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

expressive level, they “vary naturally

according to each poet, or rather they are but

the limits of the artistic potential of the

individual poet.”

The first confirmation of this truth, as

Campana himself observes, comes from the

experience of Alfredo Luciani (1889-1969),

from Pescosansonesco (Pescara), who with

Stelle Lucenti (1913, 2nd Ed. 1921), must be

considered the initiator of what could be

called an Abruzzi “Stilnovo”, marked by a

vigorous tendency to lyric vocation, with the

adoption of “a dialect that belongs to no one

town and, collectively, to all the towns in

Abruzzi,” as Luciani underlined. The way

was thus opened to what was later called a

real regional koiné, a sort of “ideal and

instinctive synthesis of all the phonetic and

intonational nuances,” into which converge

in equal measure “a strong local flavor” and