ARCADIA, ACCADEMIA della. - Literary academy, founded in Rome in 1690 by 14 men of letters and which rapidly attained great development and very wide diffusion. To the programmatic originality and hence the extravagances of seventeenth-century style it sought to oppose a return to simplicity of feeling and to a rustic candor of imagination. Its members, who on entering took Greek names, styled themselves "shepherds"; the many sections it had in all Italian cities were called "reservoirs"; as protector, or Great Shepherd of the shepherds, the Child Jesus was chosen, born in a stable and among shepherds; as its emblem it adopted the Greek panpipe wreathed with laurel and pine. The first and principal seat in Rome ("central reservoir") was inaugurated on 15 Oct. 1690 with a meeting held in the garden of the Reformed Friars Minor at S. Pietro in Montorio. The following year the A. received the high protection of Innocent XII; nor did it lack the favor of Christina of Sweden, a great patroness of artists and men of letters in Rome. Its laws were dictated in Latin by the man of letters and jurist Gianvincenzo Gravina; its head, with the title of Custode generale, was Giammario Crescimbeni, author of the Bellezze della volgar poesia (1700), in which the Platonic aesthetics of the Arcadians is formulated, and of the Memorie istoriche dell'Accademia. In harmony with its character, it held its meetings in the open air, in the Bosco Parrasio; then, in 1725, through the munificence of John V of Portugal, it established itself on the Janiculum. In the first thirty years of the 18th century there was scarcely an Italian city in which the A. had not established one of its colonies, as they said in Latin. Protected and favored by the leading personalities of the time (the Arcadians of Rome often enjoyed the lavish hospitality of Cardinal Ottoboni in the gardens of the abbey of S. Pancrazio), it numbered among its members Clement XI, 46 cardinals, hundreds of patriarchs, primates, archbishops, bishops and prelates, the queen of Poland and her son, the reigning princes of Bavaria, Tuscany, Parma, the duke of Mirandola, all the princes of the Throne, almost the whole Italian nobility and a good deal of that beyond the Alps, many ladies, among them Faustina Maratti, the marchioness Petronilla Paolini Massimi, etc.
Among the more notable Arcadians one may further recall: Mons. Sardini, of Lucca; Mons. N. Forteguerri; the canon G. Crocchiante; and, among the poets, G. B. Zappi, C. I. Frugoni, A. Bertola, I. Vittorelli, P. Rolli, E. Manfredi, Metastasio. The A. also welcomed the most famous improvisers, such as the cavalier Bernardino Perfetti and Maria Maddalena Morelli (among the Arcadians, Corilla Olimpica).
One may say, in reality, that, at least for the first half of the eighteenth century, the whole of Italian poetic production unfolded within the ambit of the A., which came to dominate entirely the literary fashion of the peninsula, imposing uniformity of aesthetic canons and of taste. It is precisely in these aesthetic canons and not in a profound vital movement that the reaction it opposed to seventeenth-century style consists. G. B. Marino and his school had indicated wonder as the aim of poetry, and their baroquism was the result of a pursuit of the new at any cost, wonder and novelty taking the place of other spiritual values that were lacking; so that in the imagism of the seventeenth-century poets one must see the expression of a mere sensualism. The A. sought to fill that inner void by other means, but did not abolish it. Against originality as an end in itself, the Arcadians restored imitation to honor by placing it before inspiration, and affirmed the dominion of rules. Such a position already contained in germ that mannerism and that dilettantism which remain the limitation of all Arcadian poetry. Apart from its established Tasso-derived origin, it was also from Marino, whom it wished to oppose, that the A. took up the pastoral world. Of the three tendencies that can be distinguished in Arcadian poetry, the Petrarchan tendency and the classicizing one, which harked back, in a more or less broad sense, to Platonism, and notably to the Renaissance Platonism of M. Ficino, proved undoubtedly the falsest; while to the pastoral and Anacreontic tendency are owed the best "canzonette" that survive (by Rolli and a few others) and the happiest moments of Metastasio. Even in these livelier expressions, feeling rarely rises above sentimentality and proves to be little more than a pretext for the melody of the verses and the refined elegance of expression, thus indicating that sensualism, if it had been a constitutive element of Marinistic imagism, remained such also for the Arcadians. This lack of feeling in its most candid and vital form makes Italian Arcadian poetry a literary phenomenon parallel to the sensism of French philosophy. In this regard, the poetic praises paid by Frugoni to Condillac remain significant.
The A. began to decline from the second half of the 18th century; the decline became ever more pronounced with the changing times, which brought new demands. After a long period of dull and stunted life, the academy was reorganized in 1925, with the addition of Accademia letteraria italiana. The seat was transferred from the Bosco Parrasio, which remains the property of the Institute, to the Angelica library in Rome. The Academy has published 13 vols. of Rime and three periodicals: L'Arcadia (1889-1896), Giornale arcadico (1898-1916), Atti dell'Accademia e scritti dei soci (from 1917).