TOLOMEI, CLAUDIO. - Man of letters, b. in Siena in 1492, d. in Rome on 23 March 1555. Exiled from his homeland in 1526 for his Medicean politics, he lived for a long time in Rome and Padua in the service of princes; recalled to his homeland, he held other offices there and was ambassador to France. He wrote various philological works, in part lost.

With the volume Versi e regole della nuova poesia toscana (1539) he gave examples and precepts for the application to Italian lyric poetry of quantitative meter and of Greek-Latin strophic devices. He was a vigorous champion of the Tuscan character of the Italian language in two dialogues: Il Polito (published in 1524 under the pseudonym of Adriano Franci), where, among other things, he fought Trissino's orthography; and Il Cesano (slightly later, but published in 1555), where, in the spirit of a distant forerunner of Manzoni, he gives "great weight to the living usage of educated people."

Bibliography5 works

BIBL.: G. Carducci, La poesia barbara nei secc. XV e XVI, Bologna 1881; F. Sensi, C. T. e le controversie su l'ortografia ital. nel sec. XVI, in Atti dell'Accad. dei Lincei, 4th series, 6 (1890), p. 314 ff.; id., C. T. e Celso Cittadini, in Arch. glottologico, 12 (1884), p. 441 ff.; P. Rajna, Datazione ed autore del « Polito », in Rassegna bibl. della lett. it., 24 (1916), p. 350 ff.; id., Quando fu composto il « Cesano », ibid., 25 (1917), pp. 107-37.

Giulio Natali

@incollection{ec12_tolomei_claudio, author = {Natali, Giulio}, title = {Tolomei, claudio}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {XII}, pages = {210}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1954}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/tolomei-claudio} }

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Tolomei, Claudio

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