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The Many Voices
of Contemporary
Piedmontese Writers
The Many Voices
of Contemporary
Piedmontese Writers
By
Andrea Raimondi
The Many Voices of Contemporary Piedmontese Writers
By Andrea Raimondi
This book first published 2016
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Raimondi
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-9964-X

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9964-2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... vi
Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii
Introduction .............................................................................................. viii
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

Piedmont’s Linguistic Variety and Literary Production
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 37

Subversive Writing: The Language of Alterity in Pavese’s Ciau Masino
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 69

Beppe Fenoglio: Language and Identity in I racconti del parentado
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 98

Continuity and Discontinuity in Piedmontese Literature of the 1960s
and 1970s
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 130

Trends in Contemporary Narrative Production
Conclusion ............................................................................................... 162
Appendix A ............................................................................................. 166

Theories on Language, Identity, and Alterity
Appendix B.............................................................................................. 177

A Current Linguistic Map of the Region
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 183
Index ........................................................................................................ 209

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. B.1. Carta delle parlate del Piemonte (from Allasino et al. Le lingue
del Piemonte [Torino: IRES, 2007], 10)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book originated from a PhD thesis submitted to University College

Cork in 2015. For this reason, my sincere gratitude goes, first of all, to my
supervisor, Dr Silvia Ross, for her understanding and advice, and to the
members of the Department of Italian, UCC. I would also like to thank
Prof. Patricia Kennan for her encouragement and help, Prof. Umberto
Capra for guiding me through the bookshops and libraries of Turin, and
Prof. Hussein Mahmoud for his assistance in understanding the Arabic
words and phrases in Tawfik’s novel. Special thanks to Benito Mazzi, who
has been very generous with his time, and to my relatives and friends for
their help with Piedmontese terms. I am much obliged to Erika Borgna for
allowing me to use her inspiring picture as the book cover. I would finally
like to express my gratitude to Victoria Carruthers and everyone at
Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their support and for believing in this
project.
INTRODUCTION
This study aims to undertake a linguistic analysis of a group of narratives

written by twentieth-century authors hailing from the same Italian region:
Piedmont. The novels and short stories examined stand out for the
intriguing ways in which they operate across a variety of linguistic
codes—Italian, Piedmontese, English, and pastiche (with some rare
excursions into French). Drawing on methodological tools such as
linguistic and philosophical theories on the relationship between identity,
alterity, and language, I intend to explain the reasons for multilingualism1
in the works of Cesare Pavese, Beppe Fenoglio, and Primo Levi, among
others, as well as the ideological positions that may lie behind their
linguistic strategies.
At the same time, I point out that such a multilinguistic inclination may
have also been influenced by the region’s socio-geographical context, and
by the political events that have occurred in Piedmont since around the
sixteenth century. As will be investigated in the following sections,
Piedmont has held a prominent place in the modern and contemporary
Italian scene. Yet at first, due to its peripheral position, the region
straddled French and Italian territories at a remove from both political and
literary centres for a lengthy period. Then, during the nineteenth century, it
was Piedmont’s ruling class, with its diplomatic ties to France, that led the
1
I adopt the term multilingualism to refer to the use of two or more languages in a
literary text. In a multilingual text, the languages can be kept separate, and each
associated with different characters, professions, social statuses, etc. This is what
happens, for example, in Pavese’s Ciau Masino, for which I have used the
Bakhtinian terms “heteroglossia” and “polyphony.” Literary multilingualism can
also lead to a more or less extended mix of different languages into one hybrid
code. Such is the case of Fenoglio’s Racconti del parentado and Mazzi’s novels.
Instead, whenever I use the term “plurilingualism,” I refer to the repertoire of
languages in a given society or a geographical area, and to an individual’s ability
to use such varieties for the purposes of communication. Therefore, Piedmont is a
plurilingual region, since many individuals have the ability to switch from one
code (i.e. Standard Italian) to another (i.e. Regional Italian, local vernacular, or
minority language) according to context or the interlocutor. See the distinction
between multilingualism and plurilingualism made by the Council of Europe
(2001).
The Many Voices of Contemporary Piedmontese Writers ix
unification process of the peninsula, thus moving the region into the heart
of Italy’s political and cultural context.
As a consequence, a group of Piedmontese writers, including Massimo
D’Azeglio and Giovanni Faldella, being attracted to Italian literary models
and having to prove themselves at their ease with the Tuscan Italian,
strove tenaciously to master a more appropriate tongue than their native
vernacular, generally deemed gibberish and unrefined.2 At the same time,
these writers did not want to distance themselves from their original
linguistic roots, nor from Piedmont’s peripheral position. This “tensione
bipolare del linguaggio,” as scholar Giovanni Tesio defines it (1991, 347),
has in some fortunate cases brought about a multilingual line, starting
presumably with Giuseppe Baretti, then continuing more visibly with
Faldella, Pavese, Fenoglio, and, finally, some contemporary writers. In
their most linguistically heterogeneous works, the use of dialect helps to
foreground local identities and marginal cultures over and against the
standardising tendencies brought about by those in power, whereas traces
of foreign languages clearly reveal an intention to broaden the region’s
cultural horizons and, particularly during Fascism, attempt to escape the
grip of an authoritarian regime.
In the first chapter of this study, a linguistic overview of Piedmont
between the fourteenth and mid-twentieth centuries will be provided
against the region’s sociohistorical background. The aim of the chapter is
to underscore the linguistically heterogeneous nature of Piedmont, where
different and sometimes opposite influences have intertwined and
overlapped over the years. At the same time, particular attention will be
2
“Barbaro gergo” ([1804] 2012), meaning “uncivilized jargon,” is a well-known
definition of Piedmontese vernacular found in Vittorio Alfieri’s autobiography.
Although ambiguous, it tells much about the relation between the Piedmontese and
their parlance. Like most people in the second half of the eighteenth century, Alfieri
would in fact have spoken dialect and he was fond of it. Yet he felt somewhat
embarrassed about its apparent coarseness and considered it inappropriate for
literature. As historian Alessandro Barbero notes, modern Piedmontese dialect had
already begun to take shape, and its written form to stabilise, in the seventeenth
century, together with the “universale luogo comune sulla sua rozzezza, per cui ci
si vergogna di parlarlo di fronte agli altri italiani” (2008, xvi). For example, in
Carlo Giambattista Tana’s ‘l Cont Piolet, a comedy composed in the late
seventeenth century and written in a mixed form of Italian and Piedmontese, the
female character Rosetta is concerned about the coarseness of her idiom. Her
preoccupation leads to a sort of inferiority complex: “A dìo ch’ ‘l piemonteis ‘l è
tant grossé: / chi sa mai s’am antëndrà?” (in Fassò 1979, 148; Piedmontese dialect
is said to be very coarse: / who knows if they will be able to understand me?). All
translations are mine unless otherwise specified.
x Introduction
paid to the literary production of the period (such as texts that present
code-mixing strategies) and relevant linguistics essays.
The second and third chapters represent the core of the present study.
In chapter two, after outlining the literary trends between the World Wars
and focusing on Pavese’s contribution to spreading the myth of America, I
will analyse the main linguistic varieties employed in Ciau Masino
(published posthumously in 1968) through the lens of alterity. By using
some concepts borrowed from philosophy and linguistic anthropology, I
demonstrate how different codes may highlight the coexistence of other
languages and cultures than those imposed by dominant groups.
The third chapter examines Fenoglio’s Racconti del parentado (written
between the 1950s and early 1960s, and collected for the first time in
1978) by adopting some studies on the language-identity relationship.
After an introduction to the short stories, I first investigate the function of
the Langhe dialect and other non-standard varieties by means of some
examples. I then proceed to illustrate how dialects may act as powerful
bonding agents, contributing to assert speakers’ belonging to a specific
social group.
The fourth chapter deals primarily with the socio-economic and
linguistic transformations that took place in Italy during the Boom years
and the 1970s. On the basis of specific sociolinguistic studies (Berruto
1983; Manlio Cortelazzo 1972; 1977; Pellegrini 1975), I carry out an
analysis of some relevant Piedmontese novels of the time (such as
Vogliamo tutto [1971] by Nanni Balestrini, Primo Levi’s La chiave a
stella [1978], as well as La donna della domenica [1972] and A che punto
è la notte [1979] by Fruttero and Lucentini) in order to understand how
and to what degree they reflect the ongoing changes of the time and
whether they maintain the plurilinguistic regional tradition.
In the last chapter, after an introductory section on the current socio-
cultural state of affairs in Italy and Piedmont, I will investigate some
linguistic strategies carried out by Benito Mazzi and Younis Tawfik to
demonstrate, respectively, how the use of substandard codes can still
express a strong sense of regional identity in Mazzi’s La formica rossa
(1987) and Nel sole zingaro (1997), while foreign languages in Tawfik’s
La straniera (1999) may be of help in legitimising the Other. Finally,
Appendix A represents a compendium of the language/identity theories
and methodologies I have used in tackling the texts. In Appendix B, I
illustrate the current linguistic situation of Piedmont. The image at the end
of this section, which shows the linguistic fragmentation of the region,
aims at helping the reader to understand the distinctive, linguistically
variegated situation of Piedmont.
The Many Voices of Contemporary Piedmontese Writers xi
With this study, I attempt to fill a gap in the research on Piedmontese

literature. In fact, although some critical studies on the use of dialect or
English exist on individual authors and works (e.g. Meddemmen on
Fenoglio’s use of English and Villata 2013), and some important
contributions to the history of Piedmontese literature have appeared in
print, too (such as Clivio 2002; Piemonte e letteratura nel ’900 1979), no
current, systematic study that includes different Piedmontese writers under
the language/identity theme has (to my knowledge) been published to date.
My contribution thus proposes to shed new light on Piedmontese literature
by including some contemporary writers in the literary debate and
particularly by identifying a common thread of research among different
authors (that is, multilingualism) against the region’s sociohistorical
background.
CHAPTER ONE
PIEDMONT’S LINGUISTIC VARIETY

AND LITERARY PRODUCTION
Piedmont before Italian Unification

Before embarking on a literary-linguistic analysis of the texts by Pavese,
Fenoglio, and others, it is first of all necessary to draw attention to the
concept of region, which is particularly problematic considering the
complex and multifaceted Italian historical and political framework. I will
therefore circumscribe the object of my study in the sections that follow,
providing some background on Piedmont’s historical importance, its role
in nation building, its linguistic history, and its literary production.
Dealing with regional literature may be a thorny exercise, first and
foremost because of the concept of region itself, given that there is no
single, commonly accepted definition of the term,1 and second because of
the uniqueness of Italy’s regional system. The Constitution, drafted in
1947, brought in new intermediate bodies between local and central
authorities, namely the regional ones. Italy’s regioni are entities endowed
with both administrative and legislative powers, whose competences are
established by articles 114 to 133 of the Charter (Edye and Lintner 1996,
336). In particular, the way the Constitution aims at harmonising “the
requirements of autonomy with unitary interests referring to the State as
the body representing the whole national community” is “absolutely
1
According to Keating, the term “has a multiplicity of meanings in the various
social science disciplines and the historical traditions of European countries and is
politically loaded and sensitive because the very definition of a region as a
framework and a system of action has implications for the distribution of political
power and the content of public policy” (1997, 383). In Smouts’ view, instead,
“[i]t is a characteristic of the region to have neither a definition nor an outline. The
empirical criteria which allow the socio-economic entity to be recognised as
sufficiently homogeneous and distinct are vague and mixed” (1998, 30–1). Ellis
and Michailidis (2011) provide more information on the problematic concept of
region in European history.
2 Chapter One
original” (D’Atena 2013, under “The Constituent Assembly chooses

Regions”). Varying degrees of regional autonomy have been achieved
through the distinction between five special regions—Aosta Valley, Friuli-
Venezia Giulia, Sardinia, Sicily, and Trentino-Alto Adige—enjoying
home rule, and fifteen ordinary regions. The regional structure relies on a
complex system of balances between the State’s and the regions’ functions
as well as on a regime of checks to which the regions are subjected.
Except for five regioni a statuto speciale, which were introduced in 1948,
the ordinary regional system came into being in full in 1970, while the
2001 constitutional reform granted all regions further power and autonomy.2
Apart from their relatively recent administrative status, Italian regions
have a long and indisputable tradition. The current regional system is
neither artificial nor invented, since it harkens back to pre-unitarian states.
Italy, unlike France, Spain, and England, lacked the centripetal forces
which could have organised its territory around a strong capital city.
Rather than one large city, several centres developed, all relatively
powerful and scattered throughout the peninsula. Around them, different
societies, languages, and literatures came into being. Since the Late
Middle Ages, Italy’s stati regionali (that is, medium-size, politically
independent entities between municipalities and nation states) have
“supplied the building blocks of a process of political unification” (Ellis
and Michailidis 2011, 7). Alongside the use of the Tuscan vulgar tongue,
shared only by literary elites for centuries (and which became the national
language as a result of the prestige gained by the poetry of Dante and
Petrarca, as well as Boccaccio’s prose), the use of distinct dialects has long
been an expression of the vivacity of regional culture. The history of
Italian language and literature has thus been marked by an intense
relationship between the periphery of the country and its cultural centre,
that is, Tuscany, particularly Florence. Tuscany has indeed played a
pivotal role in the cultural tradition of Italy, but the importance of other
regions is also evident.3
The territorial object of my study, Piedmont, is the second largest
Italian region, home to nearly 4,400,000 people. Piedmont is one of the
most peripheral (and certainly the westernmost) of all Italian regions. The
region presently known as Piemonte is surrounded by the Alps to the
northwest and the Ligurian Apennines to the south. To the east, the Ticino
2
For an in-depth analysis of Italy’s regional system see Levy (1996) and
Mangiameli (2013).
3
A diachronic analysis of multilingualism in Italian literature is provided by
Contini (1970; 1972). Refer also to Segre (1991), who focuses on the use of
multiple linguistic varieties in the Italian literature of the twentieth century.
Piedmont’s Linguistic Variety and Literary Production 3
and Sesia rivers separate the region from Lombardy. Piedmont borders the
western tip of Emilia-Romagna to the east, with Liguria to the south,
France to the west, and Switzerland and the Aosta Valley to the north. Its
territory is divided into eight provinces, and the region has the second
highest number of municipalities (or comuni) after Lombardy at 1,206.
The core of the region is the Po Valley, a large plain extending in
southwestern Piedmont crossed by the Po River and its tributaries.
Nevertheless, the region’s geography is varied: about 43% is mountainous,
but there are also extensive areas covered by hills (30%) and plains (26%).
The capital of Piedmont, as well as its economic and cultural centre, is
Turin, a city with a current population of about 896,000 inhabitants
(GeoDemo 2015).
Whereas today Piedmont can be identified by its borders on the map, it
was not always considered a distinct geographical entity nor an
administrative body with a capital city, defined boundaries, and powers.
Furthermore, the region of Piedmont was not always known by this name.
As historians have attested, “[i]l nome del Piemonte appare per la prima
volta nel 1193, quando i ‘castellani di Piemonte’ sono menzionati in un
accordo fra il comune d’Asti e il marchese di Saluzzo” (Barbero 2008,
xiv). Starting approximately from the thirteenth century, the term
Piemonte began to spread to the rest of Italy, though different meanings
were attributed to it. In short, at first it indicated a variously identified
group of territories belonging to Lombardy. Afterwards, from around the
fourteenth or fifteenth century, a new meaning associated Piedmont with
the Italian domains progressively occupied by the French House of Savoy,
which included the area currently corresponding to modern-day Piedmont,
the Aosta Valley, the county of Nice, and the region of Savoy. Finally,
Piedmont as referred to today originated from the transfer of the capital
city of the Duchy of Savoy from Chambéry to Turin in 1560, and from
subsequent military conquests and political resolutions.
Despite sharing some characteristics with other regions, the case of
Piedmont is distinctive within the national panorama. Being a terra di
frontiera, the region has been open to foreign influences more than other
areas. Linguistically speaking, its history was at first marked by French-
Italian vernacular bilingualism—with French being used by the upper-
classes and local parlances by the illiterate majority. A third linguistic
variety, Latin, employed by churchmen and diplomats, remained the
prevalent written code until the end of the sixteenth century. Later, when
the House of Savoy was charged with unifying Italy under one language,
Tuscan Italian was preferred over Piedmontese because the latter was
considered peripheral and lacking an aura of literariness and distinction.
4 Chapter One
The region played a key role in spreading the Tuscan variety all over Italy,
a language that initially sounded foreign to the Piedmontese themselves
but whose mastery was deemed a hard-fought achievement.
As mentioned earlier, Piedmont straddled Italy and France for
centuries—two areas that were both culturally and linguistically different.
Such differences encouraged a hybrid language situation. In his De vulgari
eloquentia (ca. 1303), for instance, while considering the necessity of
Italy’s linguistic unification, Dante rejects the varieties used in cities like
Turin and Alessandria because they are so peripheral:
che non possono avere parlate pure; tanto che, se anche possedessero un
bellissimo volgare ௅ e invece l’hanno bruttissimo, per come è mescolato
coi volgari di altri popoli dovremmo negare che si tratti di una lingua
veramente italiana. Perciò, se quello che cerchiamo è l’italiano illustre,
l’oggetto della nostra ricerca non si può trovare in quelle città. (43; bk. 1,
ch. 15)
Dante considered the Piedmontese vulgar tongue “bruttissimo” since it

was too contaminated by other varieties to be taken into account as a
national language. The poet was looking for a pure form of language and
rejected those idioms that were exposed to many linguistic influences. In
fact, in the fourteenth century, the Tuscan linguistic variety was less
widespread in Piedmont than other regions, while Piedmont was one of the
first regions where a local linguistic variety was codified.4 However, a
small number of literary texts would surface only at the end of the
fifteenth century. At this point, Piedmontese was not as yet an autonomous
literary variety, being caught between the major linguistic varieties of
French and Tuscan Italian.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and up to the eighteenth
century, French was the dominant language in Piedmont, used at court and
among aristocrats and intellectuals. This influence is evident because
words of French origin are still present in Piedmontese local parlance, the
4
The earliest written example of the Piedmontese vulgar tongue is represented by
the Sermoni Subalpini. It consists of 188 parchment leaves on which twenty-two
sermons are written in prose, and is ascribed to the end of the twelfth century. The
text was intended for the use of priests throughout the liturgical year. Apart from
Latin quotations, they are written in Piedmontese vernacular, although French and
Franco-Provençal influences are also noticeable. For a detailed study of the
Sermoni Subalpini and the written use of Piedmontese, consult Clivio 1970; Danesi
1976.
phonetic system of which has been affected as well.5 During the fifteenth
century the impact of Tuscan vulgar increased via the ongoing
relationships between some courts of Eastern Piedmont and those of Milan
and Mantua. As Marazzini observes, the Marquisate of Monferrato, in
particular, had a “funzione di cerniera tra il Piemonte più francesizzato”
(2003, 344) and the rest of northern Italy, more exposed to the influence of
Tuscany.
It took some time for the Tuscan variety to spread as significant
achievements took place following a series of language policies imposed
from above. After the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, which put an
end to the conflict between Spain and France for the control of Italy, the
French armies abandoned Piedmont and Savoy, two territories that had
been occupied during the Italian Wars and subsequently returned to the
Duchy of Savoy. One year later, Duke Emmanuel Philibert decided to
move the capital from Chambéry to Turin. In doing so, he made an overtly
political decision in an attempt to escape the influence of France and shift
the focal point of the region eastwards. In the same year, despite him being
a French native speaker, the duke ordered the use of the “lingua volgare”
(Fiorelli 2008, 68) in judiciary and administrative acts. Yet he did not
specify which variety of Italian vulgar tongue he had in mind. Certainly,
Piedmontese lawyers and judges could not master Tuscan perfectly, and
thus probably used Piedmontese “embellished by Latin words and
constructions” (Clivio 1976, 73). In any case, the decision stimulated the
use of Italian local parlances within the Savoy territories at the expense of
French and Latin. As for spoken usage “this policy surely favored
Piedmontese,” whereas “when it came to writing the lingua volgare” an
already codified language was preferred, hence the recourse to Tuscan
Italian and French (73). The duke also encouraged the presence of Italian
intellectuals and scientists at his court, among them novelist and poet
Giraldi Cinzio and Tuscan typographer Lorenzo Torrentino. A new
cultural environment was thus promoted in Turin where Italian culture and
literature were considered more important than ever.6
5
For instance, the mute vowel e and the intermediate ö, which can be found in
many Piedmontese dialect words, are both phonemes present in the French
phonetic system, but not in the Italian one. See Parry (1997, 238–9).
6
The duke’s son, Charles Emmanuel I (1562–1630), wrote some poems in
Piedmontese vernacular, French, and Tuscan Italian, and was the patron of
Alessandro Tassoni. Giovan Battista Marino was also invited to his court in 1608
as well as Giovanni Battista Guarini, whose most prominent work Il pastor fido
(1590) had its first performance in honour of the Duke’s marriage. On Charles
Emmanuel and his poetry see Cognasso (1969, 132–7); Doglio (1979).
6 Chapter One
During the sixteenth century, the dominance of the Tuscan vulgar

tongue grew stronger. This linguistic variety was “ormai saldamente
fondata (come dappertutto del resto) sul primato della grammatica di
Bembo, accolta anche dalle tipografie” (Marazzini 2003, 344). As for
printed works, the first Italian grammar book, Giovanni Fortunio’s Regole
grammaticali della volgar lingua, came out of the press of the Vercelli-
born Bernardino Guerralda in 1516. In addition, Gabriele Giolito de’
Ferrari, born near Vercelli in 1508 (and who later moved to Venice), was
one of the major publishers of literature in the Tuscan vernacular. Later in
the sixteenth century, Piedmont gave birth to the region’s first talented
writer, Giovan Giorgio Alione. Born to a noble family of Asti in 1460 or
1470, he wrote poems, especially farce, which were published for the first
time in 1521. In the wake of Teofilo Folengo’s macaronic language, which
was generated as a reaction against the Bembian model in the outermost
courts of northern Italy during the sixteenth century, different linguistic
codes were combined in his poems and theatrical works. Alione’s farces
are based on Piedmontese vulgar, but French and macaronic Latin (a
mixture of Classical and non-standard Latin) are also used. The author’s
linguistic choices ultimately contributed to the literary prestige of regional
parlance.7
Such a tendency towards literary multilingualism ran alongside the
process of Tuscanisation, which was more evident in Eastern Piedmont. In
the years between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Piedmontese
writers and intellectuals, while acknowledging Tuscan supremacy, did not
however accept it passively. Marazzini mentions the example of Stefano
Guazzo, writer and diplomat from Casale Monferrato, a town in the
province of Alessandria, and author of the grammar book Gli avertimenti
intorno allo scriver thoscano (1597). In his book, despite accepting Pietro
Bembo’s teachings on writing, he re-evaluates the use of dialect elements
in conversation. Matteo di San Martino, another sixteenth-century
Piedmontese poet and grammarian, represents an even more extreme
example. He criticises the supremacy of the Tuscan language in poetry by
proposing a heterogeneous code, made up of Latin, Tuscan, and
Piedmontese words and phrases. However, he promotes such an ideal
linguistic pastiche after studying the Tuscan language thoroughly and
compiling a grammar book in 1555, entitled Le osservazioni grammaticali
7
In one of his best texts Farsa del Braco (1521), Alione mixes Asti dialect with
other Piedmontese varieties and Milanese vernacular, since one of the characters is
from Milan. The mocking effect serves to poke fun at some of the characters and
highlights the humorous side of their adventures. For an analysis of Alione’s
language see Villata (2008).
e poetiche della lingua italiana, with which he aspires to become a poet or,
as he writes, “per istruire me stesso ne i miei componimenti” (Marazzini
2003, 345). To those who accuse him of not being able to compile a
grammar book and become an Italian-speaking poet because of his
belonging to a border region, he replies that the will to master a new
language, along with zealous study, makes him better than Tuscan-born
writers. The conquest of Petrarca’s idiom by assiduous work and its
manipulation to create an original linguistic medium would remain a
distinctive habit of some Piedmontese writers, who took up the practice of
drawing up long lists of Piedmontese words and their Tuscan equivalents
in order to “faticare sulla lingua per conquistare l’arte” (346).8
From the first half of the seventeenth century, France regained a
position of control over Piedmont that would last until the end of the
eighteenth century. French was imposed as the national language in the
French territories of the Duchy of Savoy and played a prominent part in
the education of Piedmont’s young aristocrats and upper middle-class
individuals. During the same period, French became the most influential
language in Europe. It was the language of culture as it somehow inherited
the universal function of Latin, establishing itself as “strumento e segno
del razionalismo cartesiano e dell’Illuminismo” on the European scene
(Morgana 1994, 698). Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a
considerable number of French words entered the Italian vocabulary
through different channels: fashion, diplomacy, politics, and, of course,
literature and theatre. In the first half of the eighteenth century several
French theatre troupes came to Italy, though they stopped in Piedmont
most of the time. From the second half of the century onwards they began
to visit other regions as well, thus contributing in the spreading of French
culture and language to the rest of Italy.9
In spite of this French influence, during the eighteenth century the
House of Savoy decided officially to introduce the teaching of Italian
language in some state schools. After reforming the University of Turin in
1729, Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy and King of Sardinia (also called
Piedmont-Sardinia, which is the title given to the Savoy state after
receiving Sardinia from the Austrian Habsburgs in 1720), brought in the
8
See Matteo di San Martino (1999); Corti ([1977] 2001, 224–46).
9
Words like stoffa, colpo di stato, patto sociale, and burocrazia are all of French
origin, while toilette, claque, and troupe are just a few examples of unadapted
French terms that entered the Italian lexis during the eighteenth century and are
still in use today (Marazzini 1998, 313). In the same period, syntactic constructions
modelled on French entered Italian too, like venire da followed by the infinitive
form of the verb, clearly derived from French passé récent (Serianni 2002, 585).
8 Chapter One
teaching of Latin grammar through manuals written in Italian. In 1733 the

teaching of Italian was made compulsory—even if restricted to elite
secondary schools—and a chair of Italian and Greek eloquence was
established at the University of Turin in 1734. In the 1750s, Piedmont-
Sardinia became stronger than any other Italian state. The reforms carried
out by Victor Amadeus II, which also affected the army and diplomacy,
the taxation system, commerce, and industry, successfully continued with
his successor Charles Emmanuel III, whose long reign lasted from 1730 to
1773. The subsequent annexation of the provinces of Novara and
Alessandria gave the kingdom a more modern political and administrative
structure, even though it remained an authoritarian state inspired more by
French absolutism than by reformative principles.10
The attitude of Piedmontese people towards the French language
changed dramatically when Savoy territories were occupied by Napoleon’s
troops and the region was forcibly annexed to France. After the French
revolutionary government replaced the House of Savoy and took control of
Piedmont in 1799, a process of francisation was attempted. French was to
become the language of schools and public administration in Piedmont,
while local dialects were considered a useful medium to help the French
language spread to the whole region. As stated in a report by the
provisional Piedmontese government in 1799, “il dialetto nostro [è un]
misto di voci italiane, e Francesi [e] ha una pressoché eguale analogia coi
due idiomi, a segno che il giovane Piemontese entra nella società con
disposizioni eguali ad apprendere le due lingue” (in Marazzini 1991, 66).
The Regolamento of 1802 concerning public instruction gradually
introduced the study of French in the schools of Piedmont. A list of
grammar books was suggested, and pupils were also recommended to
teach themselves by making comparisons between French and dialect
words. Contrary to what had been claimed, Piedmontese vernacular
revealed itself as a major source of problems for pupils, since “si trovano a
studiare allo stesso tempo la [lingua] italiana, la latina e la francese, e
nessuna di queste è per loro naturale, in quanto sono abituati al dialetto”
(in Marazzini 1991, 69–70). Moreover, French was spoken almost
exclusively in Turin, while regionally it was known only to the upper
classes.
As soon as the French language became a symbol of the enemy’s
oppression, the preference for Italian began for chauvinistic reasons. The
Turinese Francesco Galeani Napione’s Trattato dell’uso e dei pregi della
10
On Victor Amadeus II’s reign and school reforms, consult Ennio Russo (1969)
and Symcox (1983).
lingua italiana can be considered Piedmont’s linguistic manifesto of that

time, as well as an example of the political value ascribed to language.
Published for the first time in 1791, then reprinted in 1813, the treaty
outlines the history and use of Italian in Piedmont, giving special emphasis
to Emmanuel Philibert’s decision to introduce it in judiciary and
administrative acts in 1560. In the author’s opinion, this was a choice that
had to be followed since the Duke of Savoy’s decision was consistent with
a precise political plan of building a strong, independent state west of the
Alps. Although Napione also opposed the excess of Tuscan purism in the
Italian language, French remained the enemy par excellence to him. For
this reason, he tried to persuade Victor Amadeus III to adopt the Italian
language officially for his territories in order to resist French language and
culture. The treaty was crucial because it attracted great attention from
other regions, thus allowing Piedmont, or at least a part of its intellectual
elite, to break its cultural isolation from the rest of the Italian regional
states. What is more, from that moment on the Piedmontese situation of
French-Italian bilingualism began to change in favour of the Italian
language.11
On the other hand, a good number of Piedmontese intellectuals of the
early nineteenth century were still in favour of a condition of French-
Italian bilingualism with prevalence to the French language. One of them
was historian Carlo Denina, who hoped for the adoption of French as the
official language of the Savoy State by virtue of its affinity with
Piedmontese. According to his treaty Dell’uso della lingua francese
(1803), French was preferable to Tuscan Italian since the latter had
become too literary and unsuitable for everyday conversation owing to the
excess of purism imposed by the members of the Accademia della Crusca.
Denina believed that such an imperfect condition of bilingualism was
11
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a movement called Purismo began to
develop among the intellectual circles of northern Italy partly due to the aversion
to the French language. Purists were contrary to any language innovation,
neologism, and foreign influence on the Italian language. For them, any term of
French origin was particularly “sozzo, sconcio,” or “un vocabolo pari a
bestemmia” (in Serianni 2002, 590). On the contrary, they considered the Tuscan
Italian of the fourteenth century as the best variety of Italian ever spoken, and they
hoped for its adoption throughout Italy. Although Napione could be considered the
forerunner of the Purist movement, its major representatives were not
Piedmontese. Purists eventually did not succeed in stopping the influence of the
French language, but they nonetheless contributed to the hostility of Piedmontese
intellectuals against it during the first half of the nineteenth century. For an in-
depth analysis of Napione’s works, see Beccaria (1983) and Marazzini (1982).
10 Chapter One
suitable for Piedmont, which could truly become a region of transition

between French and Italian culture.
Dating back to some years earlier is Vittorio Alfieri’s well-known
linguistic attempt of spiemontizzarsi by learning Tuscan Italian and
abandoning both local parlances and French linguistic influence. Before
leaving Asti, Alfieri was a decent French speaker and used dialect with
friends and relatives, but was not able to master Dante’s idiom correctly.
More importantly, he needed a refined language for his tragedies since he
knew he could not use the “barbaro gergo,” ([1804] 2012, 32), as he called
the Piedmontese dialect of his time (see note 2, page ix). For this reason,
in 1776 he went to Florence to learn a literary language through which he
could speak to posterity. During his research, Alfieri avoided plain or
colloquial expressions and included archaisms and terms of the Tuscan
literary tradition. After leaving for Florence, he began to gather notes to
prove his will to also study the spoken Tuscan vernacular. The notes
(initially written in French, then in Italian) would be published in 1983
under the title Appunti di lingua e letterari, which Beccaria describes as
“[i]l primo vocabolarietto domestico dell’uso toscano” (Beccaria and
Sterpos 1983, 491). It is a lexical compendium made up of over six-
hundred Tuscan terms with corresponding Piedmontese or French
translations that the writer grouped together to improve his conversational
language. According to Dionisotti, Alfieri’s desire to “spiemontizzarsi” is
an exemplary sign “della tenacia in lui dell’origine piemontese, del peso di
quel provenire dall’ultima regione d’Italia acquisita alla letteratura
italiana, onde nel linguaggio poetico delle sue tragedie la forza e
l’impaccio insieme quasi di una preportente ruvidezza barbarica e di una
ingenua e paziente devozione scolastica” ([1967] 1999, 41). As will be
noted later, Alfieri’s determination to learn and master a new idiom was
significant, as it encouraged future generations of Piedmontese writers to
research the living Tuscan language (and, in general, linguistic varieties
different from their own) in order to enrich their literary tongue.12 Such an
apparently contradictory linguistic stance is in fact representative of
Tesio’s above-mentioned “tensione bipolare del linguaggio,” which
characterises several Piedmontese writers as will clearly emerge from my
linguistic investigation in the subsequent chapters.
12
A comprehensive overview of Alfieri’s linguistic research is provided by
Perdichizzi (2009) and Tomasin (2009).
Piedmont during the Unification Years

Despite the contradictions and difficulties associated with Piedmont’s
involvement in nation building, the region played a prominent part in the
formation of modern Italy. The Italian Unification process, which had its
crucial years between 1859 and 1861, was long and troubled. Not only was
it difficult to achieve, but it was also forced. Italy was still an aggregation
of macro-regions and political spaces up to 1860, each with its own
cultural, historic, and linguistic identity. The only way to assemble them
into a unified country in a relatively short time was to compel them to stay
together. The Unification was then decided and conducted by a few men—
aristocrats, churchmen, lawyers, and officers, Piedmontese for the most
part—with the consent and oversight of the House of Savoy.13
However, the Unification of Italy started long before that date, having
its roots in the 1820s when a group of young patriots called Carbonari
formed secret societies to obtain rights from the governments that ruled
the different parts of Italy. One of their masterminds was Giuseppe
Mazzini. While in exile in France he founded a movement named Giovane
Italia, whose aim was to create a united country with a republican form of
government. But, first of all, it had to educate people before encouraging
them to rise up against foreign occupiers and conservative governments.
Although Mazzini’s political activism had some success in different parts
of Italy, all his insurrectional attempts failed—such as the first Savoy
uprising in 1833, the attempted invasion of Genoa in 1836, and the revolts
in Lombardy and Tuscany. Despite this, the legacy of Mazzini contributed
to spreading democratic and republican principles in Italy.14
In 1848 another attempt to unify Italy failed when Charles Albert of
Piedmont declared war on Austria and invaded the Kingdom of
Lombardy-Venetia. The House of Savoy then had the opportunity to
achieve the goal it had been longing for; that is, to incorporate Lombardy
into its territories and put itself at the head of the unifying movement. A
decisive battle was fought in Novara on March 23, 1849, which gave the
Austrians an undisputed victory. As a consequence, Charles Albert
abdicated in favour of his son Victor Emanuel II.
Already Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Finance of the
Kingdom of Piedmont under Victor Emanuel II, Camillo Benso, Count of
Cavour, held a decisive role in the process of Unification. A moderate
liberal descending from a long-established Piedmontese noble family, after
13
For an analysis of the role of Piedmont during the Risorgimento, see Nada 1993.
14
For a detailed study of Mazzini’s politics, refer to Sarti 1997.
12 Chapter One
he was appointed Prime Minister of Piedmont in 1852 he knew that the

only way to unify Italy was to divert the attention of European powers
towards the Italian situation. Thus, in 1854, when France and England
intervened in support against Russia in the Crimean War he negotiated an
alliance and sent an expeditionary corps of about 18,000 men to Crimea
that performed brilliantly. As a result, Piedmont was able to assume a
place among the victors at the Congress of Paris in 1856. Cavour
persuaded his audience that Piedmont’s ambitions and its allies’ interests
coincided with an anti-Austrian policy (Saladino 1970, 11–2). Three years
later, he arranged a secret meeting with Napoleon III. The agreement was
for a war to be waged against Austria for the acquisition of the Lombardo-
Veneto by Piedmont. Napoleon III would provide 200,000 soldiers, but he
would receive Savoy and Nice in exchange. Cavour would only have to
arrange for Austria to invade Piedmontese territories—the sole condition
needed for France to enter into war against Austria. Cavour succeeded in
his attempt as the war broke out on April 23, 1859. French troops helped
the Piedmontese army and together defeated Austria after winning battles
at Magenta, Solferino, and San Martino in June 1859. Piedmont obtained
Lombardy and ceded Savoy and Nice to France. In the meantime,
Tuscany, Modena, Parma, and the northern Papal States had rebelled and
asked to be added to Piedmont.15
In 1860, the democratic movement gained momentum as Giuseppe
Garibaldi led a volunteer force (called I Mille) to free southern Italy from
the Bourbon grasp. While Piedmontese troops occupied the central Papal
States, the Mille defeated the Bourbon army near Caserta. After other
victorious battles, Garibaldi was ordered to stop and deliver the territories
he had won to Victor Emmanuel II, who would be saluted as Re d’Italia
on March 17, 1861. The Kingdom of Italy was officially announced and
Turin appointed its capital. Rome and the eastern regions remained to be
gained. In 1866 Venice was annexed and, four years later, the military
forces of Victor Emmanuel invaded Rome. In October 1870 the
acquisition of Rome was confirmed by plebiscite and the city was made
capital of the Kingdom. Italy had to wait until the end of World War I to
gain Trentino-Alto Adige, Istria, and Trieste.
The presence of the Casa Savoia guaranteed a sense of continuity
between the Kingdom of Piedmont and the Kingdom of Italy. They
managed to embody the unitary cause and were able to act as a strong
point of reference for all political and social forces that aimed to unite
Italy. Besides, in the panorama of political equilibrium among European
15
On the life and politics of Cavour, see Romeo 1984.
powers, the Savoy House was considered the only body able to carry out
the process of unification.
Historians have often used the term piemontesizzazione to refer to the
extension of Piedmont’s legislative, administrative, and political structures
in the regions annexed to the Kingdom of Italy (Saladino 1970, 63).
During the first forty years of the Kingdom, nine out of fifteen Prime
Ministers were either Piedmontese or came from the former Kingdom of
Piedmont. It was a process imposed from on high without any parliamentary
discussion. Actually, at the beginning of the newly formed country, the
idea was to preserve the autonomy of the new regions and respect pre-
unitarian differences. Then, the outbreak of the Second War of Independence
and rebellions in the south led to a centralised form of state with the 1861
and 1865 laws establishing the new order. The Constitution of Italy
remained the Statuto Albertino, so named as it was conceded by King
Charles Albert of Savoy in 1848. It guaranteed considerable control to the
King as the executive power belonged to him alone. He had the right to
choose his most faithful collaborators to form the core of the new
bureaucracy. The perfect symbol of these reformations is the Prefetto, a
public servant under the authority of the Home Office and a representative
of the crown in the provinces (Hearder 1983, 121).
In the mid-nineteenth century, the discussion on the Questione della
lingua became particularly animated in Piedmont. The core of the matter
was the necessity to find the best Italian vernacular to be used as the
national language. Eventually, Alessandro Manzoni’s ideas on language,
summarised for the first time in 1847 in a letter to Piedmontese linguist
Giacinto Carena, became the most influential. According to Manzoni, the
best Italian language variety was the Florentine—“nell’uso attuale e
vivente” (1987, 207)—spoken by the well-educated classes. In Manzoni’s
opinion, it was better to teach a language that was actually spoken
somewhere in Italy rather than adopting the lifeless models of literary
tradition. In 1860, he was appointed senator of the Kingdom of Sardinia,
and the Ministry of Education invited him to become a member of a
commission whose aim was to “ricercare e proporre tutti i provvedimenti e
i modi coi quali si possa aiutare a rendere più universale in tutti gli ordini
del popolo la notizia della buona lingua e della buona pronunzia” (in
Serianni 1990, 41). The commission decided to spread the Italian language
through state schools based on Piedmont’s school system. This means that
it was based on the Casati Law (named after Gabrio Casati, Minister of
Education from 1859 to 1860), which made primary education free for
four years and compulsory for the following two years, while the Italian
language gained an important role in the education of children.
14 Chapter One
At the time of Unification the Italian language was known only to a

few. According to De Mauro, only 2.5% of the population could speak the
national tongue fluently in 1861 (1970, 42).16 Although not sufficient to
fight the high level of illiteracy, the Piedmontese school system was
nonetheless among the most advanced in Europe at the time.17 In 1877, the
Coppino Law, which owes its name to the Minister of Education Michele
Coppino, raised the age of compulsory attendance to nine and punished the
families of children who did not attend school.18 In addition, the Italian
government commissioned the compilation of a dictionary based on the
living use of the Florentine, the first edition of which, entitled Novo
vocabolario della lingua italiana secondo l’uso di Firenze, was published
between 1870 and 1897.
Therefore, together with the political merger, Piedmont also took charge
of the country’s linguistic integration. Tuscan Italian was a language that the
House of Savoy first imposed on itself, then on Piedmont, and finally on
the whole Kingdom of Italy. As mentioned, the learning of Italian was a
difficult achievement for Piedmontese political elites and intellectuals as
well. As evidence of their linguistic apprenticeship, between the eighteenth
and twentieth centuries, drawing mainly from Alfieri’s example, some
writers would compile personal notes and documents in their local
vernacular, as seen for instance in the lists of Piedmontese words or
expressions translated into Florentine. The Vercelli-born writer Giovanni
Faldella recorded Tuscan words and expressions in a personal dictionary
between the 1860s and 1880s, but published much later under the title
Zibaldone in 1980. Massimo D’Azeglio behaved in a similar way: he left a
series of personal notes about the Tuscan language that denoted his
particular interest in Tuscan sayings of the period (Marazzini 1984, 218).
These few examples demonstrate the level of difficulty, even for well-
educated people, in learning and mastering a new language as well as the
16
This estimate was later modified to 9.5% by Castellani (1982).
17
During Unification, Piedmont was the region with the lowest rate of illiteracy
(about 54%) and with the highest level of literacy among females aged six years
and above. In 1871, 51% of Piedmontese women had the ability to read and write
(Serianni 1990, 19). On the education of women in Italy in the nineteenth century
see also Soldani (2009).
18
Prior to these laws, in the 1820s Charles Felix of Savoy had enacted a
Regolamento scolastico, providing free elementary schools in every city and
village of the kingdom as well as the teaching of Italian to primary-school pupils.
Charles Albert had launched another school reform in 1840, with which the Italian
language became an important subject in secondary schools. Although these
reforms did not attain the expected results, they demonstrated a new attention
reserved to the role of the school system in teaching Italian (Marazzini 1984, 256).
ambivalent relationship between the Italian of the literary tradition and

local idioms.
In the Unification years, Piedmontese literature also assumed a
pedagogical role. The greatest editorial phenomenon of the last decades of
the nineteenth century was Cuore by Edmondo De Amicis. Born in
Liguria in 1846 (part of the Kingdom of Sardinia at that time), and having
grown up in Piedmont, he wrote Cuore in 1886. The novel, set in 1881–2,
takes the form of the fictional diary of Enrico Bottini, a middle-class boy
who attends third grade at an elementary school in Turin. To Enrico’s
diary nine short stories are added, the protagonists of which are children
from other regions. Nowadays, Cuore is regarded as “uno degli strumenti
più potenti di unificazione culturale nazionale (in senso psicologico e
psico-antropologico)” (Asor Rosa 1975, 928). Its pedagogical intent was
to promote the values and ideals elaborated by the northern bourgeoisie
during the Risorgimento: a strict sense of sacrifice and duty, respect for the
family, sympathy for the poor and a sentiment of belonging to a united
nation. Despite its ubiquitous paternalism and persistent pathetic tone,
Cuore was extremely popular and read by generations of schoolchildren
up to the twentieth century. The success of the novel also contributed to
spreading the national language, especially among the middle class. Based
on Manzoni’s teaching, De Amicis adapted the language of the novel to
spoken Florentine. The result was a rather simplified code, without
syntactic complexities and Piedmontese words but rich in Tuscan idioms
(like “dare le croste” instead of picchiare, or “far querciola” in place of
camminare con le mani in terra e le gambe in aria) and, at the same time,
marked by “una certa regolata patina di arcaismo,” as Tempesti points out
(1991, 4).
In 1905 De Amicis published L’idioma gentile, a very successful
compendium of spoken Italian. De Amicis was originally a dialect speaker
who learned Tuscan Italian through classical writers and during his stay in
Florence. Like Manzoni, he paid attention to the language spoken in
everyday situations, elegant but far from academic. Having experienced
the challenge of learning and mastering Italian, De Amicis insisted on the
study and defence of a unified language as an act of love for one’s country
and an opportunity to broaden one’s regional horizons. At the beginning of
his L’idioma gentile—which takes the form of “un’autobiografia linguistica,
garbatamente romanzata, con l’aggiunta di personaggi” (Tempesti 1991,
4)—he asks his readers “che vale amar la propria lingua se non si studia?”
(De Amicis [1905] 2006, 62). Then he adds that a national language
should be studied “non soltanto per amore, ma per interesse nostro” (63),
and also “per dovere di cittadini” (64), thus implying both civic duties and
16 Chapter One
the possibility of communicating more easily. The linguistic debate on the

opportunity to adopt a centralised form of language continued for several
decades, thus proving that De Amicis’ concerns expressed in L’idioma
gentile were well founded.19
As has been noted, some Piedmontese writers did not restrict themselves
to simply adhering to Tuscan linguistic rules, but retreated from the
imposition of a unique linguistic model. This is the case of the members of
the artistic movement known as Scapigliatura, which included writers,
painters, and musicians from northern Italy. The idiolect adopted by the
writers was a mixture of literary language and dialects, vibrant and full of
lexical creativity, which would eventually lead to Gadda’s heterogeneous
style.20 Piedmont contributed to the movement with a group of artists who
formed a society called Dante Alighieri in 1863. Giovanni Faldella, born
near Vercelli in 1846, can be considered the most representative of this.
He is the author of Figurine (1875), a successful collection of short stories
“che lo rivelano definitivamente come scrittore estroso e anticonformista,
impegnato in quella ricerca stilistica che resta la costante e l’elemento di
assoluto rilievo delle sue opere migliori” (Cicala and Tesio 1998, 434).21
Another collection, entitled Verbanine, was published in the Gazzetta
Letteraria in 1878, then as a volume in 1892. The stories are set in the
Lake Maggiore area and are full of inventive and lively descriptions. In
1879 he wrote a novel entitled Rovine, while the novella Madonna di
fuoco e Madonna di neve appeared in 1888. Among minor scapigliati,
Achille Giovanni Cagna, a close friend of Faldella, is an intriguing writer
too, whose linguistic traits—influenced by Faldella’s style and interspersed
with Piedmontese and Tuscan—are clearly visible in the collection of
short fiction Provinciali (1886) and Alpinisti ciabattoni (1888), a farcical
19
Boero and Veronesi (2009) provide an excellent overview of Cuore. On De
Amicis’ linguistic works, see Tosto (2003) and Benucci (2008).
20
For a detailed analysis of the Scapigliatura, refer to Contini (1953, 7–48) and
Tessari (1980).
21
The linguistic habits of the upper classes were occasionally mocked by the
Scapigliati. Faldella employed French terms, together with Piedmontese and
English words, to give birth to an extremely original pastiche in some of his works,
especially with ironic purposes, as is evident in the following excerpt taken from Il
male dell’arte where an intentional abuse of words of French origin is made:
“[f]ummo invitati ad una soaré del barone Nobilara, che le pose la semplice
intestazione di tè danzante, molto bene accomodata in questa stagione di accozzi
strambi, quali sono i discorsi della Corona, i Caffè cantanti e i Risotti mascherati”
(in Morgana 1974, 106).
novel on the misadventures of a group of people during a mountain

excursion.22
As Giuseppe Zaccaria points out, “l’opera di Faldella e di Cagna pone
in primo piano il problema del linguaggio letterario, da conquistare
attraverso uno sperimentalismo mistilingue che denuncia l’insoddisfazione
nei confronti di ogni omologazione accentratrice e generalizzata (la lingua
nazionale proposta da Manzoni)” (1997, 16). As mentioned earlier, after
an accurate recording of Tuscan words of the nineteenth century, and after
perfectly mastering this linguistic code, they interspersed their literary
language with Piedmontese and foreign terms, thus pushing Italian to its
limits and creating an experimental type of writing, in which dialect in
particular “dà voce a ciò che è periferico e provinciale, integrando e
contestando, insieme, ogni progetto di unificazione forzosa” (16). As we
will see in chapter two, to a certain extent, the linguistic experimentation
which Pavese carries out in Ciau Masino is most probably influenced by
Faldella’s and Cagna’s prose, since the refusal to conform to a single
linguistic code is a permanent feature of Pavese’s early work, together
with the desire to mock the highbrow narrative of the time and open
Piedmontese literature to foreign influences.
Simultaneous with the spread of the Tuscan variety in Piedmont and
multilingual experimentation, the second half of the nineteenth century
saw the birth of vernacular theatre and narrative, as well as the circulation
of the first periodicals written in Piedmontese dialect. Such apparently
contradictory events are no surprise, since the region’s linguistic identity
often proceeds on parallel tracks. Around the same time, the Kingdom of
Piedmont was about to disappear and merge into a new country. Dialect
was thus used for nostalgic purposes; that is, as a way to make old
Piedmont survive. The first steps towards Piedmontese theatre date back to
1857, when Giovanni Toselli founded his acting company, the Compagnia
drammatica nazionale. The use of dialect in plays like La Cichin-a‘d
Moncalé (literally meaning “Francesca da Moncalieri,” an adaptation of
Silvio Pellico’s Francesca da Rimini) “diventerà ben presto un fatto
sociale che coinvolse anche il popolo minuto accanto al tradizionale
pubblico borghese e aristocratico” (Clivio 2002, 337). Vittorio Bersezio
soon became the most popular actor of the time, gaining fame with his
22
For further readings on Faldella see chapter one of Tesio (1991) and Ragazzini
(1976). For an insight on Cagna’s theatre and narrative, see Tamiozzo Goldmann
(1988) and Sarasso (1972).
18 Chapter One
comedy Le miserie ‘d monsù Travet, written in dialect and performed for

the first time in Turin in 1863.23
A year earlier, Luigi Pietracqua set to print La Gasëta d’Gianduja, the
first periodical in Piedmontese vernacular. The narrative in regional
parlance was closely connected to the circulation of periodicals, since the
first novels in dialect appeared in periodicals as romanzi d’appendice. As
Tesio points out, only in Turin, “dal 1866 al 1915 si stamparono una
ventina di periodici in dialetto” (1981, 265). The most successful
feuilleton writer was the above-mentioned Pietracqua, his most
representative work being the historical novel Don Pipeta l’Asilé—first
serialised in La Gasëta d’Gianduja in 1867, then published in volume in
1868—in which “si incrociano due modelli narrativi: il feuilleton e il
romanzo storico” (Tesio 1986, 291).24
In the second half of the nineteenth century, a real anglomania ran
parallel to such a resurgence of interest in regional cultures in Piedmont.
The Industrial Revolution, the wealth of the British Empire, and the
stability of its political system brought English language and literature to
the fore. New words describing recent advances and products entered the
Italian vocabulary in their original forms, such as ferry boat, whisky, and
jersey, while others were Italianised (e.g. bilancio, locomotiva, and
coalizione). In the nineteenth century, English words, either translated or
kept in their original form, also entered Italian via other channels: for
example the success and translation of Walter Scott’s historical novels,
and the dissemination of the periodical press in the second half of the
century (Cartago 1994, 735–6). In 1859 the spread of English in Italy was
also encouraged by law, since the Legge Casati provided for the teaching
of English in secondary schools.
That said, the first major lexical transfers from English into Italian
actually date back to the seventeenth century. At that time, modern science
and political theories began to develop in England, and Italian intellectuals
showed a certain interest in them. The influence of England and its
language grew during the eighteenth century, although Italians who could
actually speak English were scarce. During that period, knowledge of the
English language was indeed of secondary importance in Europe and Italy,
23
Bersezio also founded La Stampa in 1867, still the most important Piedmontese
newspaper. On the birth of Piedmontese theatre, see Rizzi (1984) and Albina and
Tesio (1990).
24
Asilé is a Piedmontese term meaning “acetaro, che fa o vende l’aceto” (“Asilé”
1830). The novel, written in Turinese vernacular, indeed tells the story of a vinegar
pedlar in the Turin of the eighteenth century. See Croce (1914, 139–50). On
Monti’s Italian translation of Pietracqua’s novel, see Tesio (1975).
where a few intellectuals (such as Carlo Denina and Giuseppe Baretti)

were just beginning to look at England with curiosity. At that time, French
played the role of lingua franca in Europe and mediated between English
and Italian, as many English words were transferred via the French
language. As stated by Turinese professor Arturo Graf, who studied the
influence of English on Italian in the eighteenth century, while referring to
the borrowing of English words, “era ancor essa, l’anglomania, una
conseguenza, e starei per dire, una forma della gallomania” (1911, 33).
During the French Revolutionary Wars, the relationships between England
and the Italian states became closer and more direct than before. The
Kingdom of Sardinia and other Italian states entered the First Coalition in
1793, while only the Kingdom of Naples took part in the Second and
Third Coalition wars. Then, as stated above, it was during the nineteenth
century that the anglomania took place.25
Clearly, the contacts between England and Piedmont were not as
intense and frequent as those between Piedmont and France for obvious
geographical reasons. Yet, one of the first Italian intellectuals to have a
close relationship with English culture and language was the Piedmontese
Giuseppe Baretti. He was the first to use the word anglicismi in the history
25
Long before the first borrowings from the English language, Piedmont and
England established an interesting connection. Piedmont was in fact “a natural
staging-point on the journey from England to Rome which would have accounted
for a large part of all the travel undertaken by Englishmen through Northern Italy”
(Nichols 1967, 15). Furthermore, there were “the pilgrims on their way to and from
the Holy Land who would once again have taken the Alps on foot before
embarking at a Mediterranean port” (15). Few traces of these passages were found,
but one pilgrim left a tangible mark of his presence: the Vercelli Book, a collection
of Anglo-Saxon prose and verse of the late tenth century. It is the latest of the four
surviving major manuscripts of Old English poetry to be brought to the attention of
modern readers. The Vercelli Book is so named because it was found in the
Cathedral library at Vercelli (a city 75 km east of Turin) in 1822, where it is still
held today. It is neither clear how it exactly ended up in Vercelli nor who brought
it there. However, since the Piedmontese city was a major staging post on the route
to Rome throughout the Middle Ages, the most plausible explanation is that the
book was left behind by an Anglo-Saxon pilgrim on his way to or from Rome.
Another explanation is that Guala Bicchieri, a cardinal born in Vercelli, brought
the book back with him from England where he had been papal legate from 1216
to 1218, and Prior of St. Andrew near Ely. As a mark of his admiration for English
culture, when he went back to Vercelli he built the Sant’Andrea Cathedral, one of
the earliest Italian examples of Cistercian Gothic, which is imitative of the Abbey
of St. Andrew in Chesterton. For detailed information on the Vercelli Book see
Zacher (2009).
20 Chapter One
of the Italian language in 1764. In issue 24 of the journal Frusta letteraria,

he wrote:
Oh che bella cosa, se mi venisse fatto di svegliare in qualche nostro

scrittore la voglia di sapere bene anche la lingua inglese! Allora sì, che si
potrebbono sperare de’ pasticci sempre più maravigliosi di vocaboli e di
modi nostrani e stranieri ne’ moderni libri d’Italia! E quanto non
crescerebbono questi libri di pregio, se oltre a que’ tanti francesismi di cui
già riboccano, contenessero anche qualche dozzina d’anglicismi in ogni
pagina. (in Cartago 1994, 728)
Even though he actually employed only a few English words in his works,
Baretti was a genuine admirer of English culture and language. “Ad onta
di tutti i vizi e di tutti i mali che regnano nella lor isola, la loro isola è
tuttavia il miglior paese senza paragone che oggi sia nel mondo” (in
Ubezio 2010, 193), writes Baretti in a letter from England to an Italian
friend in 1776. Several Italian intellectuals travelled to England during the
eighteenth century, like Francesco Scipione Maffei, Alessandro Verri, and
Francesco Algarotti, but Baretti was most likely the one who knew
England and the language best. He in fact spent nearly thirty years in
London, where he worked as an Italian teacher and essayist. “La
riflessione linguistica ispira gran parte della produzione londinese di
Baretti” (Martino 1999, 45), as is clear from the titles of his works:
Introduction to the Italian Language, An Account of the Manners and
Customs of Italy, and especially the Dictionary of the English and Italian
Languages, published for the first time in 1760, which also contains
grammatical explanations similar to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.26
What is relevant to this study is that Baretti was probably the first
Piedmontese writer to set up a privileged channel of communication
between the English language and culture and Piedmont. At first, this
brought him to exploit the rich variances of literary Tuscan Italian; then he
tended to “costruire soluzioni stilistiche inedite e a far valere la dismisura
di un eccesso” (Marazzini 1984, 220) by using colloquial terminology,
Piedmontese expressions, and words of English origin. This linguistically
inventive linea piemontese inaugurated by Baretti, within which “la ricerca
linguistica si traduce quasi subito in sperimentalismi” (220), continued
with the Scapigliati and, as we shall see, Pavese and Fenoglio.
26
For an in-depth study of Baretti’s works and experiences abroad, refer to
Martorelli (1993) and Cerruti and Trivero (1993).
Language and Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth

Century
Between 1861 and the early 1880s Piedmont became a crucial industrial
area in Italy. In the same period, the modernisation of agriculture led to the
growth of small peasant property. Yet Turin, in particular, suffered
economic and political repercussions when the capital was moved to
Florence in 1865, and then to Rome in 1871. It nevertheless succeeded in
recovering quickly, becoming a prosperous and modern city in the
subsequent decades. Meanwhile, the percentage of factory workers in
Piedmont had been growing by virtue of new companies such as
Savigliano mechanical factories and Fiat, the largest Italian vehicle
manufacturer, founded in Turin in 1899. A couple of years later, in 1906,
another automobile producer, Lancia, was established, while Olivetti
opened in Ivrea in 1908 and soon became Europe’s leading manufacturer
of typewriters and office machines. Turin also saw the birth of the cinema
industry, since five major film production companies were instituted there
at the beginning of the twentieth century.27
Although less affected than other areas, Piedmont was somewhat
struck by the economic crisis at the close of the nineteenth century.
Initially, the emergency affected agriculture because of the competition of
non-European products. A few years later, economic difficulties had a
significant impact on industry as well, when the frail banking system
collapsed after a series of bankruptcies. Numerous silk, mechanical, and
chemical factories were forced to close, a fact that soon led to the rise of
unemployment rates and migration—especially towards France and
America. Workers’ strikes became a common occurrence, mutual aid
societies grew in number, and Socialism intensified its influence on the
labour movement. The general election of 1892 saw left-wing parties
gaining a great number of votes in the constituencies of Turin, Biella, and
Novara. Five years later, “i voti socialisti a Torino raggiungono il 27%,”
while in 1899 “Alessandria è la prima città italiana ad avere un sindaco
socialista, l’operaio Paolo Sacco” (Barbero 2008, 430). Broadly speaking,
in Piedmont economic stagnation and popular discontent resulted in open
hostility towards Prime Minister Francesco Crispi’s increasingly
authoritarian government and disastrous foreign policy.28 Consequently,
the appointment of the Piedmontese Giovanni Giolitti as Treasury Minister
27
For details on the role of Turin in the history of Italian cinema see Rondolino
(1999) and Della Casa and Ventavoli (2000).
28
Consult Adorni (1999) for an in-depth analysis of Crispi’s policy.
22 Chapter One
in 1889 was welcomed, as he was considered capable of pursuing a strict

economic policy of renouncing expensive colonial expeditions.
After the assassination of King Umberto I in 1900, the worst seemed to
be over. The first fifteen years of the century were marked by Giolitti’s
governments and characterised by economic recovery. Like Cavour,
Giolitti was a moderate liberal, familiar with the State’s intricate bureaucracy,
respected by the King and admired by the leading parliamentary socialists.
This period saw the first State welfare measures: working days for women
limited to eleven hours, the abolition of the employment of children, and
the Supreme Council of Labour’s examination of labour issues. Contrary
to what was expected, Giolitti’s policy was also marked by the war against
Libya. Ultimately though, Giolitti’s policy to defuse popular discontent
through social reform and by absorbing and integrating new political
forces (socialists, Catholics, and nationalists) into the traditional system of
dynastic and bureaucratic authority failed.29
The end of Giolitti’s fourth term as Prime Minister in 1914 coincided
with the beginning of World War I. When Italy entered the conflict in
1915, Turin had a population of about 430,000, with more than 5,000
companies employing over 93,000 workers (Colli 2010, 144). About one-
third of its population had industrial jobs (Clark 1984, 192). Fiat had
already become the leading producers of trucks and lorries in Europe and
was one of few Italian firms to enjoy a war boom. Generally speaking,
among northern Italian regions, “il Piemonte fu quella che più delle altre
rafforzò durante il periodo bellico il suo potenziale industriale” (Castronovo
1977b, 300).
Piedmontese factory workers and farmers proved themselves largely
against military intervention. This was especially evident in Turin, where a
police report informed of public opinion being “in tutte le classi,
generalmente avversa all’attuale guerra” (in Barbero 2008, 439). In May
1915, Turin became the only city where the outbreak of war caused a
general strike. Two years later, bread shortages triggered other riots that
were brutally crushed by the army, but shortly afterwards protests and
lockouts would become commonplace. After the 1919 national landslide
victory for the socialists, industrial workers took control of several
factories in Turin, formed councils, and hoped the revolution would spread
from Russia to Europe, while peasants occupied land in the provinces of
Novara and Vercelli. The years between 1919 and 1921 were soon to be
known as the biennio rosso (“two red years”), which saw Turin and
Piedmont at the forefront of the movement. In the region’s capital, two
29
De Grand (2001) provides an insightful study of the Giolitti age.
workers were killed on September 2, 1920. Later, the protest turned even
more violent: fifteen perished between protesters and police forces. At this
point, socialist party executives, for fear that the social struggle might
degenerate into civil war, decided to accept a compromise with the
government. Occupied factories were to be cleared in exchange for
concessions—later retracted by factory owners. Such a compromise
marked the defeat of the protest, which was confirmed by the local
elections of November 1920: “quando i socialisti persero per pochi voti il
municipio di Torino a favore di un ‘blocco d’ordine’ che univa liberali e
cattolici” (Barbero 2008, 443).30
Two leading figures in Piedmont’s post-war political and cultural life
were Antonio Gramsci and Piero Gobetti. Their editorial activity, which
influenced many intellectuals and writers, as well as their ability to get in
touch with either proletarians and local literati, functioned as an
impediment in the potential establishment of a dictatorial regime in
Piedmont. Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891 but moved to Turin in
1911. In 1919 he founded L’Ordine Nuovo (a newspaper that supported
the occupation of factories and the creation of councils) with the future
leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, and Angelo
Tasca, Piedmontese and co-founder of the Partito Comunista Italiano.
While writing in L’Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci began to sketch his idea of the
intellettuale organico as opposed to the traditional conception of
intellectual as unrelated to everyday life, a concept that he would later
develop in his prison writings. Most notably, Gramsci co-founded the
Communist Party of Italy in 1921. He later became General Secretary and
was elected deputy in Veneto. In 1926 he was arrested and sentenced to
prison by the Tribunale Speciale Fascista (Special Fascist Tribunal), and
died in a hospital in Rome in 1937 as a consequence of poor health and
dreadful prison conditions.
Also critical of Liberal and Fascist governments, the Turinese Gobetti,
after factory occupations, became acquainted with the proletarian
movement. His writings were inspired by the necessity to reconcile
middle-class liberal positions with Gramsci’s idea of socialismo dal basso
(socialism from below). In 1922 Gobetti launched the short-lived
periodical La Rivoluzione Liberale, which Mussolini defined “uno dei più
perfidi nemici del presente Governo” (in Graglia 2013, 30). Two years
later he founded the literary journal Il Baretti, which played an important
function in an attempt of “sprovincializzazione della cultura italiana”
30
For more on the biennio rosso in Piedmont consult Preti (1955) and Spriano
(1968).
24 Chapter One
(Guglielmino and Grosser 1987, 5:412). In September 1925 he was

assaulted in Turin, severely injured by a Fascist squad, and forced to leave
Italy for France, where he died in 1926.31
Piedmont’s literary scene at the beginning of the twentieth century was
marked by an intimate kind of poetry that featured Guido Gozzano as one
of its most significant exponents. Gozzano was at the head of the
Crepuscolari torinesi, a group of poets who favoured an unadorned style
to express nostalgic memories. Gozzano’s poetry refused any heroic or
sublime form (such as those well exemplified by D’Annunzio’s style),
acting instead as a refuge from the turmoil of passions and society
aspirations. Glimpses of this kind of poetics were already revealed in his
first collection of 1907, La via del rifugio. In 1911 a new volume of poetry
was published entitled I colloqui. By this time, Gozzano had completely
overcome the influence of D’Annunzio, laying the foundations for a
poetry of “cose inutili,” which reflects a regard for what he calls “le buone
cose di pessimo gusto.” A perfect example of such verse is La signorina
Felicita, ovvero la Felicità (1909), wherein the poet examines the objects
and atmosphere “of a fin di siècle home, and praises the simple life
opposed to his own poetic and intellectual pretentions” (Bondanella 1979,
256).
Although Gozzano mainly used the Tuscan variety of Italian language
in his literary works, he nonetheless treasured his relationship with dialect,
as for him the use of Turinese vernacular evokes sentimental values,
namely a nostalgia for a Turin of the past. In his collection of short stories
entitled L’altare del passato, published in 1918, the Turinese dialect is
described as “così vivo fra tante cose morte” and “adorato più di
qualunque parlare, più dell’italiano (adoratissimo) ma estraneo alla mia
intima sostanza di subalpino, appreso tardi, con grande amore e con
grande fatica, come una lingua non mia” (1956, 542). This is a noteworthy
point, because the quote reveals, once again, “[i]l bilinguismo degli
scrittori piemontesi, la tensione bipolare tra ‘purismo’ e ‘dialetto’ che ne
contraddistingue le scelte,” which are “un fatto centrale della letteratura
subalpina” (Tesio 1981, 266). The struggle to study and eventually
conquer a new language would explain Gozzano’s monoglot choice,
although dialect remained the idiom in which he most recognised himself.
These different linguistic tools can be either kept separate by Piedmontese
writers like Gozzano and by dialect writers, or merged to give way to
experimental linguistic styles, as in the case of Faldella and Cagna.32
31
For an analysis on the role played by Gobetti and Gramsci, see Guglielminetti
and Zaccaria (1989), Bassignana (1998), and Martin (2008).
32
On the importance of Gozzano and the crepuscolarismo see Farinelli (2005).
In the same period a new variety of dialect poetry was coming to life,
somewhat influenced by Gozzano’s, as it was a poetry “che possiamo dire
municipale, quasi solo torinese” (Clivio 2002, 409). The main protagonists
were the poets of the generazione del Birichin (named after the literary
journal ‘l Birichin).33 The journal was published from 1886 to 1926 and
was marked by a lively and high-spirited tone, but its content was limited
to city events. The satirical-literary journal was the result of the
collaboration between Oreste Fasolo, Arrigo Frusta, Giovanni Gastaldi,
and Alberto Viriglio, the most influential poet of his generation.34
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth, the publication of historical novels written in the national
tongue gained success in Piedmont. A remarkable case, to which Umberto
Eco has called attention, is represented by Luigi Gramegna.35 Born near
Novara in 1846, he soon moved to Turin where he attended the military
academy and discovered his vocation for writing, based on “un amore per
le ricerche storiche che lo porta a studiare con attenzione anche gli usi e i
costumi del ‘vecchio Piemonte’” (Cicala and Tesio 1998, 395). Following
in the footsteps of D’Azeglio, one of the most admired Piedmontese
historical novelists and author of Ettore Fieramosca,36 Gramegna began
his career as a novelist and wrote eighteen historical adventure novels, like
Monsù Pingon (1906)—set in the sixteenth century, the central character
of which is Emmanuel Philibert Pingone, historian of the House of
Savoy—and Dragoni azzurri (1906) on the 1706 French siege of Turin.
His literary models were, of course, D’Azeglio and especially Scott,
Dumas, and Manzoni, “anche se in Gramegna si è ben lontani dalla carica
rivoluzionaria e polemica dello scrittore milanese, così come da una
concezione sofferta e problematica della storia” (Settingiano 2003, 162).
Gramegna’s readers were mainly from Piedmont, and they especially
appreciated his ability to re-enact historical events scrupulously, as well as
33
According to Clivio, “la voce birichin viene usata oggi prevalentemente come
attributo di bambino nel senso di ‘birbantello,’ in genere scherzosamente, ma nel
secondo Ottocento valeva ancora ‘ragazzo di strada, monello,’ equivalente al
napoletano scugnizzo” (2002, 359).
34
On these poets, see Clivio (2002, 407–27). For a general overview see also
Gandolfo (1972).
35
In his essay on popular novels Il superuomo di massa, Eco defines Gramegna as
“autore di una vasta epopea sabauda di cappa e di spada ingiustamente
dimenticata” ([1976] 2005, 189). On Gramegna’s narrative, see Settingiano (2003)
and Zaccaria (1997, 185–8).
36
Ganeri (1999) provides a comprehensive overview of the historical novel in Italy
in Il romanzo storico in Italia. For the use of historical sources in Ettore
Fieramosca consult Procacci (2001).
26 Chapter One
his style, “scorrevole, essenziale e privo di indugi” (161). Gramegna’s

aims were to teach the history of Piedmont and foster loyalty to the King
and the nation, while omitting the contradictions and agitations of his time.
Piedmont and Italy under Fascist Language Policy

The success of the publications in dialect of the second half of the
nineteenth century was primarily due to the fact that the majority of
readers still used dialect as a first language. In the years following
Unification, school reforms were insufficient to increase the number of
Italian speakers at the expense of vernacular speakers. In 1861, 22% of the
Italian population was literate; ten years later, the literacy rate had grown
to only 27% (De Mauro 1970, 36). The main reasons for this failure were
the shortage of funds set aside for primary instruction, the high rate of
school truancy in elementary schools (62% of pupils did not go to school
in 1870), and inadequate teacher training. Even in Piedmont, where the
school system was well organised, schoolteachers were prone to using
vernacular language at school. Therefore, although the school system had
improved compared to pre-Unitarian years, at the turn of the twentieth
century Italian was still foreign to a vast number of people who preferred
to use dialect or a variety of the national language with marked regional
influences.37
This linguistic diversity was fought by the Fascist regime’s language
policy in the 1920s and 1930s. This was an authoritarian policy that aimed
at creating a unified linguistic code, since language was taken as “la più
rilevante singola caratteristica di definizione della nazionalità” (Foresti
2003a, 46). Accordingly, the idea of language-nation osmosis led to the
persecution of all linguistic minorities. The three main campaigns carried
out in Piedmont, as in any other region, were against foreign borrowings,
linguistic minorities, and dialects, the latter considered anti-Italian, given
their status as expressions of local culture.
The language planning carried out by the Fascist establishment was
ultimately unsuccessful, since the objectives of the linguistic campaign
were “soprattutto un’emanazione retorica dell’ideologia dominante”
(Foresti 2003b, 13). Imposing a unique standard variety upon a majority of
dialect speakers was largely unrealistic; yet, language was considered a
powerful medium of social control, thus becoming immediately a central
item on the Fascist propagandistic agenda. The lingua toscana in bocca
37
More details on the linguistic situation of the time can be found in the 1865
ministerial report Sulle condizioni della pubblica istruzione nel Regno d’Italia.
romana (Tuscan language in a Roman mouth) was taken as the linguistic

norm, together with the Italian variety spoken by the Duce. The
widespread use of radio messages and propagandist videos simply gave
the illusion “di una diffusione della lingua italiana superiore alla reale
situazione” (Rosiello 2003, 32). The reality was different, since dialects
were “per tutto il ventennio gli strumenti di comunicazione di gran lunga
più usati e tali sono rimasti per almeno due decenni dopo la caduta del
fascismo” (Foresti 2003a, 48). In fact, Fascism did not make any
improvements upon the linguistic campaign: it simply limited itself to
“favorire quelle tendenze conservatrici che già esistevano nella cultura
italiana e che si possono riassumere in un certo purismo (o neopurismo)”
(Rosiello 2003, 33).
Some measures were nevertheless adopted to protect the unity of
Standard Italian. Starting from 1931, right when Pavese was writing Ciau
Masino (see chapter two), a press release by the regime invited
newspapers and publishing houses to not put out “articoli, poesie o titoli in
dialetto” on the premise that “l’incoraggiamento alla letteratura dialettale è
in contrasto con le direttive spirituali e politiche del regime, rigidamente
unitarie” (in Cannistraro 1975, 48).38 Some years earlier, the school reform
promoted by Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, which was designed to
introduce dialects as a basis for a better teaching of the Italian language,
had been replaced by a new reform by Giovanni Gentile. The philosopher
and Minister of Education wanted to create “a class of Fascist teachers
capable of widening the horizons of students who, in turn, would opt to
support Fascism and the Fascist state, in his opinion the only true
dispenser of liberty” (Graglia 2013, 187). His idea was clearly to give birth
to a new Fascist ruling class through a well-controlled, elitist school
system. From the mid-1920s, the educational system actually became an
effective tool in the hands of Fascist authorities: the teaching of minority
languages was prohibited in elementary schools, a libro unico was
introduced at most levels, translations of non-Italian writers disappeared
38
Fascist authorities became progressively more intransigent towards dialects. In
1941 the Ministry of Popular Culture demanded the withdrawal from circulation of
all literary works written in dialect, while in 1942 a press release asked newspapers
and publishing houses “di non occuparsi del teatro vernacolo. Questa disposizione
ha carattere tassativo e permanente” (in Flora 1945, 81). The acme of the anti-
dialect campaign was reached in June 1943 when another press release prohibited
newspapers from dealing with “produzioni dialettali e dialetti in Italia,
sopravvivenze del passato che la dottrina morale e politica del fascismo tende
decisamente a superare” (82).
28 Chapter One
from school texts in 1934, and the existence of local tongues was once and
for all ignored by school programmes.
While dialects “vengono tollerati nell’uso privato, si cerca con tutti i
mezzi di scoraggiare l’uso della lingua minoritaria anche nella vita
privata,” as Klein observes (1986, 144). The Fascist government carried
out an operation of forced Italianisation of the German-speaking
population of Trentino-Alto Adige, the Slovenes, and Croats in Friuli-
Venezia Giulia, and the French in the Aosta Valley. Such measures were
“più sostanziose rispetto a quelle adottate per i dialetti” (144) and
concerned foreign surnames and names on tombstones and the languages
taught at school, but also the linguistic varieties spoken in private.39
Perhaps the campaign against foreign words is “l’unico impegno
organico … nei riguardi della lingua e del suo uso portato avanti durante il
ventennio, per il numero, la frequenza e la qualità degli interventi
dell’apparato governativo e di personalità della cultura” (Foresti 2003a,
59). Language had to be protected against foreign invasions, especially
from England and France. The campaign against non-Italian words peaked
in the late 1930s. Then, when Italy entered World War II against France
and England, lists of proscribed words, called Forestierismi da eliminare
(Loanwords to be banned), were published. The Accademia d’Italia was
officially appointed to periodically arrange lists of forbidden words to be
replaced by Italian terms. Intellectuals and linguists encouraged the Italian
people to abandon foreign terms and adopt other selected forms considered
more appropriate. Despite that, it was clear even to some linguists, like
Alberto Menarini and Bruno Migliorini, that it was impossible to keep
foreign words out of the Italian vocabulary, and that the Italian language
had already been significantly influenced by other idioms.
In spite of the relation between the House of Savoy and the regime,
Fascism was unable to plant strong roots in Piedmont during the
ventennio. Due to the presence of a substantial hostile working class, the
regime entered a phase of relative stability only at the end of the 1920s,
following the suppression of red unions and the ban of left-wing parties.40
39
For more on this subject see Tasso (2010).
40
Fascism showed its murderous side for the first time in Turin. In December 1922
a clash between some protesters and a group of Fascist activists left two of the
latter dead on the ground. In response, a few days later a band of squadristi, led by
Piero Brandimarte, launched a three-day campaign of terror in Turin. Eleven
people were brutally executed (among them, socialists, Communists, and trade
unionists), about thirty wounded, and a hundred violently beaten. Brandimarte
ordered the burning down of trade union headquarters, socialist clubs, and the
In Turin in particular, the Fascist dictatorship became an authoritarian

rather than totalitarian regime, able to establish and control consensus.
This did not mean that open anti-Fascist rebellions broke out, but rather
that Piedmontese citizens reacted with indifference to and detachment
from Fascism.
While the national literary panorama was dominated by two journals
(La Ronda and Solaria), a prolific cultural movement saw the light in
Turin, the influence of which would last until the end of the 1950s.
Leading roles were played by university personalities like Francesco
Ruffini, Natalino Sapegno, Lionello Venturi, and artists like Felice
Casorati and Carlo Levi. Moreover, the model of high morality provided
by Professors Augusto Monti and Umberto Cosmo had a large influence
on their young followers Leone Ginzburg, Norberto Bobbio, Cesare
Pavese and others. Later on, these young intellectuals would gather around
the Einaudi publishing house founded in 1933 by Giulio Einaudi.
Einaudi’s group was immediately harassed and all political parties
were outlawed by the government. Only the Communists managed to
maintain an underground network. Turin, “with its élite of specialized
workers, had been the cradle and became the stronghold of the PCI”
(Mammarella 1966, 47). At the end of the 1930s, the consensus with the
regime reached its all-time low in Piedmont due to the high cost of living,
but also because of Mussolini’s hostility towards France, a country with
which many in Piedmont had working relationships. During World War II,
as living conditions became unbearable, an open anti-Fascist rebellion
eventually emerged, with Turin and Piedmont at the head of the
Resistance. In March 1943 a general strike erupted at the Fiat-Mirafiori
plant, which soon spread to other Piedmontese centres. One year later,
lower grades of white-collar workers were allied in their cause with the
strikers, and only 20% of Fiat technicians and clerks voted in the election
of the Fascist internal commissions (Ginsborg 1990, 22). On April 18,
1943, a huge protest took place, one which was to form the prelude to
military and political insurrection.
Immediately after the armistice of September 1943 between Italy and
the Allies, armed bands of partisans began to form in central and northern
Italy. They were all coordinated by the Central Committee of National
Liberation, which helped to organise the political and military resistance
against Fascist and German troops. In Piedmont, the first short-lived
Partisan Republics (Repubbliche partigiane in Italian; that is, provisional
Ordine Nuovo offices. The event would soon be known as the Strage di Torino. A
detailed analysis can be found in De Felice (1963) and Carcano (1973).
30 Chapter One
entities ruled by the partisans) were soon declared: the Republic of Ossola,
the Republic of Alba, the Republic of Alto Monferrato, and the Republic
of Valsesia, among others. Northern cities were liberated by the partigiani
before the Allied troops arrived, and the Piedmontese Military Command
gave the order for the Monferrato formations to enter Turin on April 25,
1945. The city was freed by April 26, and so were Novara, Vercelli, and
other centres.41
Literary activity in Piedmontese continued during Fascism. From the
1920s to the 1950s, Giuseppe Pacotto (1899–1964), better known by his
Piedmontese name Pinin Pacòt, became the most influential vernacular
writer in the region, whose production “in prosa e in versi si snoda e si
impernia intorno al tema del rapporto tra la lingua e il dialetto” (Sobrero
1979, 149). He used primarily the dialect of Turin, but also wrote in that of
Asti. Thanks to Pacòt, according to Tesio, Piedmontese poetry experiences
a regeneration, “acquista coscienza europea” and “affronta … il problema
del dialetto come ‘lingua della poesia,’ tenta di scavalcare, e ci riesce fino
ad un certo segno, le remore provinciali e municipali che caratterizzano la
tradizione immediata” (1981, 268). In 1926 he published his first
collection of poems, entitled Arssivoli (a term derived from Piedmontese
vernacular, meaning “fantasticherie” in Italian). A year later he founded
the journal Ij Brandé (a Piedmontese phrase equivalent to the Italian “gli
alari del camino”) by means of which he provided the principles for the
spelling and transcription of Piedmontese dialect. Subsequently, he
founded the literary movement Companìa dij Brandé, while his poetic
production continued with the collections Crosiere (1935), Speransa
(1946), and Gioventù, pòvra amìa (1951).42
In addition, the tendency of Piedmontese writers toward multilingualism,
and their inclination to look for literary models outside regional borders,
continued during the Fascist years. In 1929 the first part of the historical
novel and domestic saga I Sansôssí (a word of French origin adapted to
Piedmontese, literally meaning “happy-go-lucky sort of people”) was
published. The author is the previously mentioned Augusto Monti,
republican, anti-Fascist, friend of Gobetti and Gramsci, and Italian
professor to Pavese. The novel, set between the Lower Bormida Valley
and Turin, tells the story of two generations of individuals in the Monti
family, Carlin and his father, starting from the Napoleonic era to the early
twentieth century. Linguistically rich, I Sansôssí combines Italian, French,
41
Dellavalle (1995) and Bocchio (2000) discuss the Resistance and Civil War in
Piedmont.
42
Gandolfo (1964) examines Pacòt’s production in his “Pinin Pacòt poeta
piemontèis.” On Pacòt’s poetry see also Tesio (2007, 175–90).
and Piedmontese parlance with Latin constructions “con cambi frequenti

di velocità … mutamenti ritmici … cambi di registro” (Tesio 1993, 6). The
Piedmontese dialect, which is normally used in direct speech without
translation, is particularly important since it has the function of
nostalgically evoking a Piedmont of old, in contrast with the oppressive
present of the war and the Fascist regime. According to Lajolo, Monti’s
writings “ebbero molta influenza sulla formazione di Pavese scrittore”
(especially in his early prose works, such as Ciau Masino), and “lo
appassionavano perché insistevano nella ricerca di un linguaggio tratto
dalla parlata popolare” ([1960] 1967, 161).43
Following the general decline of consensus towards French culture and
language in the mid-twentieth century, and the concurrent rise in prestige
of Anglo-American culture, a good number of Italian writers became
fascinated by the English language and modelled their prose on the
language and works of British and American writers, as is the case of
Cesare Pavese, Mario Soldati, and later Beppe Fenoglio, all three
Piedmontese. Although it played a different role in each writer, all three
were deeply fascinated by the Anglo-American culture that, to their eyes,
became a form of escapism from Fascist pettiness and oppression.
Pavese and Fenoglio will be examined extensively in the next two
chapters. Soldati is the only one of the three who actually left for the US.
In 1929 he made his debut as a novelist and author of short stories with the
collection Salmace. That same year he was awarded a fellowship at
Columbia University, which provided a unique opportunity to flee the new
Fascist state. When he returned to Italy two years later, a little dismayed
but still fascinated by the American way of life, he delivered his
impressions in America primo amore (1935), a surprising combination of
private journal, sociological essay, and novel. Soldati soon became a very
successful writer, although his style progressively turned more traditional.44
43
On Monti’s life and works see Tesio (1982, 11–61).
44
Le lettere da Capri (1954), winner of the Strega Prize, which some critics have
compared to Henry James’ novels in terms of plot construction, Il vero Silvestri
(1959), Le due città (1964), an apparently autobiographical account of life in Turin
and Rome, and La sposa americana (1977) are among his most significant books
of the second half of the century. Soldati was also a prolific film director and one
of the first and most popular Italian television hosts. Grillaudi (1979) and Ioli
(1999) supply a comprehensive introduction to Soldati’s literary production.
32 Chapter One
Linguistic and Literary Changes in the Aftermath

of World War II
At the end of the war, a Constituent Assembly was elected and it was
decided to hold a referendum on the institutional question: monarchy
versus republic. The vote produced a republican majority, but only by
54.3% of the votes.45 The first free parliamentary elections since 1921
were held in April 1948. They established the beginning of the Democrazia
Cristiana era (a Christian-democrat party descended from Don Sturzo’s
Popolari) that would last until the collapsing of the Prima Repubblica in
1994.
When the Piedmontese-born Luigi Einaudi (Giulio Einaudi’s father)
was elected President of the new-born Republic in 1948, the Italian
economy was still in disarray. Piedmont had to deal with the damage to
houses, buildings, and industrial plants, but also with land abandonment
and a shortage of labour. But by the early 1950s everything began to
change: industrial production rose exponentially, the gross domestic
product more than doubled, and entirely new industries emerged. The
stability of the banking system and the injection of substantial amounts of
US aid made Italy one of the world’s largest industrial powers. The
Economic Miracle was led mainly by northern regions, where modern
industry concentrated in the triangolo industriale formed by Turin, Milan,
and Genoa. In 1965, about 10% of the national labour force converged on
Piedmont, which reached Italy’s highest employment rate at 40.6% in
1969 (Castronovo 1977b, 662). Gradually, the Piedmontese factories of
Fiat and Olivetti became the driving forces of the region and the whole
country. By 1967, Fiat was selling more cars in Europe than any other
company, while Olivetti was producing one million typewriters a year and
pioneered office calculators (Clark 1984, 349).
However, the richest regions failed to act as a locomotive for the
poorest. As a consequence, millions of people started to move from the
south and northeast to northwestern industrial cities. The number of
inhabitants of Turin soared by more than 50% in the 1950s (Caesar and
Hainsworth 1984, 6). The region’s capital was completely unprepared. No
Italian city went through the same transformations as Turin during the
45
The 57.1% of voters in Piedmont were in favour of the republic. The higher
percentage of votes was in the province Novara (with an average of 63.6%
preferences), followed by Vercelli (61.7%), Alessandria (61.8%), and Turin
(58.2%). The only two northern provinces where the votes for monarchy
outnumbered those for republic were in Piedmont: Cuneo (where 56.1% of voters
chose monarchy) and Asti (where it was 50.6%). See Castronovo (1977b, 575–6).
second post-war period. In a short time it became “una sorta di Detroit dai
contorni avveneristici e anonimi della megalopoli,” a modern industrial
society “dominata dalla monocultura dell’automobile e, al tempo stesso, la
terza città meridionale della penisola … stipata e violentemente rianimata
dalla più massiccia immigrazione della nostra storia” (Castronovo 1977b,
697). Immigrant ghettos rapidly developed with poor housing and health
facilities.46
The most significant literary phenomenon of post-war Italy was
Neorealism, whose major themes were war, Partisan struggle, and the
difficulties of adapting to civilian life. Among these neorealist writers, the
Turinese Carlo Levi gave birth to the greatest literary success of 1945.
Cristo si è fermato a Eboli is a novel about his confinement in Lucania in
southern Italy between 1935 and 1936. Primo Levi, also born and raised in
Turin, made his debut as a novelist in 1947 with Se questo è un uomo, a
moving yet lucid account of his internment in Auschwitz. His literary
activity continued after World War II with novels such as La tregua
(1963), about returning to life after the concentration camp experience,
and, some years later, La chiave a stella (1978), which gained him the
Strega prize in 1979 and which will be thoroughly analysed in chapter
four.
Giovanni Arpino’s first novel was also in the neorealist vein. Born in
Croatia to Piedmontese parents, he soon moved to Turin where he
graduated and began his career as a writer with Sei stato felice, Giovanni
(1952). The novel light-heartedly recounts a picaresque series of
adventures of the protagonist and his badly off friends. Arpino later
developed a personal, mature narrative style, trying to adapt it to fast-
changing society. Among his most convincing efforts is La suora giovane
(1959), which is set in a foggy and cold Turin. As in all his works, which
stand out for their lively creativity and clarity of narration, Arpino here
tries to “investigate the recesses of the problematic relationship between
man and society” (Malato 1999, 974). With L’ombra delle colline (1964),
the author seems to follow in Pavese’s footsteps since the novel focuses on
the protagonist’s return to his hometown of Bra, near Cuneo, after having
dreadful experiences during World War II, whereas Un’anima persa
(1966) is again set among Turin’s middle class.47
The post-conflict years saw the publication of a relevant number of
autobiographical writings on the wartime experience. Nuto Revelli is one
of the most talented of such Piedmontese authors. Born in Cuneo in 1919,
46
More information on the conditions of immigrants in Turin can be found in Fofi
(1975) and Sacchi and Viazzo (2003).
47
For an introduction to Arpino see Cetta (1991) and Veneziano (1994).
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may be sealed or corked, and boxed at once.
If large quantities of honey are extracted, it may be most
conveniently kept in barrels. These should be first-class, and ought
to be waxed before using them, to make assurance doubly sure
against any leakage. To wax the barrels, we may use beeswax, but
paraffine is cheaper, and just as efficient. Three or four quarts of the
hot paraffine or wax should be turned into the barrel, the bung driven
in tight, the barrel twirled in every position, after which the bung is
loosened by a blow with the hammer, and the residue of the wax
turned out. Economy requires that the barrels be warm when waxed,
so that only a thin coat will be appropriated.
Large tin cans, waxed and soldered at the openings after being
filled, are cheap, and may be the most desirable receptacles for
extracted honey.
Extracted honey should always be kept in dry apartments.
CHAPTER XIII.
HANDLING BEES.
But some one asks the question, shall we not receive those
merciless stings, or be introduced to what "Josh" calls the "business
end of the bee?" Perhaps there is no more causeless, or more
common dread, in existence, than this of bees' stings. When bees
are gathering, they will never sting unless provoked. When at the
hives—especially if Italians—they will rarely make an attack. The
common belief, too, that some persons are more liable to attack than
others, is, I think, put too strong. With the best opportunity to judge,
with our hundreds of students, I think I may safely say that one is
almost always as liable to attack as another, except that he is more
quiet, or does not greet the usually amiable passer-by, with those
terrific thrusts, which would vanquish even a practiced pugilist.
Occasionally a person may have a peculiar odor about his person
that angers bees and invites their darting tilts, with drawn swords,
venom-tipped, yet, though I take my large classes each season, at
frequent intervals, to see and handle the bees, each for himself, I still
await the first proof of the fact, that one person is more liable to be
stung than another, providing each carries himself with that
composed and dignified bearing, that is so pleasing to the bees.
True, some people, filled with dread, and the belief that bees regard
them with special hate and malice, are so ready for the battle, that
they commence the strife with nervous head-shakes and beating of
the air, and thus force the bees to battle, nolens volens. I believe that
only such are regarded with special aversion by the bees. Hence, I
believe that no one need be stung.
Bees should never be jarred, nor irritated by quick motions.
Those with nervous temperaments—and I plead very guilty on this
point—need not give up, but at first better protect their faces, and
perhaps even their hands, till time and experience show them that
fear is vain; then they will divest themselves of all such useless
encumbrances. Bees are more cross when they are gathering no
honey, and at such times, black bees and hybrids, especially, are so
irritable that even the experienced apiarist will wish a veil.
THE BEST BEE-VEIL.

This should be made of black tarlatan, sewed up like a bag, a half
yard long, without top or bottom, and with a diameter of the rim of a
common straw-hat. Gather the top with braid, so that it will just slip
over the crown of the hat—else, sew it to the edge of the rim of some
cheap, cool hat, in fact, I prefer this style—and gather the bottom
with rubber cord or rubber tape, so that it may be drawn over the hat
rim, and then over the head, as we adjust the hat.
Fig. 62.
Some prefer to dispense with the rubber cord at the bottom (Fig,
62), and have the veil long so as to be gathered in by the coat or
dress. If the black tarlatan troubles by coloring the shirt or collar, the
lower part may be made of white netting. When in use, the rubber
cord draws the lower part close about the neck, or the lower part
tucks within the coat or vest (Fig, 62), and we are safe. This kind of a
veil is cool, does not impede vision at all, and can be made by any
woman at a cost of less than twenty cents. Common buckskin or
sheep-skin gloves can be used, as it will scarcely pay to get special
gloves for the purpose, for the most timid person—I speak from
experience—will soon consider gloves an unnecessary nuisance.
Special rubber gloves are sold by those who keep on hand
apiarian supplies.
Some apiarists think that dark clothing is specially obnoxious to
bees.
For ladies, my friend, Mrs. Baker, recommends a dress which, by
use of the rubber skirt-lift or other device, can be instantly raised or
lowered. This will be convenient in the apiary, and tidy anywhere.
The Gabrielle style is preferred, and of a length just to reach the
floor. It should be belted at the waist, and cut down from the neck in
front, one-third the length of the waist, to permit the tucking in of the
veil. The under-waist should fasten close about the neck. The
sleeves should be quite long to allow free use of the arms, and
gathered in with a rubber cord at the wrist, which will hug the rubber
gauntlets or arm, and prevent bees from crawling up the sleeves.
The pantalets should be straight and full, and should also have the
rubber cord in the hem to draw them close about the top of the
shoes.
Mrs. Baker also places great stress on the wet "head-cap," which
she believes the men even would find a great comfort. This is a
simple, close-fitting cap, made of two thicknesses of coarse toweling.
The head is wet with cold water, and the cap wet in the same, wrung
out, and placed on the head.
Mrs. Baker would have the dress neat and clean, and so trimmed
that the lady apiarist would ever be ready to greet her brother or
sister apiarists. In such a dress there is no danger of stings, and with
it there is that show of neatness and taste, without which no pursuit
could attract the attention, or at least the patronage, of our refined
women.
TO QUIET BEES.
In harvest seasons, the bees, especially if Italians, can almost
always be handled without their showing resentment. But at other
times, and whenever they object to necessary familiarity, we have
only to cause them to fill with honey to render them harmless, unless
we pinch them. This can be done by closing the hive so that the
bees cannot get out, and then rapping on the hive for four or five
minutes. Those within will fill with honey, those without will be tamed
by surprise, and all will be quiet. Sprinkling the bees with sweetened
water will also tend to render them amiable, and will make them
more ready to unite, to receive a queen, and less apt to sting. Still
another method, more convenient, is to smoke the bees. A little
smoke blown among the bees will scarcely ever fail to quiet them,
though I have known black bees in autumn, to be very slow to yield.
Dry cotton cloth, closely wound and sewed or tied, or better, pieces
of dry, rotten wood, are excellent for the purpose of smoking. These
are easily handled, and will burn for a long time. But best of all is a
BELLOWS-SMOKER.
This is a tin tube attached to a bellows. Cloth or rotten wood can
be burned in the tube, and will remain burning a long time. The
smoke can be directed at pleasure, the bellows easily worked, and
the smoker used without any disagreeable effects or danger from
fire. It can be got from any dealer in bee apparatus, and only costs
from $1.25 to $2.00. I most heartily recommend it to all.
There are two smokers in use, which I have found very valuable,
and both of which are worthy of recommendation.
THE QUINBY SMOKER.
This smoker (Fig, 63, a) was a gift to bee-keepers by the late Mr.
Quinby, and not patented; though I supposed it was, and so stated in
a former edition of this work. Though a similar device had been
previously used in Europe, without doubt Mr. Quinby was not aware
of the fact, and as he was the person to bring it to the notice of bee-
keepers, and to make it so perfect as to challenge the attention and
win the favor of apiarists instanter, he is certainly worthy of great
praise, and deserving of hearty gratitude. This smoker, until a better
one appeared, was a very valuable and desirable instrument. Its
faults were, lack of strength, too small a fire-tube, too little draft when
not in use, so that the fire would go out, and too great liability to fall
over on the side, when the fire was sure to be extinguished. Many of
these defects, however, have been corrected, and other
improvements made in a new smoker, called the Improved Quinby
(Fig, 63, b).
Fig. 63.
THE BINGHAM SMOKER.
This smoker (Fig, 64) not only meets all the requirements, which
are wanting in the old Quinby smoker, but shows by its whole
construction, that it has not only as a whole, but in every part, been
subject to the severest test, and the closest, thought and study.
Fig. 64.
At first sight this seems an improved copy of Mr. Quinby's

smoker, and so I first thought, though I only saw it in Mr. Bingham's
hand at a Convention. I have since used it, examined it in every part,
and have to say that it is not a Quinby smoker. The bellows, the
valve, the cut-off, and even the form, are all peculiar. The special
point to be commended, and, I suppose, the only one patentable, is
the cut-off between the bellows and fire-tube, so that the fire seldom
goes out, while even hard-wood, as suggested by the inventor, forms
an excellent and ever-ready fuel. The valve for the entrance of air to
the bellows, permits rapid work, the spring is of the best clock-spring
material, the leather perfect, not split sheep-skin, while the whole
construction of the bellows, and the plan of the fire-screen and cut-
off draft, show much thought and ingenuity. I am thus full in this
description, that I may not only benefit my readers, all of whom will
want a smoker, but also out of gratitude to Mr. Bingham, who has
conferred such a favor on American apiarists. There are three sizes,
which may be bought for $1.00, $1.50 and $1.75, respectively,
including postage.
Mr. Bingham, to protect himself, and preserve the quality of his
invention, has procured a patent. This, provided he has only
patented his own invention, is certainly his right, which I think
honesty requires us all to respect. Like Mr. Langstroth, he has given
us a valuable instrument; let us see that he is not defrauded out of
the justly earned reward for his invention.
Brother apiarists, let us cease this unjust clamor against patents
and patentees. If a man procures a patent on a worthless thing, let
him alone, and where is the damage? If a man procures a patent on
a valuable and desirable invention, then buy it, or pay for the right to
make it, and thus keep the Eighth and Tenth Commandments
(Exodus, 20th chap., 8th and 10th verses). Let us never buy an
article unless we know it is valuable and desirable for us, no matter
how stoutly importuned; but for honesty's sake, and that we may
encourage more inventions, let us respect a man's patent as we
would any other property. If we are in doubt as to the correctness of
some person's claim, let us not be forced to pay a bonus, but first
write to some candid editor or other authority, and if we find a man
has a right to the article, then pay as we would any other debt. I
should be very suspicious of any man's honesty who was not willing
to respect such rights.
TO SMOKE BEES.
Approach the hive, blow a little smoke in at the entrance, then
open from above, and blow in smoke as required. If at any time the
bees seem irritable, a few puffs from the smoker will subdue them.
Thus, any person may handle his bees with perfect freedom and
safety. If at any time the fire-chamber and escape-pipe become filled
with soot, they can easily be cleaned by revolving an iron or hard-
wood stick inside of them.
TO CURE STINGS.
In case a person is stung, he should step back a little for a
moment, as the pungent odor of the venom is likely to anger the
bees and induce further stinging. The sting should be withdrawn, and
if the pain is such as to prove troublesome, apply a little ammonia.
The venom is an acid, and is neutralized by the alkali. Pressing over
the sting with the barrel of a watch-key is also said to be of some use
in staying the progress of the poison in the circulation of the blood. In
case horses are badly stung, as sometimes happens, they should be
taken as speedily as possible into a barn (a man, too, may escape
angry bees by entering a building), where the bees will seldom
follow, then wash the horses in soda water, and cover with blankets
wet in cold water.
THE SWEAT THEORY.

It is often stated that sweaty horses and people are obnoxious to
the bees, and hence, almost sure targets for their barbed arrows. In
warm weather I perspire most profusely, yet am scarcely ever stung,
since I have learned to control my nerves. I once kept my bees in the
front yard—they looked beautiful on the green lawn—within two rods
of a main thoroughfare, and not infrequently let my horse, covered
with sweat upon my return from a drive, crop the grass, while cooling
off, right in the same yard. Of course, there was some danger, but I
never knew my horse to get stung. Why, then, the theory? May not
the more frequent stings be consequent upon the warm, nervous
condition of the individual? The man is more ready to strike and jerk,
the horse to stamp and switch. The switching of the horse's tail, like
the whisker trap of a full beard, will anger even a good-natured bee. I
should dread the motions more than the sweat, though it may be true
that there is a peculiarity in the odor from either the sensible or
insensible perspiration of some persons, that angers the bees and
provokes the use of their terrible weapons.
CHAPTER XIV.
COMB FOUNDATION.
Fig. 65.
Every apiarist of experience knows that empty combs in frames,

comb-guides in the sections, to tempt the bees and to insure the
proper position of the full combs, in fact, combs of almost any kind or
shape, are of great importance. So every skillful apiarist is very
careful to save all drone-comb that is cut out of the brood-chamber—
where it is worse than useless, as it brings with it myriads of those
useless gormands, the drones—to kill the eggs, remove the brood,
or extract the honey, and to transfer it to the sections. He is equally
careful to keep all his worker-comb, so long as the cells are of proper
size to domicile full-sized larvæ, and never to sell any comb, or even
comb-honey, unless a much greater price makes it desirable.
No wonder, then, if comb is so desirable, that German thought
and Yankee ingenuity have devised means of giving the bees at
least a start in this important, yet expensive work of comb-building,
and hence the origin of another great aid to the apiarist—comb
foundation (Fig, 65).
HISTORY.
For more than twenty years the Germans have used impressed
sheets of wax as a foundation for comb, as it was first made by Herr
Mehring, in 1857. These sheets are four or five times as thick as the
partition at the centre of natural comb, which is very thin, only 1-180
of an inch thick. This is pressed between metal plates so accurately
formed that the wax receives rhomboidal impressions which are a
fac simile of the basal wall or partition between the opposite cells of
natural comb. The thickness of this sheet is no objection, as it is
found that the bees almost always thin it down to the natural
thickness, and probably use the shavings to form the walls.
AMERICAN FOUNDATION.
Mr. Wagner secured a patent on foundation in 1861, but as the
article was already in use in Germany, the patent was, as we
understand, of no legal value, and certainly, as it did nothing to bring
this desirable article into use, it had no virtual value. Mr. Wagner was
also the first to suggest the idea of rollers. In Langstroth's work,
edition of 1859, p. 373, occurs the following, in reference to printing
or stamping combs: "Mr. Wagner suggests forming these outlines
with a simple instrument somewhat like a wheel cake cutter. When a
large number are to be made, a machine might easily be constructed
which would stamp them with great rapidity." In 1866, the King
Brothers, of New York, in accordance with the above suggestion,
invented the first machine with rollers, the product of which they tried
but failed to get patented. These stamped rollers were less than two
inches long. This machine was useless, and failed to bring
foundation into general use.
In 1874, Mr. Frederick Weiss, a poor German, invented the
machine which brought the foundation into general use. His machine
had lengthened rollers—they being six inches long—and shallow
grooves between the pyramidal projections, so that there was a very
shallow cell raised from the basal impression as left by the German
plates. This was the machine on which was made the beautiful and
practical foundation sent out by "John Long," in 1874 and 1875, and
which proved to the American apiarists that foundation machines,
and foundation, too, were to be a success. I used some of this early
foundation, and have been no more successful with that made by the
machines of to-day. To Frederick Weiss, then, are Americans and the
world indebted for this invaluable aid to the apiarist. Yet, the poor old
man has, I fear, received very meager profits from this great
invention, while some writers ignore his services entirely, not
granting him the poor meed of the honor. Since that time many
machines have been made, without even a thank you, as I believe,
to this old man, Weiss. Does not this show that patents, or
something—a higher morality, if you please—is necessary, that men
may secure justice? True, faulty foundation, and faulty machines
were already in use, but it was the inventive skill of Mr. Weiss that
made foundation cheap and excellent, and thus popularized it with
the American apiarists.
Fig. 66.
These Weiss machines turn out the comb-foundation not only of

exquisite mold, but with such rapidity that it can be made cheap and
practicable. Heretofore these machines have been sold at an
enormous profit. Last November, 1877, I expostulated with one of
the manufacturers of American machines, because of the high price,
saying, as I looked at one of the machines: These ought to be sold
for thirty or forty dollars, instead of one hundred dollars. He replied
that such machines—with rollers, not plates—that gave the
foundation the exact figure of natural comb, were only made, he
thought, by the person who made his machines, and thus convinced
me that said person should be rewarded, amply rewarded, for his
invention. But as I have since learned that this is only the Weiss
machine, and does no more perfect work, I now think Mr. Weiss
should receive the super-extra profits. Even with machines at one
hundred dollars, foundation was profitable, as I with many others
have found. But with the present price—forty dollars, which I think,
judging from the simplicity of the machine, advertised at that price
(Fig, 66), must be reduced still lower—we can hardly conceive what
an immense business this is soon to become.
HOW FOUNDATION IS MADE.

The process of making the foundation is very simple. Thin sheets
of wax, as thin as is consistent with strength, are simply passed
between the rollers, which are so made as to stamp worker or drone
foundation, as may be desired. The rollers are well covered with
starch-water to secure against adhesion. Two men can roll out about
four hundred pounds per day.
Fig. 67.
TO SECURE THE WAX SHEETS.

To make the thin sheets of wax, Mr. A. I. Root takes sheets or
plates of galvanized iron with a wooden handle. These are cooled by
dipping in ice-water, and then are dipped two, or three times if the
wax is very hot, in the melted wax, which is maintained at the proper
temperature by keeping it in a double-walled vessel, with hot water in
the outer chamber. Such a boiler, too, prevents burning of the wax,
which would ruin it, while it is being melted. After dipping the plates
in the wax, they are again dipped, when dripping has ceased, into
the cold water, after which the sheets of wax are cleaved off, the
plates brushed, wiped, cooled, and dipped again. The boiler used in
melting the wax has the gate with a fine wire sieve attached near the
top, so that the wax as it is drawn off into the second boiler, will be
thoroughly cleansed. Mr. Root states that two men and a boy will
thus make four hundred pounds of wax sheets in a day.
Others use wooden plates on which to mold the sheets, while the
Hetherington brothers prefer, and are very successful with a wooden
cylinder, which is made to revolve in the melted wax, and is so
hinged, that it can be speedily raised above or lowered into the
liquid.
For cutting foundation, nothing is so admirable as the Carlin
cutter (Fig, 67, a), which is like the wheel glass-cutters sold in the
shops, except that a larger wheel of tin takes the place of the one of
hardened steel. Mr. A. I. Root has suggested a grooved board (Fig.
67, b) to go with the above, the distance between the grooves being
equal to the desired width of the strips of comb foundation to be cut.
USE OF FOUNDATION.
I have used foundation, as have many other more extensive
apiarists, with perfect success in the section-boxes. The bees have
so thinned it that even epicures could not tell comb-honey with such
foundation, from that wholly made by the bees. Yet, I forbear
recommending it for such use. When such men as Hetherington,
Moore, Ellwood, and L. C. Root, protest against a course, it is well to
pause before we adopt it; so, while I have used foundation, I think
with some small advantage in sections and boxes for three years, I
shall still pronounce against it.
It will not be well to have the word artificial hitched on to our
comb-honey. I think it exceedingly wise to maintain inviolate in the
public mind the idea that comb-honey is par excellence, a natural
product. And as Captain Hetherington aptly suggests, this argument
is all the more weighty, in view of the filthy condition of much of our
commercial beeswax.
Again, our bees may not always thin the foundation, and we risk
our reputation in selling it in comb-honey, and an unquestioned
reputation is too valuable to be endangered in this way, especially as
in these days of adulteration, we may not know how much paraffine,
etc., there is in our foundation, unless we make it ourselves.
Lastly, there is no great advantage in its use in the sections, as
drone-comb is better, and with caution and care this can be secured
in ample quantities to furnish very generous starters for all our
sections. This will readily adhere, if the edge be dipped into melted
beeswax, and applied to the sections.
If any one should still be disposed to make such use of
foundation, they should only purchase of very reliable parties, that
they may be sure to use only such wax as is genuine, yellow, clean,
and certainly unmixed with paraffine, or any of the commercial
products which were first used to adulterate the wax. Only pure,
clean, unbleached wax should be used in making foundation. We
should be very careful not to put on the market any comb-honey
where the foundation had not been properly thinned by the bees.
Perhaps a very fine needle would enable one to determine this point
without injury to the honey.
But the most promising use of foundation, to which there can be
no objection, is in the brood-chamber. It is astonishing to see how
rapidly the bees will extend the cells, and how readily the queen will
stock them with eggs if of the right size, five cells to the inch. The
foundation should always be the right size either for worker or drone-
comb. Of course the latter size would never be used in the brood-
chamber. The advantage of foundation is, first, to insure worker-
comb, and thus worker-brood, and second, to furnish wax, so that
the bees may be free to gather honey. We proved in our apiary the
past two seasons, that by use of foundation, and a little care in
pruning out the drone-comb, we could limit or even exclude drones
from our hives, and we have but to examine the capacious and
constantly crowded stomachs of these idlers, to appreciate the
advantage of such a course. Bees may occasionally tear down
worker-cells and build drone-cells in their place; but such action, I
believe, is not sufficiently extensive to ever cause anxiety. I am also
certain that bees that have to secrete wax to form comb, do much
less gathering. Wax secretion seems voluntary, and when rapid
seems to require quiet and great consumption of food. If we make
two artificial colonies equally strong, supply the one with combs, and
withhold them from the other, we will find that this last sends much
fewer bees to the fields, while all the bees are more or less engaged
in wax secretion. Thus the other colony gains much more rapidly in
honey, first, because more bees are storing; second, because less
food is consumed. This is undoubtedly the reason why extracted-
honey can be secured in far greater abundance than can comb-
honey.
The foundation if used the full depth of the frame, stretches so
that many cells are so enlarged as to be used for drone-brood. This
demands, if we use the sheets unstrengthened, that they only be
used as guides, not reaching more than one-third of the depth of the
frame. Strips not less than four inches wide will not sag to do any
harm. The foundation, too, should not quite reach the sides of the
frame, as by expansion it is liable to warp and bend. Captain J. E.
Hetherington has invented a cure for this stretching and warping, by
strengthening the foundation. To do this, he runs several fine copper
wires into the foundation as it passes through the machine.
I understand, too, that Mr. M. Metcalf, of this State, has a similar
device now being patented.
This is a valuable suggestion, as it permits full-sized sheets of
foundation to be inserted in the frames. I presume that very soon all
worker-foundation will contain such wires.
TO FASTEN THE FOUNDATION.

In the thin sections, the foundation can best be fastened by use
of the melted wax. To accomplish this, I have used a block made
thus: Saw a fifteen-sixteenths inch board so that it will just exactly fill
a section. Screw this to a second board, which is one-half inch
broader each way, so that the larger under board will project one-
quarter of an inch each side the top board. Now set the section over
the top board, place the foundation, cut a trifle shorter than the inside
of the section, within, close to the top and one side of the section,
and cause it to adhere by running on a little of the melted wax,
which, by use of a kerosene lamp or stove, may be kept melted. If
the basin is double-walled, with water in the outer chamber and wax
in the inner, it is much safer, as then the wax will never burn.
If the tops of the sections are thick, they may be grooved, and by
crowding the foundation into the groove, and, if necessary, pressing
it with a thin wedge, it will be securely held.
Fig. 68.
This last method will work nicely in case of fastening into the
brood-frames. But I have found that I could fasten them rapidly and
very securely by simply pressing them against the rectangular
projection from the top-bar already described (page 134). In this
case a block (Fig, 68, a) should reach up into the frame from the side
which is nearest to the rectangular projection—it will be remembered
that the projection (Fig, 36) is a little to one side of the centre of the
top-bar, so that the foundation shall hang exactly in the centre—so
far that its upper surface would be exactly level with the upper
surface of the rectangular projection. This block, like the one
described above, has shoulders (Fig, 68, f), so that it will always
reach just the proper distance into the frame. It is also rabbeted at
the edge where the projection of the top-bar of the frame will rest,
(Fig, 68, b), so that the projection has a solid support, and will not
split off with pressure. We now set our frame on this block, lay on our
foundation, cut the size we desire, which, unless strengthened, will
be as long as the frame, and about four inches wide. The foundation
will rest firmly on the projection and block, and touch the top-bar, at
every point. We now take a board as thick as the projection is deep,
and as wide (Fig, 69, d) as the frame is long, which may be trimmed
off, so as to have a convenient handle (Fig. 69, e), and by wetting
the edge of this (Fig. 69, d) either in water, or, better, starch-water,
and pressing with it on the foundation above the projection, the
foundation will be made to adhere firmly to the latter, when the frame
may be raised with the block, taken off, and another fastened as
before. I have practiced this plan for two years, and have had
admirable success. I have very rarely known the foundation to drop,
though it must be remembered that our hives are shaded, and our
frames small.
Fig. 69.
The above methods are successful, but probably will receive

valuable modifications at the hands of the ingenius apiarists of our
land. Study in this direction will unquestionably pay, as the use of
this material is going to be very extensive, and any improvements
will be hailed with joy by the bee-keeping fraternity.
SAVE THE WAX.

As foundation is becoming so popular, and is destined to come
into general use, it behooves us all to be very careful that no old
comb goes to waste. Soiled drone-comb, old, worthless worker-
comb, and all fragments that cannot be used in the hives, together
with cappings, after the honey is drained out through a coarse bag or
colander—which process may be hastened by a moderate heat, not
sufficient to melt the wax, and frequent stirring—should be melted,
cleansed, and molded into cakes of wax, soon to be again stamped,
not by the bees, but by wondrous art.
METHODS.
A slow and wasteful method is to melt in a vessel of heated

water, and to purify by turning off the top, or allowing to cool, when
the impurities at the bottom are scraped off, and the process
repeated till all impurities are eliminated.
A better method to separate the wax is to put it into a strong,
rather coarse bag, then sink this in water and boil. At intervals the
comb in the bag should be pressed and stirred. The wax will collect
on top of the water.
To prevent the bag from burning, it should be kept from touching
the bottom of the vessel by inverting a basin in the bottom of the
latter, or else by using a double-walled vessel. The process should
be repeated till the wax is perfectly cleansed.
But, as wax is to become so important, and as the above
methods are slow, wasteful, and apt to give a poor quality of wax,
specialists, and even amateurs who keep as many as ten or twenty
colonies of bees, may well procure a wax extractor (Fig, 70). This is
also a foreign invention, the first being made by Prof. Gerster, of
Berne, Switzerland. These cost from five to seven dollars, are made
of tin, are very convenient and admirable, and can be procured of
any dealer in apiarian supplies.
Fig. 70.
By this invention, all the wax, even of the oldest combs, can be
secured, in beautiful condition, and as it is perfectly neat, there is no
danger of provoking the "best woman in the world," as we are in
danger of doing by use of either of the above methods—for what is
more untidy and perplexing than to have wax boil over on the stove,
and perhaps get on to the floor, and be generally scattered about.
All pieces of comb should be put into a close box, and if any
larvæ are in it, the comb should be melted so frequently that it would
not smell badly. By taking pains, both in collecting and melting, the
apiarist will be surprised at the close of the season, as he views his
numerous and beautiful cakes of comb, and rejoice as bethinks how
little trouble it has all cost.

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The Many Voices of Contemporary

Piedmontese Writers 1st Edition

Emerging CONTEMPORARY READINGS FOR WRITERS 5th Edition

White Masculinity in Contemporary Australia The Good Ol

The Many Lives of Carbon 1st Edition Dag Olav Hessen

A Culture of Kinship and Place: the poetry of Sorley

A House Of Many Rooms 1st Edition Marius Gabriel

The Pyramid of Mud 1st Edition Andrea Camilleri

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VOICES Voices of Interdisciplinary Critical

This book first published 2016

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Raimondi

ISBN (10): 1-4438-9964-X

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... vi

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii

Introduction .............................................................................................. viii

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 37

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 69

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 98

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 130

Conclusion ............................................................................................... 162

Appendix A ............................................................................................. 166

Appendix B.............................................................................................. 177

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 183

Index ........................................................................................................ 209

This book originated from a PhD thesis submitted to University College

This study aims to undertake a linguistic analysis of a group of narratives

With this study, I attempt to fill a gap in the research on Piedmontese

PIEDMONT’S LINGUISTIC VARIETY

Piedmont before Italian Unification

original” (D’Atena 2013, under “The Constituent Assembly chooses

Dante considered the Piedmontese vulgar tongue “bruttissimo” since it

During the sixteenth century, the dominance of the Tuscan vulgar

teaching of Latin grammar through manuals written in Italian. In 1733 the

lingua italiana can be considered Piedmont’s linguistic manifesto of that

suitable for Piedmont, which could truly become a region of transition

Piedmont during the Unification Years

he was appointed Prime Minister of Piedmont in 1852 he knew that the

At the time of Unification the Italian language was known only to a

ambivalent relationship between the Italian of the literary tradition and

the possibility of communicating more easily. The linguistic debate on the

novel on the misadventures of a group of people during a mountain

comedy Le miserie ‘d monsù Travet, written in dialect and performed for

where a few intellectuals (such as Carlo Denina and Giuseppe Baretti)

of the Italian language in 1764. In issue 24 of the journal Frusta letteraria,

Oh che bella cosa, se mi venisse fatto di svegliare in qualche nostro

Language and Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth

in 1889 was welcomed, as he was considered capable of pursuing a strict

(Guglielmino and Grosser 1987, 5:412). In September 1925 he was

his style, “scorrevole, essenziale e privo di indugi” (161). Gramegna’s

Piedmont and Italy under Fascist Language Policy

romana (Tuscan language in a Roman mouth) was taken as the linguistic

In Turin in particular, the Fascist dictatorship became an authoritarian

and Piedmontese parlance with Latin constructions “con cambi frequenti

Linguistic and Literary Changes in the Aftermath

THE BEST BEE-VEIL.

THE QUINBY SMOKER.

THE BINGHAM SMOKER.

At first sight this seems an improved copy of Mr. Quinby's