ABSTRACT
The Italian revival originated in that distant province of Italy which had been for some centuries most subject to alien influences. In the Italian courts of the twelfth century the conventional idiom of the poets was Provencal, and even in the thirteenth the Mantuan troubadour Sordello, celebrated by Dante and the hero of Browning's poem, wrote entirely in that tongue. The new poetry of Italy, however, was destined to be not religious in basis but philosophical, not emotional but intellectual, not Umbrian but Tuscan; these Northern schools quickly faded into obscurity and merely local significance. The achievement of the Tuscan poets, who grew up in this expanding culture, was in the first place to take over the Sicilian tradition, secondly to develop and intellectualize it, and thirdly to reconcile it with Latin writing, the centre of which remained in Rome, a city unable, owing to its tradition, to play any part in the making of a new vernacular literature.
