PERTICARI, GIULIO. - Man of letters, b. at Savignano (Rimini), 15 Aug. 1779, d. at S. Costanzo (Pesaro) 26 June 1822. Son-in-law and collaborator of Monti, he stood close to him in the controversy of the classicists against the romantics, which P. developed in the Giornale arcadico of Rome, and in that over the language.
His two most famous works (Degli scrittori del Trecento e dei loro imitatori, 1818, and Dell'amor patrio di Dante, e del suo libro intorno il Volgare Eloquio, 1820) were included in the 7 vols. of Monti's Proposta (v.). In them P. upheld a language composite not only in space but also in time, advocating with a germinal historicist sense the necessity of admitting into the Italian language the words that had entered it in the course of its centuries-long life. The passion of the scholar, which is the fundamental characteristic of P., then led him, in contradiction with his proclaimed classicism, to turn his mind to studies of Provençal language and literature, in the footsteps of Raynouard, and to the collection of Spanish romances edited by Depping, as well as to various studies on the Italian language and literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
His attitude toward Catholicism is not the dominant problem of his spiritual life, but insofar as it is an attitude toward the papacy it appears connected to his ideal propensities as a politician and also as a man. Indeed, from the celebration of the return of Pius VII to Rome in the canticle in the manner of Monti Il prigioniero apostolico, he passed to an Italian "love of country" arising from disillusionment at the failure to realize the ideals he had dreamed of. This national sentiment, which nourishes with negative or fruitful results his most famous works of criticism, also takes shape in an anti-curial sense. The reflections of this tendency have been seen, besides in explicit declarations of P. and in the testimonies of contemporaries, in certain manifestations of his philological production, as always happened with him, such as the vernacular translations of eclogues and epistles of Petrarch inspired by similar sentiments, and a life of Cola di Rienzo dedicated to Guglielmo Pepe.
Bibliography
Marcello Aurigemma