Galens David. World Literature and Its Times: Italian Literature and Its Times (ENG)

Publisher: Gale, 2005 - 576 p. ISBN10: 0787637254 ISBN13: 9780787637255"My Italy" chants a despairing Petrarch in a poem that he penned some 500 years before Italy became a unified nation. Then the area was just a collection of separate regions with a common memory. Resounding from Tuscany, his lament invoked a single name for the already long-disunited regions — Italia — an ancient appellation for territory that once formed the heart of the Roman Empire and that roughly corresponds to Italy today. Remarkably, for 1400 years, from the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 C.E. to unification in 1861, the regions remained separate yet conceived elements of a national identity. Fundamental to this achievement was a common literary language in a land of multiple dialects.