Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca. Venice: Giovanni Alberti, 1612

Accademia della Crusca. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca. Venice: Giovanni Alberti, 1612.
The Florentine Accademia della Crusca arose from a group of friends who, after a decade of meetings during the period 1570 to 1580, took upon themselves the great task of compiling a dictionary of what they deemed to be “pure” Italian. Not surprisingly, they chose to base their new lexicon on the works of fourteenth–century Tuscan authors, in particular the “Tre corone,” or “Three Crowns,” Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In 1595, the Academy presided over the publication of a new scholarly edition of the Divina commedia, produced to provide a text on which to base dictionary entries. The first edition of the dictionary was published in 1612, and Dante appears at the top of the list of authors cited. Dante’s supporters were few in the seventeenth century (see Item 10), and the position of the influential Accademia della Crusca was significant in keeping alive some interest in the poet. More importantly, the Academy’s work helped to establish Dante’s Tuscan dialect as the national language of Italy.