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

Elementary school teachers became the

unquestioned leaders in this effort, as

preservers, interpreters and mediators of the

most authentic reality and the most

authentic popular “wisdom”, or even the

“bards” of this reality (it is not by

coincidence that Eugenio Cirese, Michele

Cima, Giovanni Cerri, dialect poets of the

first generation, were elementary school

teachers, but more on the role of the teachers

further on in this prologue).

So that paradoxically, within the very

monocentric state organization established

by Fascism, there was room for testing and

solidifying those designs of

“regionalization” that had already surfaced

between the end of the Nineteenth Century

and the beginning of the Twentieth, maybe

even with the strains and distortions of the

basic principles of the school reform that,