Università Roma Tre

The language of some sixteenth-century authors (Bembo, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini).
The course aims to present the main aspects of the language and style of these great authors of the Italian Renaissance. Some excerpts from the works of these authors will be read and commented. The main characteristics of the style will be highlighted and comparative comparisons will be made between the various authors. At the end of the course students will have achieved a good knowledge of 16th century Italian.

G. Patota, The great beauty of Italian. The Renaissance, Bari-Rome, Laterza, 2019.

The course aims to present the lexicon of Italian in its formative stages, starting with Vulgar Latin, and in its development down to the present. It will introduce the principal tools and methods of lexical analysis, focussing on issues of dating. The following will be considered in detail: allotropes (i.e. different words deriving from the same Latin base); dialectal and regional words, examined also in connection with the corresponding Tuscan forms; deonymics (i.e. words derived from proper names); colour terms; loan-words (whether integrated or not); archaic forms and neologisms. At the end of the course the students will have the tools to reconstruct the history and use of either individual words or sets of lexical items of Italian.

- Marcello Aprile, Dalle parole ai dizionari, Bologna, il Mulino, 2009.
- Paolo D’Achille, Parole nuove e datate. Studi su neologismi, dialettismi, prestiti, Firenze, Franco Cesati, 2013.
- The following articles from the Enciclopedia dell’Italiano, ed. by Raffaele Simone, Roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2010-2011 (also available on-line on the Treccani website): lessico, allotropi, arcaismi, colore, termini di, deonomastica, dialettismi, forestierismi, geosinonimi, neologismi, regionalismi.
- one of the following, belonging to the series “Parole nostre”:
- Luca Serianni, Parola, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2016
- Giuseppe Patota, Bravo!, Bologna, il Mulino, 2016
- Paolo D’Achille, Che pizza!, Bologna, il Mulino, 2017.
- Nicola De Blasi, Ciao, Bologna, il Mulino, 2018.
- Enrico Testa, Bulgaro, Bologna, il Mulino, 2019.
Students attending the course on a regular basis may refer to the material distributed during classes instead of the articles from the Enciclopedia dell’italiano; in place of the volume from the “Parole nostre” series they may furthermore prepare an essay on a topic agreed in advance with the professor.