Salvatore Viale

Salvatore Viale (born September 6, 1787 in Bastia ; † November 23, 1861 there ) was a Corsican writer, poet and judge. He was the first author to use the Corsican language in a major literary work, the Dionomachia (1817). Educated on the basis of liberal ideas, he played an important role in reviving the cultural tradition of the Corsican people and defending the role of the Italian language as the cultural language of the island.

biography

He was born in Bastia to a well-known family of Genoese origin (one of his ancestors, Benedetto, was governor of Corsica for the Republic of Genoa from 1641 to 1643 ) and received his first education in his hometown. The father Paolo Agostino, a member of the city council of Bastia, wanted to train his son as a doctor and sent him to Rome, where his compatriot and priest Bonaventura Poletti, a friend of Pasquale Paoli , received him. During his stay in Rome he discovered a passion for literature and decided not to study medicine. In Rome, his brothers Benedetto , papal archiater , and Michele , who became a cardinal, made brilliant careers.

After the death of his father in 1805 he returned to Corsica to take over the family business and enrolled at the University of Pisa , where he graduated in law in 1809.

In the same years he was a teacher at the Collegio di Bastia and published the treatise Principi delle Belle Lettere (Principles of Beautiful Literature).

With the fall of Napoleon I (1815), a provisional independence government was formed in Bastia, which unsuccessfully urged the British and the Congress of Vienna to separate Corsica from France . Viale was fully committed and contributed to the drafting of the Italian government documents. After the reunification of Corsica with France under Louis XVIII. he went into exile in Rome, where he made friends with the important georgophile Raffaello Lambruschini . He approached the Italian liberal circles and continued the studies of literary studies.

In 1816 he returned to Corsica and was appointed deputy prosecutor at the local criminal court by Count Alessandro Colonna d'Istria, Attorney General of the King of France at the Bastia Court of Appeal.

In 1817 the first edition (another five will appear in the course of the 19th century) of his main work, the Dionomachia (ie " Donkey Battle "), which Niccolò Tommaseo defines as the most important of the heroic-comic genre after Alessandro Tassoni's La secchia rapita , appears. It seems that the work - which tells about a tragicomic conflict between the residents of Lucciana and Borgo - was already in development before 1813.

From 1819 to 1831 he was an investigative judge in the Bastia district, where he distinguished himself for his efforts to contain the severity and number of crimes. He then resigned (but retained the position of Council President of the Court of Appeal) in order to continue the cultural and literary commitment that he had already exercised during his employment in the court. Even before 1831, Viale had distinguished itself through its great commitment to the reactivation of the Società centrale d'istruzione pubblica in Bastia, an academy for scientific and literary promotion.

In the following years he occupied himself with the collection of folk songs in Corsican language from the extensive oral tradition. Between 1838 and 1839 he worked actively with the Italian philologist and patriot Niccolò Tommaseo, who during his stay in Corsica studied the local dialect, which he described as one of the purest and most faithful of Dante's languages. He continued to work with the circles of the Georgofili and Accademia della Crusca and linked, among other things, an important correspondence with his publisher Giovan Pietro Vieusseux in Florence.

In 1852 he resigned from all judicial posts and devoted himself to his studies in Bastia until his death in 1861.

A staircase near the central Via XX Settembre (formerly named after Antoine Christophe Saliceti), a street in Lido di Ostia , a district of Rome , and a street in his hometown near the Teatro Municipale were named after Viale in Genoa . The study center in Bastia was also dedicated to Viale, a monument inaugurated on January 22, 1865, and a statue in Saint-Florent .

Works

It is better to let the author speak for himself than to deliberate in retrospect about the meaning of the work and the cultural commitment of Salvatore Viale. In his introduction to the 1843 edition of the Canti popolari corsi , printed in Bastia and expressly dedicated to the "Corsican readers", Salvatore Viale wrote a real ideological manifesto in which he - the French public prosecutor - clearly and freely contrasted the Corsican identity emphasizes the French and its natural affiliation to the Italian cultural area. The main passage:

“From reading these songs you will see that the Corsicans have no poetry or literature other than Italian, and certainly cannot have so far. The source and the material of poetry in a people lies in their history, their traditions, their customs, their way of being and feeling: all things in which the Corsican man differs essentially from that of the French continent and above all from the prototype of the French man who is the one from Paris. I will not speak of the language that is much better mastered by the same principles, and the Corsican language is also Italian, and in fact it has been one of the least impure dialects in Italy so far. "

Full list of Salvatore Viale's works:

• Dei Principi delle Belle Lettere , Bastia, 1813 (II edition 1843).
• Dionomachia , Bastia, 1817.
• Poetry Giocose , Bastia, 1817.
• Prose Giocose , Bastia and Paris, 1828.
• Prose series , Bastia and Paris, 1828.
• Poetry series , Bastia and Paris, 1828.
• Canzoni contadinesche in dialetto corso , Bastia
• L'ultima vedetta , Bastia, 1837
• Canti popolari corsi , Bastia, 1843.
• La sposa d'Abido, saggio di versi italiani e di canti popolari corsi , Bastia and Brussels, 1843.
• Novella Corse , Bastia and Trieste, 1846.
• Sopra lo stile della versione poetica dell'Iliade di Melchiorre Cesarotti
• Delle cagioni e degli effetti della moderna letteratura romanzesca , 1835
• Canti popolari corsi . Fabiani, Bastia 1855 ( google.it ).
• Componimenti in versi e in prosa , Vieusseux, Florence Bastia, 1857
• Dell'uso della lingua patria in Corsica , Vieusseux, Florence, 1858 (in Italian).
• Dell'uso dei costumi corsi , Vieusseux, Florence and Bastia, 1860.

literature

• Santu Casanova: Almanaccu di a Muvra . Bastia 1933.
• Sabino Acquaviva: La Corsica: Storia di un genocidio . FrancoAngeli, Milan 1987.
• Francesco Silvio Orlandini: Scritti in verso e in prosa di Salvatore Viale . Felice le Monnier, Florence 1861 ( google.fr [PDF]).
• Demetrio Diamilla Muller: Biography autograph ed inedite di illustri italiani di questo secolo . Cugini Pomba e comp. editori, Turin 1853, p. 352-356 ( archive.org ).
• Paul-Michel Villa: La maison des Viale . Presses de la Renaissance, Paris 1985.

Web links

• Centro studi Salvatore Viale .
• Giacomo Cavallucci:  VIALE, Salvatore. In: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI).
• Salvatore Viale, il còrso che amava l'italiano by Silverio Novelli . Treccani.it L'Enciclopedia italiana. Archived from the original on February 17, 2015.