‘Fictio’ and Reality in the Baroque Lyric Poetry. The Connection Between Chronicle and Poetry in the XVIIth Century Naples

Abstract

The article aims to shed light on disasters’ baroque poetry of Southern Italy. It compares the compositional structure and the language of three printed ‘reports’ on the Vesuvius eruption in 1631 (written by Cesare Braccini and Vincenzo Bove) with the ode Al Vesuvio per l’incendio rinovato by Girolamo Fontanella. Its purpose is to show the similarity between prose and poetry in describing the volcano’s action on the surrounding environment (identical narrative sequences, similar lexicon and the use of stereotyped figures), plus, to address the issue of a poetic witness. Besides an accurate analysis of the texts, the introduction of the Aristotelian theories on poetry, and contemporary baroque Poetics (as Giulio Cesare Cortese’s and Tommaso Campanella’s), will lead to a discourse on mimesis and verysimilitude. Moreover, it will be also useful for a clear interpretation of a kind of lyric poetry which seems to deal with the category of ‘reality’ more than that of ‘fictionality’.