Agnolo Monosini was a Fiorentine scholar and cleric of the 16th and 17th centuries, who played a key role in the development of the Italian language two hundred years prior to the risorgimento.

He was a native of Pratovecchio

Pratovecchio

-History:Dono di Paolo, father of the Florentine artist Paolo Uccello, was a barber-surgeon from Pratovecchio. Dono moved to Florence and became a citizen there in 1373.-Main sights:...

, and studied with the Accademia della Crusca

Accademia della Crusca

The Accademia della Crusca is an Italian society for scholars and Italian linguists and philologists established in Florence. After the Accademia Cosentina, it is the oldest Italian academy still in existence...

 in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, where he contributed to its first Vocabolario della lingua italiana published in 1623, in particular adding an index of Greek words.

A Passion for Words

Monosini had one craze which consumed all his intellectual energies: that of proving the Greek origins of the Florentine idiom, which would one day develop into modern Italian. He was reacting to French writers of the period who took great pains to relate their own language directly with Ancient Greek, bypassing the inheritance of Latin and Italian and Alpine Humanism.

The relationships that Monosini develops between Greek and his contemporary vernacular rather suffer from his unconditional enthusiasm, with the result that the associations proposed are often cumbersome and sometimes quite bizarre.

Floris Italicae

He key work: Floris Italicae lingue libri novem (The Flower of Italian Language in a new book) was published in 1604, in which he collected many vernacular Italian proverbs and Idioms, and compared and contrasted them with Greek and Latin.

Floris Italicae particularly concentrated on proverbs and language from Tuscany

Tuscany

Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....

 and the high Maremma

Maremma

The Maremma is a vast area in Italy bordering the Tyrrhenian Sea, consisting of part of south-western Tuscany - Maremma Livornese and Maremma Grossetana , and part of northern Lazio - Maremma Laziale .The poet Dante Alighieri in his Divina Commedia places the...

, and thus included many aspects of the ‘vulgar’ vernacular

Vernacular

A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...

 language which were to become part of the official Italian language in the time of the Risorgimento.

Floris Italicae has been re-published in 2011, with a companion volume of Etymology and Proverbs from the period.

External links

• Treccani Encyclopedia Entry http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/angelo-monosini/
• Italian Language Article and Book Review http://www.visumezine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2617
• Entry in Website of re-publisher "Vecchiarelli Editore" http://www.vecchiarellieditore.com/scheda.asp?id=522
• Virtual Library of the La Crusca Academy
  Accademia della Crusca
  The Accademia della Crusca is an Italian society for scholars and Italian linguists and philologists established in Florence. After the Accademia Cosentina, it is the oldest Italian academy still in existence...
  
  http://www.bdcrusca.it/ris_0.asp?parola1=monosini (Registration Required)