Their local
patriotism, stronger probably than in any other medieval people, soon
found expression in literature, and allied itself with the current
conception of 'Fame.' Topography became the counterpart of biography;
while all the more important cities began to celebrate their own
praises in prose and verse, writers appeared who made the chief towns
and districts the subject partly of a serious comparative description,
partly of satire, and sometimes of notices in which jest and earnest
are not easy to be distinguished. Next to some famous passages in the
'Divine Comedy,' we have here the 'Dittamondo' of Uberti (about 1360).
As a rule, only single remarkable facts and characteristics are here
mentioned: the Feast of the Crows at Sant' Apollinare in Ravenna, the
springs at Treviso, the great cellar near Vicenza, the high duties at
Mantua, the forest of towers at Lucca. Yet mixed up with all this, we
find laudatory and satirical criticisms of every kind. Arezzo figures
with the crafty disposition of its citizens, Genoa with the
artificially blackened eyes and teeth (?) of its women, Bologna with
its prodigality, Bergamo with its coarse dialect and hard-headed
people. In the fifteenth century the fashion was to belaud one's own
city even at the expense of others. Michele Savonarola allows that, in
comparison with his native Padua, only Rome and Venice are more
splendid, and Florence perhaps more joyous--by which our knowledge is
naturally not much extended.
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