Chapter John Florio e Giuseppe Baretti tra nostalgia e lessicografia

Abstract

My article is a comparative analysis of John Florio and Giuseppe (‘Joseph’) Baretti centred on the themes of exile and lexicography. The founder of Italian-English lexicography with his Worlde of Wordes (1598) and Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611), respectively 46,000 and 74,000 Italian words copiously translated into English, John Florio was also the author of two epoch-making translations: Montaigne’s Essais (1603) and Boccaccio’s Decameron (1620). Furthermore, his two handbooks for the learning of Italian and English, Firste Fruites (1578) and Second Frutes (1591), offer an interesting ‘picture of England’ on the threshold of Shakespeare’s time, providing fascinating vantage points into Shakespeare’s own multi-language world. An expatriate and a friend of Samuel Johnson’s, Baretti was the reviver of Italian and English lexicography in the mid-18th century. His Dictionary was published at the right time and in the right place (London), when Italy was opening its doors to the Grand Tour travelers and English – an unappealing language on the international stage in Florio’s time, or so it seemed – was by then becoming the world’s language. Both for Florio and Baretti lexicography seems to have been the response to, if not an actual therapy against fruitless pride, nostalgia, and loss of identity.