Sicilian School

In a literary context, the term Sicilian School identifies a small community of Sicilian, and to a lesser extent, mainland Italian poets gathered around Frederick II, most of them belonging to his court, the Magna Curia. Headed by Giacomo da Lentini, they produced more than three-hundred poems of courtly love between 1230 and 1266, the experiment being continued after Frederick's death by his son, Manfredi. This school included Enzo, king of Sardinia, Pier delle Vigne, Inghilfredi, Guido and Odo delle Colonne, Jacopo d'Aquino, Giacomino Pugliese, Giacomo da Lentini, Arrigo Testa and Frederick II himself.

Linguistic notes on the Sicilian standard

The standard of the Sicilian school combines many traits typical of the Sicilian, French, Latin and to a lesser, but not negligible extent, Apulian and certain southern dialects. Such a melting pot greatly helped the new Italian language: the French suffixes -ière and -ce, for example, generated hundreds of new Italian words in -iera and -za as it. riv-iera ("river") or costan-za ("constancy"). Such affixes would be then adopted by Dante and his contemporaries, and handed on to future generations of Italian writers. Dante's styles illustre, cardinale, aulico, curiale were partly developed from his close study of the Sicilian School which he quotes widely in his studies, especially in his De Divina Eloquentia. The Sicilian school was later re-founded by Guittone d'Arezzo in Tuscany following the death of Manfredi, Frederick's son, so many of these poems were later copied in manuscripts that widely circulated in Florence. This first standard in which they were written, was, however, modified in Tuscany. In fact, Tuscan scriveners perceived the five-vowel system used by southern italian dialects (i, e, a, o, u) as a seven-vowel one (i.e. i, é, è, a, ó, ò, u). As a consequence, many texts Italian students read in their anthologies today contain lines that do no longer rhyme with each other (sic. -i > tusc. -é, sic. -u > tusc. -ó). Tuscans also changed words as gloria to ghiora, aju ("I have) to aggio etc. Though some original texts have been restored to their original Sicilian, we must see such remakes only as tentative reconstructions of originals that, unfortunately, may have been lost forever. Dante and his contemporaries would take this newborn language a step further, expanding and enriching it with even more words of Latin and French, and Florentine origin, carefully working on the style to create volgare illustre, a higher standard quite close to today's polite Italian.

Related Topics:
Melting pot - Italian language - Italian - De Divina Eloquentia - Guittone d'Arezzo - Tuscany - Florence

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