TAVERNA, GIUSEPPE. – Priest, educator, b. Piacenza 14 March 1764, d. Parma 20 April 1820.
After ordination he taught at Piacenza in the college of S. Pietro, where his pupil included the twelve-year-old Pietro Giordani; at Brescia (1812–22) in the Peroni college; in 1825 he was entrusted by Maria Luisa with the Lalatta college in Brescia; after its closure in 1831 he lived in straitened circumstances, somewhat relieved in 1848 when the revolutionary government appointed him honorary professor of philosophy.
He was prompted to write for children by a burning desire to educate them wholesomely and by acquaintance with the little journal L’ami des Enfants, published by A. Berquin. Among his works the best known and most widely read were: Novelle morali ad istruzione dei fanciulli (Parma 1800); Racconti storici (ibid. 1803); Le prime letture dei fanciulli (ibid. 1808). All this narrative is stamped by the life of children, the common incidents of their existence, the sphere of the family, and is marked by freshness of feeling and delicacy of expression. Even today it has not lost its beneficial efficacy, were it not that the over-elaborate, recherché and at times prolix style repels young readers.
(da
zione di L. Rados.
G. T. Operette diverse per fam. maestramento dei fanciulli, Milano 1891)
TAVERNA, GIUSEPPE – Portrait. Engraving by L. Rados.
Tauropolo – Taurobolic altar of Périgueux.
TAVOLA ROTONDA. – Symbol of the perfect equality of rights and duties among the knights who gathered in the legendary Breton court of King Arthur, and by extension the name given to the cycle of romances and poems that grew up around their adventures.
No mention of the famous Round Table appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135), but only in the French octosyllabic translation made a few decades later by the Anglo-Norman chronicler Robert Wace (Roman de Brut); the notice was then expanded around 1200 by Layamon, the English translator of Wace, with an imaginative account of the struggles for precedence at Arthur’s table and the clever device of a Cornish carpenter who offered to build a table seating more than 1,600 persons of equal dignity.
The matter of the Breton knightly romances, though rooted in the native soil of Celtic culture, was artistically elaborated in the centres of Franco-Norman civilisation and gradually linked with the Round Table (though originally quite extraneous to it, as in the case of the legend of Tristan and Iseult), until in the work of Chrétien de Troyes it formed an organic development of the psychological and ethical ideal of courtly chivalry, finally sublimated in Percival le Gallois ou le Conte du Graal through a fortunate religious symbolism. The unfinished poem’s material was widely taken up by the German Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170–1225) and by other French writers known and unknown: Vaucher de Denain, Manessier, Robert de Boron, Gerbert de Montreuil. With the legend of the Holy Grail, containing the blood of Jesus collected by Joseph of Arimathea, it lent itself to heretical polemic against papal authority, drawing on legendary material of very mixed origin.