GIORNALE ARCADICO

GIORNALE ARCADICO. - Literary periodical published in Rome from 1819 to 1856; it was the official organ of a group of men of letters, among them G. Perticari and S. Betti, who, out of a taste for elevated language and solemn style, out of love for the classical tradition and aversion to every foreign novelty, sought to raise a bulwark against the Romantic invasion.

The journal was therefore decisively inspired by a pronounced literary classicism; and it was the expression of a society that the times were beginning to leave behind. Similar in its content to the literary journals of the eighteenth century, its literary orientation appeared anti-Manzonian; yet its contributors developed a program that had some merit, both for the admiration they professed for Dante, thus anticipating by several decades the great interest that Dante studies would arouse toward the end of the century, and for the defense they mounted of the Italian language.