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

Norman, Swabian and Angevin

dominations, have barely grazed the Latin

lexical patrimony, and in the Matera

territory the Greek-classical heritage is more

evident than the Byzantine (Talia, 1976, p.

146). Anna M. Compagna attests that the

passage from the use of Latin to the

vernacular is to be dated from the first

decades of the Fifteenth Century and, in fact,

it can be surmised that the “lack of an

intense communal life in the Kingdom

during the Fourteenth Century explains the

absence of local vernacular documentary

texts, found in such abundance elsewhere”

(Compagna, 1983, p.280). Raffaele Nigro has

documented a widespread usage, beginning

with the Seventeenth Century, of poetic and

political texts, but also religious and

scientific, written in vernacular (Nigro,

1981). In the Nineteenth Century it is the