Vittorio Imbriani
1840–1886
Biography
Vittorio Imbriani was an Italian writer, critic and scholar who lived from 1840 to 1886. He was born in Naples into a family of liberal patriots. As a boy he followed his father into exile in 1849, and he grew up in Nice and then in Turin. He studied in Zurich and then in Berlin, where he absorbed German Romantic and Hegelian ideas. In 1866 he served as a volunteer with Garibaldi's forces in the Third War of Independence, and he was taken prisoner after the battle of Bezzecca.
Imbriani was a combative critic who argued that Italian should draw on the riches of the country's dialects rather than be bound by narrow Tuscan purism. He also worked on folklore, collecting fairy tales and popular songs from oral tradition. In 1871 he published La novellaja fiorentina in Naples, and a fuller edition followed in 1877. In 1884 he was given the chair of Italian literature at the University of Naples, but a progressive illness that had left him paralysed kept him from teaching, and he died in his native city on 1 January 1886.
The site holds La novellaja fiorentina: Fiabe e novelline stenografate in Firenze dal dettato popolare, in which he recorded, in shorthand, tales dictated by ordinary Florentine speakers. It is one of his best-known contributions to the study of oral storytelling, and it reflects his wish that a national literature should grow from the speech of the people.
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Books
La novellaja fiorentina: Fiabe e novelline stenografate in Firenze dal dettato popolare
by Vittorio Imbriani
Fifty fairy tales and popular stories taken down word for word from Florentine storytellers in the 1870s, with ogres, enchanted birds, a Tuscan Cinderella and quick-witted peasants. Imbriani keeps the tellers' own spoken Florentine and follows each tale with notes comparing it…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.