Hover a line for its translation; hover a word for its meaning. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 0 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
Sign in to generate dialogues. It needs a pass — the first ten lessons of every course are free either way.
Sciacquare i panni in Arno
The phrase is Manzoni's own and it describes a deliberate act of language policy carried out by one man on his own book. Writing in Milan in the 1820s he had no national written language available: literary Italian was an archaic, Tuscan-derived register nobody spoke, and his own speech was Lombard, which readers outside Lombardy would not follow. The 1827 edition, the ventisettana, compromises between them. He then spent thirteen years, including a long stay in Florence with a Florentine dictionary and Florentine informants, replacing his vocabulary word by word, and published the quarantana of 1840 in the educated Florentine of his own day — not the literary language, but what Florentines actually said. Note what makes the gesture unusual: he chose a living spoken variety over a prestigious written one, which is the opposite of what a nineteenth-century writer was expected to do. It worked because of what happened next. Italy unified twenty years later with no common language, needed one for its schools, and had to hand a widely read novel written in a consistent, modern, teachable variety. The quarantana became the model for school prose and much of it is still there — which is why Lesson 70's business email and Lesson 103's formal letter sound the way they do, and why Italian written registers feel further from speech than English ones. Lesson 81 said the standard was chosen from literature. This is the choosing, and the man who did the deciding was correcting proofs while he did it.