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

“a certain inten- tional verbal aristocracy.” It

is not by chance that Pasolini includes him in

his anthology, along with De Titta and

Clemente.

At the beginning of the Twentieth

Century, a similar course is followed by

Cesare De Titta (1862-1933), relying on his

own devices. Born in Sant’Eusanio del

Sangro (Chieti), humanist and philologist of

great learning, he went through an

extraordinary experience of poetry in Italian

and Latin, and comes to dialect poetry in his

later years, but just the same leaving the

mark of an uncommon presence: from

Canzoni abruzzesi [Songs of Abruzzi] (1919)

to Nuove canzoni abruzzesi (1923), to Gente

d’Abruzzo [People of Abruzzi] (1923), to

Terra d’ore [Golden Land] (1925), within the

span of barely five years De Titta crosses all

the stages one normally crosses in a lifetime.