Despite its spread as Europe’s universal language, and its currency as a language of learning, Italians had always felt that Latin in some special way belonged to them. For them, in fact, the term Latin had become a synonym for Italian. In Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, at the outset of the fourteenth century, Latius, Latinus, and Ytalus [Italian] are used interchangeably; ‘the Italian vernacular’, which he is seeking to define, is called vulgare latium, and Latium is even used to refer to Italy in general.
Half a century later, in 1368, Francesco Petrarca (known in English as Petrarch) sought to disprove in scholastic style a Frenchman’s claim that Latin should be distinguished from Italian, appealing to a text from Augustine: “they traced the succession through Greeks and Latins, then to the Romans, who are themselves Latins.” He proceeds, “And furthermore, learned men, in all speech and writing, call Roman eloquence Latin and vice versa, as there are two names but one thing,” adding, “We are not Greeks, not barbarians, but Italians and Latins.”
The Italians felt that Latin was “a kind of sameness of speech unalterable for diverse times and places,” as Dante had still expressed it. Latin had a universal status, but it was nonetheless a conscious universal that had been distinctively created and developed in Italy.
With the growing strength and independence of the cities of Italy, and above all in Dante’s and Petrarch’s hometown of Florence, their citizens saw Latin as ‘ours’, nostra lingua Latina. Even in 1281 the Florentine historian Ricordano Malespini jnoted that Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor ‘knew our Latin tongue and our vernacular’, seppe la lingua nostra latina e il nostro volgare.
Latin was conceived as not only an ideal language, and as an ancient language characteristic of the Italian past, but also as a language of the present, a language loyally preserved and still spoken by Italians in a modified form.
References:
• Ricordano Malispini (Storia fiorentina, 1281)
• Dante Alighieri (De Vulgari Eloquentia, 1302-1305)
• Petrarch (Invective Against a Detractor of Italy, 1373)
