952 ronnie ferguson
which felt no need to forge and impose a national language.54 apart from
the post-1300 literary impact of tuscan, what were the broader factors
that tilted Venice’s cultural and linguistic center of gravity towards italian
options? a number of interlinked historical and cultural factors may help
to explain why the textual impact of italian upon Venetian reached a criti-
cal mass soon after 1500, tipping trend into inevitability. Venice’s gradual
territorial contraction, its patriciate’s progressive conversion from mari-
time to landed interests, the shift in the commercial centre of gravity from
Mediterranean to atlantic, the impact of italian Humanism, and a print-
ing industry favoring tuscan— these factors combined meant that Venice
came to align herself increasingly with italian patrician mentalities.
after 1500, then, Venice de facto adopted, in legislation and in unmarked
writing generally, the tuscan-based vernacular which had become the
written medium of choice of the dominant classes in italy and which had
already influenced written venexian in various ways in the trecento and
Quattrocento. However, it did so gradually and without fuss. unmarked
writing in Venice transited seamlessly from Venetian to italian in the
course of the 16th century, via a more-or-less italianized Venetian, then
a more-or-less Venetianized italian. the absence of clean breaks in lan-
guage in this period is characteristic of the Venetian attitude to cultural
matters in general and to linguistic ones in particular. not only was there
never to be a language policy in the Stado Veneto but also Latin itself
would linger on for centuries after 1500 in legislation and official writ-
ing. and while Venetian never became a fully fledged language, it was an
exceptional dialect. the “bilingualism” that characterized Venetian from
Renaissance to enlightenment was only a writing-speaking dichotomy. in
the oral domain, venexian reigned supreme from 1500 to 1797 in all social
contexts and among and between all social classes.
the mainstream vernacular prose written by educated Venetians
between 1500 and 1797 was invariably italian and—as we noted—was
meant to be so. this is true of the 16th-century dispatches to the Signoria
of the Republic’s ambassadors as it is of the city’s pioneering 18th-century
press, although most writing by Venetians revealed venexian intrusions
to a greater or lesser degree. the different rates at which the transition
from Venetian to tuscan/italian in educated written usage occurred
54 For a lucid discussion of the historical trajectories of Venetian patriotism see
Feliciano Benvenuti, “Venezia da patria a nazione: un percorso,” in gino Benzoni and gae-
tano Cozzi, eds., Venezia e l’Austria (Venice, 1999), pp. 475–94.