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| Grounds of Villa dei Papiri replica at Getty Museum |
It all happened centuries ago, according to the account in Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Eat, Pray, Love, but, to me, that doesn't make the story any less romantic. It began when Latin, changing as it went, spread from country to country to spawn the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian languages. There were so many dialects, though, in each country, that a carpenter in southern France could not understand a woodworker from Paris. In Italy, consisting of dozens of city-states, people from one town could not understand the people two towns away.
When it came time to choose one dialect so that countries could be united by a single language, the largest, most powerful cities in each country dictated the language choice. The French dialect spoken in Paris became the only acceptable dialect as did the Portuguese used in Lisbon and the Spanish spoken in Madrid. It is only in Italy that the most powerful city did not determine the spoken language.
In Italy, the intellectuals rejected the dialects of their largest cities, Rome and Venice, and turned instead to the lyrical beauty of a poet's language. Unlike all the other countries in Europe, it was literature, not power or wealth, that determined the choice. And it was Florence's dialect, home of the Renaissance and Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy, that served as the basis for the Italian we know today.
You've got to love a land that became united by adopting the beautiful language of a poet. No wonder I never tire of it.
