ITALY (LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) 455 abridged in English, 1 vol., London, 1832); Wrightson, " History of Italy from the French Revolution to 1850 " (London, 1855); Arriva- bene, " Italy under King Victor Emanuel " (2 vols., London, 1862). The principal travellers in Italy who have given accounts of their tours in letters, journals, or more elaborate works, are Montaigne, Evelyn, Gray, Smollett, Dr. Moore, Goethe, Joseph Forsyth, Mine, de Stael (" Corinne "), J. C. Eustace, Henry Matthews, Lady Morgan, Miss Eaton, W. S. Rose, Hans Christian Andersen ("The Improvisators "), Mrs. Kemble, William Spalding, and George S. Hillard. See also Fulchiron, Voyage dans Vita- lie meridionals, centrale et septentrionale (7 vols., Paris, 1847-'58); II. Alford, "Letters from Abroad" (2d ed., London, 1865); and Taine, Voyage en Italie (2 vols., Paris, 1866 ; English translation by J. Durand, 2 vols., New York, 1869 ; 1 vol., 1874). ITALY, Language and Literature of. The term Italian language is applied in literary history to what is at present the universal vehicle of official communication, religious instruction, epistolary correspondence, and general litera- ture throughout Italy. But it is only in Tus- cany and parts of the adjacent provinces that this is the household speech of even the educa- ted classes. In Piedmont, Lombardy, the Ve- netian and Ligurian territories, in a great part of the former States of the Church, and in the Neapolitan provinces, as well as in Sicily and Sardinia, all alike employ local dialects in or- dinary oral intercourse. Persons of even mod- erate culture are, indeed, able everywhere to use Tuscan freely, though always with local peculiarities of pronunciation and expression ; but the vernacular is the habitual medium of thought, and, as Biondelli emphatically states, the written productions of non-Tuscan authors are translations. The parentage and formation of this Tuscan or Italian constitute a much dis- cussed and most interesting linguistic problem. According to Giuseppe Micali, ancient Italy most probably had a common language of many dialects, which were divided into two main branches, the dialects of Etruria and Umbria, represented chiefly by the Iguvian, and the Sabine, Samnian, and Oscan, which included the Marscian, Volscian, and Hernician. Greek was spoken in the south, in Magna Grsocia. The Latin was the dialect used by the mixture of Pelasgian Siculi and Osci from the Abruzzi, who x together formed the historical Latini on the lowlands about the Tiber. Their idiom became in time the official language of the Ro- man republic and empire. This supremacy of the Latin, apart from any intrinsic excellence of its own, may have contributed to the neg- lect and debasement of the cognate dialects. In this debasement the Latin itself must have shared during the occupation of Italy by the barbarians. Whether the local dialects recov- ered their old popular ascendancy while the governmental language of Rome was in dis- favor with the conquerors, is a matter of con- jecture. It is certain that the Oscan became extinct in the 1st century B. C., and that the Etruscan continued to be spoken under the re- public and the empire down to the middle of the 2d century A. D., as attested by Aulus Gellius. But in Cisalpine Gaul and along the shores of the Adriatic, as far at least as Ancona, the Celtic was spoken at the epoch of the Gothic domination, and contributed, according to O. M. Toselli, more elements to the Italian than did the Latin itself. Thus many of these local dialects survived through the middle ages, were modified by the influence and literature of the church, and are more or less faithfully represented by the vernacular idioms of mod- ern Italy. The common roots of all of them are traced to an Indo-European stem ; but tho formation and growth of the modern Italian has not been conclusively shown to be derived from any known parentage, as the pedigree of English is carried back to Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. Three theories have been ad- vanced on this subject. The first asserts the Ital- ian to have anciently coexisted with the Latin ; the latter being the language of tho learned, of public oratory, and of legal documents, while the former, as the Romano, ruitica, was the language of the common people and of or- dinary conversation, and maintained its ground after the other had died with the aristocracy. Such is the theory of Leonardo Bruni, Cardi- nal Bembo, Saverio Quadrio, and others. The second maintains that the primitive dialects lived in spite of neglect and proscription, and, modified by time, concurred with the Latin to form the basis of modern Italian. This hy- pothesis has the authority of Muratori, Fonta- nini, Tiraboschi, Denina, Ginguene', and Sis- mondi. A third theory, which is that of Maffei, affirms that Italian is merely a corrupt Latin, without any admixture of foreign tongues. But no facts are adduced to support this theory of a gradual change of Latin into modern Ital- ian speech. Latin died like Mosso-Gothic, and, in Italy at least, left no lineal descendant, though the present speech of Rome, as it is nearest in lineage, is probably nearest also in character of all the modern Italian dialects to the vernacular language of old Rome at her best period. Mediaaval Latin, it is true, be- came corrupt, and was often mixed with words borrowed from the vulgar idioms ; but it still remained essentially Latin, and as yet no well authenticated remains have been found of a transitional stage from the old classical to the modern Italo-Romance dialects. When the modern Tuscan was first used in literary com- position in the 13th century, it was in idiom, grammar, and structure what it is to-day. The writers of that age used the familiar speech of their firesides; and Italian was full-grown, ripe, and perfect when the first native poet embodied his inspiration in it. If we trace it up chronologically, we find that Isidore of Seville in the 7th century mentions the lingua Italica as distinct from the Latin. Ciampi
