Heart Happy (cathy_edgett) wrote,
Heart Happy
cathy_edgett

Eat, Pray, Love!



In Elizabeth Gilbert'sbook Eat, Pray, Love, she writes of the origins of Italian, a language she loves.

In the sixteenth century, some Italian intellectuals got together to agree on a written form of the Italian language.  They reached back two hundred years to fourteenth-century Florence to hand-pick the most beautiful of Italian dialects.  They chose "the personal language of the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, the language of the Divine Comedy written in 1321.   Dante "wrote his masterpiece in what he called il dolce stil nuovo,  the sweet new style of the vernacular, and he shaped that vernacular even as he was writing it, affecting is as personally as Shakespeare would completely affect Elizabethan English.  For a group of nationalist intellectuals much later in history to have sat down and decided that Dante's Italian would now be the official language of Italy would be very much as if a group of Oxford dons had sat down one day in the early nineteenth century and decided that from this point forward - everybody in England was going to speak pure Shakespeare.  And it actually worked."

"The last line of the Divine Comedy, in which Dante is faced with the vision of God Himself, is a sentiment that is still easily understandable by anyone familiar with so-called modern Italian.  Dante writes that God is not merely a blinding vision of glorious light, but that He is, most of all, l'amour che move il sole e l'altre stelle ...

   
"The love that moves the sun and the other stars."


Ahhhh!   Live there,  in romance, love, and cascading rhythms of  heart.



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