Galilei, who wrote for her blind father and not for the publishers, I have never heard of any Italian woman who knew how to write Italian. Surely you would not give the name of true Italian prose to the thin broth of Matilde Serao, the surreptitious delight of boarding-schools? Or to the honest camomile in which the venerable lady who hides under the pastoral name of Neera sets forth her chaste narratives? Or to the colorful swoonings of that pretentious literary dialect which Grazia Deledda manipulates with a Sardinian frankness.
Leave her in peace then—poor Carolina. She wrote just as the words came, to be sure, but she was always intelligible, and, what is more, she was always readable. She too, like her fellow-citizen Alfieri, like her colleague Manzoni, came in her youth to Tuscany to steep herself in the idiom of the Arno. But the Arno, so clear and resplendent when it gushes forth amid the chestnut trees of Falterona, is so muddy and greasy and turbid when it reaches Florence that the beauty of its idiom is gone. And the Academy of the Crusca in its Medicean palace is too high and mighty a lady to receive or help a humble schoolma’am, such as Signora Invernizio then was.
So then you must not seek in her books the full-blown flowers of choice speech that may be gathered from the hopper of the dictionaries.
