Portugal and Spain was an organic evolution: the dialect of the most prominent city gradually became the accepted language of the whole region Hong Kong Cruise Terminal. Therefore, what we today call French is really a version of medieval Parisian. Portuguese is really Lisboan. Spanish is essentially Madrileno. These were capitalist victories; the strongest city ultimately determined the language of the whole country.
Italy was different. One critical difference was that, for the longest time, Italy wasn’t even a country. It didn’t get itself unified until quite late in life (1861) and until then was a peninsula of warring city-states dominated by proud local princes or other European powers. Parts of Italy belonged to France, parts to Spain, parts to whoever could grab the local fortress or palace. The Italian people were alternatively humiliated and cavalier about all this domination.
Most didn’t much like being colonized by their fellow Europeans hk serviced apartment, but there was always that apathetic crowd that said, “Franza o Spagna, purche se magna,” which means, in dialect, “France or Spain, as long as I can eat.” All this internal division meant that Italy never properly coalesced, and Italian didn’t either. So it’s not surprising that, for centuries, Italians wrote and spoke in local dialects that were mutually unfathomable. A scientist in Florence could barely communicate with a poet in Sicily or a merchant in Venice (except in Latin, of course, which was hardly considered the national language). In the sixteenth century, some Italian intellectuals got together and decided that this was absurd. This Italian peninsula needed an Italian language, at least in the written form, which everyone could agree upon. So this gathering of intellectuals proceeded to do something unprecedented in the history of Europe; they handpicked the most beautiful of all the local dialects and crowned it Italian.
In order to find the most beautiful dialect ever spoken in Italy eleaf istick, they had to reach back in time two hundred years to fourteenth-century Florence. What this congress decided would henceforth be considered proper Italian was the personal language of the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri.
When Dante published his Divine Comedy back in 1321, detailing a visionary progression through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, he’d shocked the literate world by not writing in Latin. He felt that Latin was a corrupted, elitist language, and that the use of it in serious prose had “turned literature into a harlot” by making universal narrative into something that could only be bought with money, through the privilege of an aristocratic education.