Romanesco 800–1550

The transformation of Romanesco from a Southern language to become one that is much closer to the Tuscan varieties has no equivalent in the history of the Italian languages, from the beginning of the vernacular era to the present day. The uniqueness of the ‘Rome case’ has been stressed in many circumstances, and several explanations have been proposed for it, but no agreement has been reached yet.

Almost one century ago, Migliorini (1932:113) proposed a theory, according to which ‘the history of Romanesco is the history of its decay.’ Interestingly, to this day, there is no consensus about when exactly, how, and with what consequences, the ‘decay’ of the Roman language took place. Indeed, more than fifty years after Migliorini’s work, Mancini (1987:41) argued that, until then, scholars ‘placed too much emphasis on some demographically macroscopic events,’ such as the Sack of Rome in 1527. Instead, according to him, the mutation of Romanesco was a slow event, already in place, at least in its germinal stages, in the Quattrocento. Pietro Trifone (1990:92) quickly reacted with a detailed linguistic analysis of new documents, and concluded that the demographic de-southernisation of Rome (caused by the Sack) and the ensuing repopulation of the city post-1527 were the main reasons for the de-southernisation of the spoken language of the lowest social classes. The debate between specialists has continued for several years. At the present time, rather than choose sides, scholars tend to report both opinions and try to harmonise them into a whole. Currently, and maybe because no one has established a definitive answer to the issue, researchers seem to prefer to focus on the Romanesco spoken in the present day, a language that has still many points of contact with its Renaissance variety.

With the aim of promoting new studies on this topic, the database offers scholars the opportunity to explore the whole corpus of texts written in Romanesco from the 9th to the 16th century. Regularly updated, it will make available as much metadata as possible concerning texts written in the language of Rome from its origins to 1550, and the physical objects (manuscripts, printed books or places, such as churches or catacombs) that convey them.