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

the ariette and Neapolitan songs and

demand a new kind of attention, free of

commonplaces. The significance of this has

been noted by Franco Loi, by this writer,

Spagnoletti, Vivaldi, Brevini, who underline

the change taking place in a linguistic area in

which the difficulty of change remained

enormous, precisely because Naples and the

surrounding areas had gone through several

intense periods overflowing with poetry (the

Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Nineteenth

centuries, the beginning of the Twentieth).

Serrao, with his long, rugged verses, not

devoid of tenderness and nuances,

inaugurated a season which attests to the

readiness of Campania’s poetry to question

everything in order to start moving forward

again. In the musicality that unfolds not

under the soft caresses of Donizetti and

Bellini, but under the apparently metallic