Giovanni di Michele e gli altri poeti siciliani incarcerati a Palermo (secoli XVI-XVII)

Abstract

This article presents several documents on the Sicilian rhymers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of which remain completely unknown today. These new documents broaden our knowledge of the poetic phenomenon of the time, which until now had been restricted to just a few well-known names. The exegesis on these poets also considers the international context in which they lived, in Palermo in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, when irreligious, anti-dogmatic and esoteric ideas and visions circulated in the Sicilian capital together with the protagonists of the European cultural panorama, condemned and persecuted by the Inquisition. Fundamental to this reconstruction was the choice to include in the exegesis that component made up of minor or unknown poets. The lack of such a census has not allowed us to develop an overall analysis of the phenomenon, which was very widespread at the time, also according to the numbers anticipated by Rinaldi relating to the quantity of poets involved, but also to that of the anthologies in which the poems circulated. their octaves. The discovery of the procedural summaries relating to Michele Moraschino, Ludovico Garlano and Giovanni Di Michele, and of the wall writings in the Steri prison by various seventeenth-century Sicilian rhymers and exhibited here for the first time has made it possible to articulate a broader and unconstrained discussion to the individual poet. This also made it possible to intercept characters of Baroque literature in the compositions of the Sicilian poets of the time that cannot be traced back to Petrarchism, to which their stylistic, lexical and textual constituents have usually been reduced.