The Arts - The Italian Lakes - page 455

Lingua Franca
Virgil (70-19 BC), son of Mantua, was poet laureate of Roman Italia, penning the national
epic The Aeneid in which he promoted the idea of Italianism by fusing Greeks, Trojans and
Italic peoples into a shared Roman ancestry. His poetry had an enduring and widespread in-
fluence, providing inspiration for medieval humanists like Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante,
who made Virgil his guide in his underworld peregrinations in the Divina Commedia (Div-
ine Comedy; 1555).
Other northern luminaries included poet Catullus (84-54 BC), naturalist and philosopher
Pliny the Elder (23-79), writer Pliny the Younger (61-112) and historian Tacitus (56-117).
Through them Romanisation continued apace, carried to all corners of the Empire through
its legionnaires, who spoke in Latin and retired to villas in the Po valley and around the
lakes. To make them comfortable, extensive building projects were commissioned: a
castrum at Como and Castelseprio, a grand arena in Verona, a forum, theatre and a multi-
tude of basilicas and temples in Mediolanum (Milan) and Brixia (Brescia), and commodi-
ous country villas at Sirmione, Desenzano del Garda and Bellagio. Many of these, such as
the well-preserved Domus dell'Ortaglia in Brescia's Museo della Città, were decorated
with fine mosaics, elegant peristyles (internal courtyards) and frescoes.
This rash of building gave the peninsula a common (vernacular) architectural language.
The red-brick basilica with its colonnaded interior, plain facade and semicircular apses is
still discernable in many of Milan's oldest churches (Sant'Eustorgio, Sant'Ambrogio, Santa
Maria delle Grazie, San Lorenzo). In Cremona, Lodi and Monza, and around the lakes, es-
pecially Lake Como, dozens of towns and villages boast Lombard Romanesque churches,
distinguished by their plain facades, symmetrical layout, vaulted interiors and rounded, or-
namental arcades. The Maestri Comacini (Como Masterbuilders) spread across Lombardy
and Europe, some travelling as far as Catalonia (Spain) and St Petersburg (Russia).
Likewise, volgare latino (vernacular Latin) cut across diverse regional dialects providing
Italy with its first lingua franca. From this, modern Italian was to finally emerge nearly
1800 years later, promoted over the centuries through the works of Virgil, Petrarch, Dante
and Alessandro Manzoni, whose immense novel I Promessi Sposi (1827) is considered the
first modern 'Italian' novel.