2024-02-10 14:21:35
by GIUSEPPE ANTONELLI
The honorary president of Crusca in dialogue with Cristiana De Santis in the volume «A welcoming Italian» (il Mulino). At the center, the Italian language
Giovanni Nencioni, president of the Accademia della Crusca at the time, entrusted his memoirs as a language scholar now in his seventies to an essay entitled Linguistic autodiachrony: a personal case (in «Quaderni dell’Atlante lexicale toscano», 1 – 1983; Leo S. Olschki Publisher). With a few more springs on his shoulders, but with just as much tenderness and irony, two decades later Tullio De Mauro recalled his childhood and youth in two books with a happy narrative tone: Words of distant days and Words of days a little less distant. Francesco Sabatini – as Luca Serianni had already done a few years ago in his The Sentiment of Language – preferred to entrust this type of reconstruction to an interview, carried out in this case with the collaboration of the linguist Cristiana De Santis. «The result», writes the curator, «is a dialogue that questions our time through language: the welcoming Italian of a welcoming Italian, who over the years has been able to respond to the many language doubts posed by a large and loyal audience» . And A welcoming Italian is the title with which the volume has just been published by Il Mulino (also the publishing house of the two volumes by De Mauro and the one by Serianni).
Born in 1931, honorary president of the Accademia della Crusca (which he led between 2001 and 2007), university professor (in the chair since 1957) and passionate popularizer, in this intellectual autobiography Sabatini recounts over seventy years of studies on our language and almost a century of history of Italian culture. Finding himself going from the meeting with Benedetto Croce, who frequented his father’s house in Abruzzo, to the one with the President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. His figure, he recalls, «was also decisive for the consideration of our language as a national asset» and recalls the words that Ciampi pronounced in the Florentine headquarters of the Crusca regarding the «importance of safeguarding, studying and making the language known Italian”.
All things that Sabatini did tirelessly, as emerges – among memories, anecdotes and photographs – from the pages of this book. The study and valorization of ancient texts, including the letter in which Boccaccio imitates the Neapolitan dialect or the graffito found in Rome in the catacomb of Commodilla («Non dicere ille secrita abboce»). A text from about a century prior to that Capuan placito (“Sao ko kelle terre …”) traditionally considered the birth certificate of our language. But also the description, in the mid-eighties, of what he himself defined as “average Italian”. An Italian in which, as Manzoni already wanted, one can finally say and write “lui” instead of “he”; a modern and elastic Italian, suitable for daily communication. And then the first dictionary also published on electronic support (created together with Vittorio Coletti: the Disc. Dizionario Italiano Sabatini-Coletti) and the grammar of Italian according to the valence model («Valence in this case is a metaphor adopted to describe the ability of the verb to link to itself the other elements necessary to form a complete sentence”). From Sabatini’s idea, the week of the Italian language in the world also came to life, now in its twenty-third edition, and Dantedì which – promoted with the collaboration of Paolo Di Stefano and the «Corriere della Sera» – has been celebrated every year since 2020 March 25.
Among the most fascinating stories is the one concerning the large family library (over twenty thousand books, including medieval codes) stolen by the Nazis who had occupied his home in Pescocostanzo. Immediately after the war, a letter reported the presence of the books at the University of Mainz. In 1961, on the occasion of his honeymoon, Sabatini went to check: but nothing appeared in the catalogues. Thirty years later, he was contacted by a student who had worked on cataloguing. «The books had been recovered by the French occupation troops in the Black Forest»; when the French had rebuilt the University of Mainz, “they had then been handed over to the library.” Long negotiations allow the restitution: among the surviving books, however, the precious manuscript codes are missing. Only one survived, which had been lent by his father to a Roman scholar. It is that “Sabatini Fragment” that the family – after having regained possession of it – donated to the Abbey of Montecassino: and it is now kept there, together with the Capuan placito.
February 10, 2024 (modified February 10, 2024 | 3:21 pm)
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