Pratica della scrittura, grammatica della poesia Prime annotazioni su un prezioso reperto lombardo della Scuola siciliana

A small anthology of poems of the Sicilian Poetic School, copied in Bergamo in the sixth or seventh decade of the 13th century, was recently discovered in a notarial parchment kept at the “A. Mai” Library. This precious discovery enables us to re-examine the question of the early circulation and reception of topics and forms of Sicilian courtly poetry in northern Italy, twenty years after the finding of an ancient fragment of a Sicilian poem marked by linguistic features of East Veneto. This paper is a preliminary study of the language of these texts: its main aim is to analyse the approach taken by the copyist (who is likely to have been a notary) to the new poetic code, giving a description of the ­constant interference/interaction between the poetic language, the vernacular of Bergamo (which was the mother tongue of the copyist) and the universal gramatica of the Latin language.