Giovanni Bona Boliris
Encyclopedia
Life
Boliris was born in Cattaro, in Albania VenetaAlbania Veneta
Venetian Albania was the name for the possessions of the Venetian Republic in southern Dalmatia that existed from 1420 to 1797. It originally covered the coastal area of what is now northern Albania and the coast of Montenegro, but the Albanian and southern Montenegrin parts were lost to the...
(today Kotor
Kotor
Kotor is a coastal city in Montenegro. It is located in a secluded part of the Gulf of Kotor. The city has a population of 13,510 and is the administrative center of the municipality....
, Montenegro
Montenegro
Montenegro Montenegrin: Crna Gora Црна Гора , meaning "Black Mountain") is a country located in Southeastern Europe. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea to the south-west and is bordered by Croatia to the west, Bosnia and Herzegovina to the northwest, Serbia to the northeast and Albania to the...
. He studied in the University of Padua
University of Padua
The University of Padua is a premier Italian university located in the city of Padua, Italy. The University of Padua was founded in 1222 as a school of law and was one of the most prominent universities in early modern Europe. It is among the earliest universities of the world and the second...
, where he studied law.
In 1551 moved to live in the Kingdom of Naples, where he participated with Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
poets to create a volume - written in italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
- in honour of Giovanna d'Aragona, Dukess of Paliano
Paliano
Paliano is a town and comune in the province of Frosinone, in the Lazio region of central Italy.- History :Paliano was the seat of a branch of the powerful Colonna family whose head was Lord, then Duke, then Prince of Paliano. Their fortress dominates the town...
.
He died in Cattaro. In 1585, 13 years after his death, a poem of his in Latin in honour of Cattaro, which he had written while living in 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 ....
, was published.
Works
He signed his italian and Latin poems as Giovanni Bona, Johannes Bona and Ioannes Bonna.The most famous work of Giovanni Bona is "Descriptio sinus et urbis Ascriviensis (for D. Ioannem Bonam de Boliris, nobilem Catharensem)" ("Description of the Gulf and City of Cattaro" (by Mr. Giovanni Bona de Boliris, noble of Cattaro)) a poem of 331 Latin exameters with which he glorified the Bocche di Cattaro, Cattaro itself and the other localities of the fairy Gulf in the present-day Montenegro.
The work was published in Lucca, in Tuscany, in 1585 by the Ragusan Dominican friar Serafino Razzi, in appendix to his "Storia di Raugia" (Ragusa) ("History of Raugia").
Bona de Boliris kept close relations with the literary circles in Italy, particularly with the poets gathered around the court of Naples.
When Girolamo Ruscelli, in 1551, collected poetic texts for an anthology in honour of Giovanna d'Aragona, Dukess of Paliano
Paliano
Paliano is a town and comune in the province of Frosinone, in the Lazio region of central Italy.- History :Paliano was the seat of a branch of the powerful Colonna family whose head was Lord, then Duke, then Prince of Paliano. Their fortress dominates the town...
, the beautiful Napolitan wife of Ascanio Colonna (member of the famous Colonna family
Colonna family
The Colonna family is an Italian noble family; it was powerful in medieval and Renaissance Rome, supplying one Pope and many other Church and political leaders...
), he invited to write also Bona de Boliris of Cattaro who, joining the initiative, was present in the volume published in Venice in 1554 with the title "Il tempio della divina signora donna Giovanna d'Aragona, fabbricato da tutti i più gentili spiriti e in tutte le lingue principali del mondo" ("The Temple of the Divine Lady Mrs. Giovanna d'Aragona, Made by the Most Gentle Spirits and in All the Principal Languages of the World").
Dispute
There is a current dispute whether Giovanni Bona-Boliris belongs to the Croatian, Montenegrin or Italian literature. His works were written in Italian sonetSonet
Sonet may refer to:* Sonet Records, European record label* Synchronous optical networking * Saab Sonett...
format and in Latin.
Thus, with very few exceptions, the Serbian and Croatian historians insert this writer in their own national literatures changing his name respectively into "Ivan Bolica" and "Ivan Bunic".
Bona was inserted (translated), at first in the anthologies of the "Croatian Latinists" of 1969 and then in the Montenegrin Anthology of 1979.
Thus he had entered the first Italian anthology already in 1555, four centuries earlier. Bona entered the book about the Dukess of Paliano, not with poems in a Croatian language
Croatian language
Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
, but with an Italian sonnet
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
and a Latin epigram
Epigram
An epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising statement. Derived from the epigramma "inscription" from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein "to write on inscribe", this literary device has been employed for over two millennia....
, signing "Giovanni Bona da [from] Cattaro".
The famous Croatian essayist Slobodan Prosperov Novak
Slobodan Prosperov Novak
Slobodan Prosperov Novak , is a Croatian literature historian, comparativist and theatrologist.-Biography:He graduated comparative literature in 1973 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, receiving his M.A. in 1976 and Ph.D. in 1978. He worked as a journalist in a periodical...
, already president of the "Croatian Center of the Pen Club", has written recently in a book that “Ivan Bolica remains eternally numbered in the Croatian literary history”.