Turbati sogni e lirici conforti. Strascino, Lasca e l’incubo del «malfranzese»

Abstract

The dreamlike representation of syphilis, better known as “morbo gallico” or “mal francese”, marks two eccentric poetic compositions of the sixteenth century: the Lamento in rhymed octaves by Niccolò Campani, alias Strascino, and the song Al molto magnifico Lionardo della Fonte by Antonfrancesco Grazzini, known as Lasca. The dream, which becomes for both authors the principle rhetorical artifice to legitimize the ideological and stylistic irreverence of their verses, in virtue of its explicit sexual content, is desacralized and democratized on the socio-anthropological level - from medieval visio as revelatio, prerogative of a narrow religious élite, to the «insogno», the result of the collective fear of getting sick – and on the historical-literary one - from the two-thirteenth-century amorous visions to the Renaissance venereal nightmare, crossed by the materiality of the body. The comforting vein of dreamlike vision, typical of the Petrarchan poetry, is replaced, with lucid metaletterary awareness, by the soothing function of poetry itself, the only remedy to the pains of illness. The self-portrait of the dreamer ‘shattered’, is rendered, in both authors, by an anti-academic pronunciation that combines the tragedy of life and comic-burlesque essence.