Accademia Della Crusca - Origins

Origins

The founders were originally called the brigata dei Crusconi and constituted a kind of circle, where the members included poets, men of letters, and lawyers. The members usually assembled on pleasant and convivial occasions, during which cruscate - discourses in a merry and playful style, which have neither a beginning nor an end - were recited for the purposes of fun. The declared intention of the group, was to create a distance between itself and the pedantry of the Accademia Fiorentina, protected by Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, and to contrast itself with the severe and classicising style of that body. The Crusconi battled against the classical pedantry of the Accademia through the use of humour, satire, and irony. However, it was important that this battle was fought without compromising the primary intention of the group, which was typically literary, and expounded in high quality literary disputes.

The founders of the Accademia della Crusca are traditionally identified as: Giovanni Battista Deti (‘Sollo’), Anton Francesco Grazzini (‘Lasca’), Bernardo Canigiani (‘Gramolato’), Bernardo Zanchini (‘Macerato’), Bastiano de’ Rossi (‘Inferigno’); they were joined in October 1582 by Leonardo Salviati (‘Infarinato’) (1540-1589). Under his forceful leadership, and based on his defining contributions, at the beginning of 1583, the Accademia took on a new form, directing itself definitively to the end that the academicians now identified: to demonstrate and to conserve the beauty of the Florentine vulgar tongue, modelled upon the authors of the Trecento.

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