Poesie

Art for the Reader’s Sake: An Historical and Textual Study of Emilio De Marchi’s Il cappello del prete (1888)

“…Indeed, upon Unification in 1861, only about two-and-a-half percent of the population could speak Italian in addition to their native dialect, and of that proportion, sixty-six percent lived in Tuscany. 20 This is only compounded by the extremely high number of illiterate Italians. During the Restoration period, Italian literacy trailed tragically behind other European countries such as England and France; the average number of literate Italians in northern and central Italy alone did not exceed twenty percent, compared to the European average which was greater than fifty percent.…”