“Tria corda”. Cesare de Titta fra italiano, dialetto, neolatino

Cesare de Titta, a key player in Abruzzo literary culture at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, dealt frequently with themes deriving from the rural culture of his region in dialect, Italian and neo-Latin poetry and moved close to popular literature. He also often wrote poetry for music. In contrast to other scholars of his time – some of whom, like Gennaro Finamore, were friends of his – he claimed there can be no good popular literature or music unless it is backed up by high quality artists. A neo-Latin poet who deserves to be re-evaluated, de Titta breathed new life into poetic forms like the Latin sonnet, a tradition which had persisted at least from the end of the Middle Ages, and was probably the first to transpose ‘stornelli’ into neo-Latin, in a little poem written for the second Virgil bi-millenary in 1930. This little poem may justly be considered one of the most successful of de Titta’s poems in the popular and classical culture, autobiography and literary traditions.