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89 12 Ferdinando Galiani, On the Neapolitan Dialect ([1779])1 Ferdinando Galiani was born in 1728 in Chieti, in Abruzzo, Italy. As a young child he moved to Naples where he studied under the tutelage of his uncle Celestino, the archibishop of Taranto and an important cleric in the Kingdom of Naples. Early on he dedicated himself to the study of economics , and today he is perhaps best known as the author of a treatise on currency, Della moneta (1750). Galiani spent ten years (1759–1769) in Paris as the secretary of the Neapolitan embassy. There he attended various salons and met key figures of the French Enlightenment, including Denis Diderot, Claude Adrien Helvétius, and Mme d’Epinay. After his return to Naples, he continued to correspond with these French intellectuals and to write on economics as well as other topics. He died in Naples in 1787. In On the Neapolitan Dialect, Galiani evaluated Basile’s writings in the literary context of a broader discussion of Neapolitan dialect. For Galiani, the thirteenth century represented a golden age for the dialect because in that period Neapolitan resembled literary Italian and was closely related to Latin. Galiani argues that in the following centuries the dialect was corrupted , becoming ever more base and vulgar. He advocated that the earlier, and to his mind more dignified, form of the dialect should be recovered and declared the official language of the kingdom of Naples. As a part of this critique, he attacked those authors who he felt had debased the dialect, including Basile. He called Basile’s tales so “tasteless, monstrous, and indecent that the very Arabs, the founders of this most depraved fashion, would have blushed for having imagined them.” Galiani is often mentioned alongside Luigi Serio, whose response to Galiani’s treatise on the Neapolitan dialect appears in the next section. 1. Del dialetto napoletano (Naples: Vincenzo Vocola, 1779). Galiani’s essay was published anonymously in 1779. 90 / Fairy Tales Framed Galiani, a true man of the Enlightenment, had no tolerance for Basile’s Baroque prose. He acknowledged Basile’s tales as literary texts that reflected the aesthetics of their day, but he asserted that this kind of tale had originated outside of Italy. He may well have carried this idea with him back from his ten-year stay in Paris, where Galland’s translation of Thousand and One Nights—along with the many imitations and parodies that subsequently appeared in France and remained popular throughout the eighteenth century —kept the category of tales from the Orient before people’s eyes. Criticizing Basile’s style as an inevitable result of his linguistic and thematic inspiration by “low” popular culture (in, as he wrote, one of the most decadent moments in the history of Neapolitan culture), Galiani posited the folk as the source for the language of the tales in Basile’s collection.2 Galiani’s negative views about Basile’s tales exemplify an eighteenth-century shift in public sentiment about propriety. Finally, he makes a generic “corrupter of youth” argument, although it’s not clear whether he means adolescents or young men, as he suggests that texts like Basile’s served the political purpose of weakening Neapolitan minds in order to allow despotism to flourish. The following translation is based on Enrico Malato’s edition of Galiani’s Del dialetto napoletano.3 Ferdinando Galiani, On the Neapolitan Dialect ([1779]) Giovan Battista Basile, knight, Count of Torrone, count palatine, and gentleman in the service of Ferdinando Duke of Mantua, was a man of some literary learning and a mediocre Italian poet. The following authors speak of him: Toppi in Biblioteca napoletana on page 130, Nicodemo in the Addizioni on page 111, Crescimbeni in volume V of the Storia della volgar poesia on page 145, P. Quadrio in volume I on page 113, Mazzuchelli and others.4 Unfortunately for us, he was taken with the whim to ape the incomparable 2. Editor’s note: Just three years later, Johann Karl August Musäus would attribute his collection’s tales themselves to the German folk in the foreword to the first volume of his Volksmärchen der Deutschen (Folk Tales of the Germans, 1782–1787). 3. Ferdinando Galiani, Del dialetto napoletano In appendice Francesco Oliva Grammatica della lingua napoletana, ed. Enrico Malato (Rome: Bulzoni, 1970), 129–135. 4. Galiani enumerates here a series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary histories, including Nicolò Toppi’s Biblioteca Napoletana et apparato a gli huomini illustri...

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