POEMS IN DIALECT AND SUBVERSIVE SLANG
FERRARI, Giovanni Francesco.
Le rime burlesche, sopra varii, et piacevoli soggetti; indrizzate à diversi nobili signori.
Venice, heirs of Melchior Sessa, 1570.
8vo, pp. [iv], 122, [4 (blank)]; woodcut Sessa cat-and-mouse device to title, italic letter, 4-line woodcut initials throughout, woodcut head- and tailpieces; a few light marks; but largely a clean, attractive copy; in contemporary vellum, remains of ties; text block coming away slightly, light wear to covers, a few chips; small nineteenth-century ink stamp ‘W.D.G.’ (i.e. Walfredo della Gherardesca?) to title, booklabel of Count A[lberto] Guido della Gherardesca with manuscript shelfmark to spine.
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Le rime burlesche, sopra varii, et piacevoli soggetti; indrizzate à diversi nobili signori.
First edition of the only work published by Giovanni Francesco Ferrari (d. 1588?), a Renaissance court poet of whom little is known, including poems in macaronic Spanish, several Italian dialects, and in lingua zerga, or furbesco, derived from the jargon of criminals.
Among Ferrari’s ‘burle’ are a laudatory poem to ignorance, paradoxes, social observations, and satire, influenced by sources such as Ariosto, Pulci, and Folengo. Also included are poems in praise of madness, cakes, artichokes, ugly women, pedantry, picking at scabs, and wine; and against laughter, love, beards, Cicero and Aristotle, and poetry itself.
Ferrari’s experimental verse makes interesting use of multiple dialects as well as languages, among them his macaronic ‘Semispagnolata’. ‘An entire chapter is composed in the dialect of Modena, and there are numerous passages in the dialects of Bergamo and Mantua, while Neapolitan is used to characterise obsequious figures or braggarts’ (DBI, trans.). Lingua zerga, or furbesco, was jargon initially associated with the criminal underworld and popularised in northern Italy – particularly in Venice – through a sixteenth-century glossary attributed to Antonio Broccardo, Modo novo de intendere la lingua zerga. Here, Ferrari applies the ‘cifra di Campo di Fiore’ to his poems ‘La quinta pistola d’Horatio’ and ‘Instruttione nella medesima Cifra’ (f. 69r–f. 71r), and to ‘Post scripta in zergo’ (f. 13v), in which messages are encrypted through the use of vocabulary in furbesco: for instance, bruna is used to mean notte, Dragon is dottore, and Simone (or its diminutive, Monello) used to signify io, mi, or me.
Most information about Ferrari’s life is gleaned from these verses; for example, his attachment to the entourage of the Mantuan prelate Ippolito Capilupi during his time in Rome is evidenced within the text, and multiple references to Roman life in the late Renaissance are to be found in these lines. Ferrari also edited or endorsed a propaganda pamphlet written by Capilupi’s nephew about the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
We find four copies in the UK (All Souls Oxford, Birmingham, BL, CUL, Manchester).
EDIT16 18789; USTC 829190; Adams F-272; BM STC Italian, p. 247; Brunet II, col. 1231. See Lastraioli, ‘In extremis: la manière burlesque de Giovanni Francesco Ferrari’, in Italique 16 (2013), pp. 233–257.
