Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

towner and lets him have a taste of its

linguistic expressiveness, which mixes with

the monuments, the works of art, tradition.

One becomes a Roman with a certain ease,

and the engagement takes place (or had

taken place in the classroom when one reads

a little Trilussa and Belli) naturally, also

because in the bars, on the busses, in the

lines at the post office, at the bank or

municipal delegations, people are not

reserved and quiet, but talk, complain,

shout, tell stories. What is happening is

somewhat similar to what used to happen at

the time of the great conquests of the Roman

Empire: then it was the slaves and the artists

who came to Rome and when they spoke

(Piero Bargellini in his History of Italian

Literature compiles an amusing inventory of

anecdotes related to this) they mangled

sentences, thereby creating the premises for