A Representative Scientific Council

‘De vulgari eloquentia’: Franco Scataglini’s Olimpo

“…Many instrumentalists and singers saw that it was performance rather than composition that had brought Serafino fame […] and that his manner pleased rulers, learned men, and fair women alike. 19 Olimpo appears thus to have been a most popular, yet controversial figure in his own time, rather quickly forgotten, or banished to the realm of the literary 'minor'. The problems posed by the very many editions of his work add to the slightly peculiar nature of his language, which shows that although he was indeed conversant with all the major literary sources of Renaissance culture, from the classics to Petrarch, the self-taught nature of that culture emerges from cracks and pitfalls in the use of Italian, crossed by vernacular forms which later on, once he took to publishing in Venice, bear also the mark of northern written varieties.…”