“I salute you, bountiful goddess, noble/generous goddess,| O our glory, O Venetian Queen!| In stormy, deadly whirlwind | You ruled secure; a thousand doughty | Bodies you laid low in bitter fight. | Through you I was not wretched, through you I do not groan; | I live in peace through you. Rule, O blessed one, | Rule in favourable/prosperous fortune, in high pomp, | In august splendour, in golden situation. | Serene, peaceful, pious, | And generous; save, love, and preserve.”

An address to the Venetian Republic, attributed here to Mattia Butturini, from Salò on Lake Garda, at the time within Venetian territory. The poem has enjoyed a certain celebrity as a curiosity, if one searches Google Books, since it is a text that has been written to be read both as Latin and as Italian. (Corrections to my version will consequently be welcomed with even greater enthusiasm than usual!) I wouldn’t make extravagant claims for its poetic quality, which doesn’t seem to me to survive the requirement to be intelligible in both languages. But like the “intercalary” verses on London tombstones a few blogs ago, I think this is more than a simple curiosity. Butturini’s biography may offer the best clue.

Born in 1752, Butturini was educated in Salò and at the University of Padua, and served as the representative of Salò in the city of Venice, remaining in the city thereafter, enjoying the society of artists and intellectuals, and gaining a reputation as a poet in Latin, Ancient Greek and Italian. But in 1797, as French and Austrian forces, the former under Napoleon Bonaparte, tussled for control of northern Italy, and the French fomented revolution within Venice, the last Doge, Ludovico Manin, formally abolished the Republic and resigned. Rapacious French control yielded to Austrian at the beginning of 1798, but Venetian independence was at an end after more than a thousand years. When the Austrians took over, Butturini left Venice for his hometown of Salò, where he practiced law, subsequently holding professorial chairs in Greek at Pavia, Law in Bologna, and Greek again at Pavia (under French, then Austrian control), until his death in 1817.

Butturini’s Latin/Italian poem clearly dates to the last days of the Venetian Republic. The form of the poem perhaps tells us a little more about its message. Its metre is not classical but Italian, the lines after the first, at any rate, conforming to the rules of the endecasillabo, the principal metre of Italian poetry. Strictly speaking, then, Butturini has written an Italian poem that can also be read as Latin. I think it’s easy enough to see the power of identifying the Italian with the Latin language and associating both with Venice, a state that made much of its being the successor to classical Rome,* all in the context of the imminent suppression of an ancient Republic by powers from beyond the Alps.

*For the idea, see D. S. Chambers, The imperial age of Venice, 1380-1580 (1970).

[Something odd happened to this blog when first posted, so I’ve reposted it.]