PERTICARI, GIULIO. – Literary scholar, born at Savignano (Rimini) on 15 August 1779, died at S. Costanzo (Pesaro) on 26 June 1822. Monti’s son-in-law and collaborator, he stood by him in the polemic of the classicists against the Romantics, which P. developed in Rome’s Giornale arcadico, and in the controversy over 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 Eloguio, 1820) were included in the seven volumes of Monti’s Proposta (v.). There P. defended a composite language not only in space but also in time, advocating, with an incipient historicist sense, the necessity of admitting into the Italian language those words that had entered it in the course of its centuries-long development. The passion for erudition, which is P.’s fundamental characteristic, subsequently led him, in contradiction with his proclaimed classicism, to turn his attention to studies of Provençal language and literature, following in Raynouard’s footsteps, and to the collection of Spanish romances edited by Depping, as well as to various studies on the Italian language and literature of the Duecento and Trecento.
His attitude toward Catholicism is not a dominant issue in his spiritual life, but insofar as it was an attitude toward the papacy, it appears connected with his ideal inclinations as a politician and also with his conception of humanity. Indeed, from celebrating Pius VII’s return to Rome in the Montian-style cantica Il prigioniero apostolico, he went on to an Italian “patriotic love” arising from disappointment at the failure to realize the ideals he had dreamed of. This national sentiment, which nourishes his most famous critical works with negative or fruitful results, also assumes an anti-Curial character. Reflections of this tendency have been identified, besides explicit statements by P. and testimonies from contemporaries, in certain manifestations of his philological output, as was consistently the case with him, such as the vernacular translations of Petrarch’s eclogues and epistles inspired by similar sentiments, and a life of Cola di Rienzo dedicated to Guglielmo Pepe.