The Comedy among the emigrants – Corriere.it

“It is not an everyday occurrence among the lost people of the colony to encounter privileged souls who know how to rise from the material life of this American century. I met them by chance, these souls, a few days ago, along the way; the air was humble and the clothes unadorned. They are two brothers and they have been working the land here for about thirty years. The meeting was simple in simple words, like peasants. They were dressed in moleskin and the white shirt was beautifully displayed on the chest: and it didn’t seem real, immediately, a slow and sweet melody of almonds, of jeweled zithers that trilled around the two poor tools. They spoke of Dante and sang his verses, with Italian faith and with that…
yes sweet note / that the well-disposed spirit of love surges
».

Dante! Down there in Bento Gonçalves, near Caxia do Sul, in the extreme south of Brazil now on the border with Uruguay! «Mines», pseudonym of the journalist (a priest?) of «Il Corriere d’Italia. Weekly for the Italian colony» author of that report «Through the prism of popular genius», he was amazed: «I no longer believed in myself: in the new joy of these true ecstatic souls I glimpsed the commoners of the City of Flowers and gondoliers of the Lagoon who at the bends of the canal streets raved, in the good old days, about Alighieri’s sweet new style. And they didn’t act at random, like a parrot repeating: far from it».

Emilio Franzina, in his Cross borders. Letters and readings, writings and songs of the ancient Italian emigration published by il Mulino, does not seem stunned by the discovery of that exciting article of September 12, 1913. Partly because the historic author of the extraordinary America! America! And many other books on Italian emigration knows like few others the story of our grandparents who left to catar luck especially on the South American routes, partly because he had recently explored the subject in a small and precious essay on “Dante and the emigrants” in the collective essay Dante studies and paths, published by the Accademia degli Agiati. Where, citing among others the song Goodbye by Francesco Guccini, who grew up in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines “among the ignorant mountain wise men / Who knew Dante by heart and improvised poetry”, had reconstructed a series of fascinating historical details testifying to the roots of Divine Comedy in the popular memory of the Italians. Also thanks to the Dante Alighieri Societyborn with the aim of “protecting and spreading the Italian language and culture in the world, reviving the spiritual ties of compatriots abroad with the mother country and fueling the love and worship of Italian civilization among foreigners”.

A bond so strong, writes Franzina, that in correspondence with the trend of the first transoceanic flows «many poets or dialectal versifiers» follow in the footsteps of the great Carlo Porta, author of the first «version in Milanese dialect» of theHell Dantesque (“A mitaa strada de quell’ gran viacc/ Che femm a vun la vœulta al mond de là/ Me sont trovaa in d’on bosch scur scur affacc/ Senza on sentee de podé segue…”) and to try his hand at the Comedy in Venetian and Calabrian, Veronese and Neapolitan dialect…

A rediscovery of Alighieri that a prominent emigrant such as the Trevisan abbot Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s brilliant librettist who ended up in Philadelphia and New York in 1805 as a bookseller and professor at Columbia College, a passionate dantist, considered «a sort of compensation after the dark season of the seventeenth century» during which «as beautiful literature decayed ungracefully, Dante also fell». And such was the rebirth of veneration for the Supreme Poet that, recalls the historian from Vicenza, not only Giovanni Pascoli was persuaded to write in 1911 a Hymn of the Italian Emigrants to Dante (“O helmsman of Italy eternal, Dante! / You are the one who turns where you want the prow / on our long foamy furrow!”) to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy which should have been officiated in Manhattan with a large statue by Ettore Ximenes (actually inaugurated ten years later) but a certain VA Castellucci (also mentioned by Giuseppe Prezzolini in The transplanted) recklessly went further.

Up to «rewriting the journey of the great poet setting it in Little Italy of the Great Depression, with Dante dazed by seasickness and landed in confusion at the port of Boston where waiting for him there was, ready to guide him, a Virgil» who spoke in «broccolino», the lingua franca of the Italian-Americans of Brooklyn: «Finally, Dante, you have decided to land on this sciore [shore: costa] sarping [salpando e attraversando] the Atellante [l’Atlantico] with the same estimate [steam: vapore] who carried maiselfe lazz taim ego [myself last time ago: me stesso tanto tempo fa]…». Poor Dante…

The tale on that example of popular devotion of our grandparents unearthed a century ago from
“The Courier of Italy”
in the colony of Rio Grande do Sulhowever, it is poignant. Especially since down there, according to the reports of the parish priests of the time such as Don Carlo Porrini, «in preaching there is no need for great sermons, sublime oratorical glimpses: the people do not understand, you always and then always teach the catechism to the small and the large and the people , educated, it will be better. Here there is a lack of not just religious but also civil education: poor people who live in the woods, what do you want them to know. It is up to the priest in his match to make sacrifices to educate them».

Where did those two Moro brothers come from who sang verses «with that… yes sweet note / that the well-disposed spirit of love surges»? They came from the Trentino valleys, they had always been farmers, they had ended up in Bento Gonçalves because other fellow villagers had informed them that there, at seven hundred meters above sea level, the winters were mild and the vineyards generous. The first was called Vittorio, he composed poems in «happy» tercets and declaimed «throwing out the verse with the measure of someone with a steady wrist leveling and balancing the halberd against the enemy». The second, Octavian, had done little school having already eleven years old “handled the marra” that is the hoe, however “his soul is completely invaded by a perennial blaze of poetry that fires everything”.

But the wonder, the 1913 chronicle still explains, was not all here: «The two brothers know thefurious Orlando and that other In lovearms sing and “’the captain whom the great sepulcher freed of Christ’”» and so theIliadL’Odyssey and theAeneid. «Make yourself ask them about Paris and Menelaus, Hector and Achilles, Ulysses and Aeneas and as much one as the other of the brothers they can give you, on even the most detailed single episodes of the poems the most extensive and exact explanations of a historical and mythological order. Indeed, suddenly caught on this and that scene they sing…». A great little prodigy. Which a century later still touches the heart.