on, up to contemporary times, readers find out how the word was modeled to fit the epistemological shifts that occurred through the centuries. In relation to space, in careful and complex coordination with the linear chronological progression, Tatti’s book investigates the literary notion of classic developed by different Western literary traditions (French, Spanish, German and British), with a more sustained attention to the Italian cultural debate. Just the mentioning of a few names that belong to the Italian tradition reveals how central to the cultural debates were the reflections over classic: L. B. Alberti, Bembo, Tesauro, Parini, Foscolo, M. de Staël, Leopardi, Manzoni, Nievo, Gioberti. Tatti devotes several pages to the political and historiographical implications of this word in the Italian political panorama during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when classic, opposed to romantic, identified the ideological tenets of the participants to the turbulent process that was leading to the birth of the Italian state (34–35). Tatti also discusses the use of classicism, an offshoot of classic initially employed by the romantici to negatively identify the uncritical supporters of Greek and Roman literature. In this context, classicism and romanticism acquire relevance in opposition to each other. However, the two terms, not surprisingly, share the same indeterminateness (because, while both are chronologically circumscribed phenomena, they are subjects to varying spatial acceptations), that ultimately make them escape unambiguous distinctions.

Tatti’s study of the meaning of classic between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century across several European countries further weakens the temptation to consider it a monolithic word (44–45). By the nineteenth century, classic (sometimes with the prefix neo-) had become a category. Tatti writes:

[Classic is] un sistema di valori, un nodo concettuale, coinvolge le periodizzazioni...