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

absorbed in a troubled search for a ethnic-

cultural identity and political and

administrative autonomy (with respect to

the neighboring regions of Abruzzi and the

Benevento area of Samnium) beginning with

the start of the century, whereby the

objective, historical conditions of isolation of

the Campobasso province (fifth of the

Abruzzi region since 1860) combined with

decided autarchic tendencies, aiming at

configuring, distinguishing and delineating

the borders of a geographic and

anthropological entity clearly defined or

definable, and therefore to be legitimated

first and foremost on the linguistic and

literary level.

This need (felt by the most engaged

intellectuals between the end of the

Nineteenth Century and the beginning of

the next, (cf. above all Alfonso Perrella and