Orti Oricellari

ORTI ORICELLARI. - In the history of Italian academies — all of them devoted to classical antiquity and to Latin in the 15th century (notwithstanding the relative eclecticism of the Neapolitan one), all of them devoted to vernacular classicism in the 16th century (especially from 1540 onward) and marked by a note of conventional bohemianism — the O. O. represent a point of exception or of discrimination.

At the advent of the first Republic (1494), Bernardo Rucellai welcomed there the Platonic Academy, which, however, has nothing to do with it. Though without the name of an academy, a gathering of learned men began to form through the work of Cosimo Rucellai after the return of the Medici, to whom it could not have been displeasing that the flower of Florentine intelligence should convene there in freedom of judgment, balanced by the sure loyalty of the guests. But the experiment ended when Zanobi Buondelmonte, Luigi Alamanni, Jacopo da Diacceto and others conspired against Cardinal Giulio, and ended up either in prison or in exile. And the O. O. came to an end as well. They lasted, however, long enough for it to be said that in them the new Italian culture had its beginning. By reading there I Discorsi sulla Prima Deca, and perhaps those on the Arte della guerra, Machiavelli opened in the study of histories a path "not yet trodden by anyone" (historical politics); Giovanni Rucellai and Trissino, by debating there the manner of making tragedy vernacular, initiated there vernacular neo-classicism, and the former's Rosmunda was performed there in 1515 in the presence of Leo X.

Giuseppe Toffanin