[METASTASIO, Pietro, and Alessandro BARBOSI (translator).] Avviso strasordinario de una cummedia de tre atti che se chiama gnente de meno che la Didona der Metastazzio gran poeta romano.

Dido in Dialect

[METASTASIO, Pietro, and Alessandro BARBOSI (translator).] Avviso strasordinario de una cummedia de tre atti che se chiama gnente de meno che la Didona der Metastazzio gran poeta romano. Rome: 'A la Stamparia ar Curso n. 336'. 1838.

8vo. In the publisher’s printed self-wrappers, title within typographic border, woodcut angel within typographic border to rear cover, upper cover lettered ‘Treato Palaccorda Carnoval 1838’; slight foxing to title; small marginal paperflaws to 2 ff., variable marginal spotting to last 5 ff.; else very well preserved.

First edition, extremely rare, of this lively programme in Romanesco, or Roman dialect, issued for the 3 February 1838 Carnival performance of La Didona, an adaptation in Romanesco of Metastasio’s 1724 Didone abbandonata.

The opera is thought to have been translated into Romanesco by the poet and abbot Alessandro Barbosi. This anonymously authored programme, advertising the opera as being in the ‘Roman language of Trastevere’ (trans.), was to be distributed at the box office (‘dar buteghino de la cummedia’) at Rome’s Teatro della Pallacorda on the night of the opera, staged back-to-back with a prequel by Luigi Randanini, Un teatro drento na casa ciovè er provemio de la commedia, also in Romanesco.

Our programme, which encourages viewers to attend both showings if they can, provides an engaging and colloquial summary of the context of the play, glowing reviews of the set design, and a blow-by-blow account of the plot.

‘So, you want me to give you the long and short of it, without going on and on? He, the man who wrote [Didone abbandonata], did everything to inspire anyone who goes to see it. Sound good? The clothes are just like the ones they wore a thousand years ago. The scenery is all made of medium-thick Frabbiano [i.e. Fabbriano] paper made of white rags, all painted on the spot … by a painter so gifted that even the sun appears as it would in real life’ (p. 8, trans.), and the prop weapons gleam like silver.

The summary is deliberately kept light in tone and brief so that it can be ‘better understood by those who – poor things! – are not especially literate and cannot read a story as old as this one detail by detail’ (p. 9, trans.).

The Avviso is not only a significant resource with regard to nineteenth-century Roman dialect, but also provides insights into the use of plays and operas in Romanesco as a means of ‘making the classical repertoire known to a wider audience. [The Avviso] is a true translation. It is neither a pure intellectual exercise in and of itself, nor an adaptation, a parody, or worse, an irreverent remake. With the exception of a few adjustments designed to justify space–time collocations inevitably connoted by the dialect, the fidelity to the original text is absolute, and the care is such that the work’s dramatic impact is in no way taken away, altered, or diminished’ (Barboni, p. 118).

The Teatro Pallacorda, famous for staging plays and operas in Romaneseco, was renamed Teatro Metastasio in 1841, closed during the First World War, and was demolished in 1936; it was formerly a tennis court, thought to be the site at which Caravaggio murdered Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606, prompting his flight from Rome. The libretto of Barbosi’s Didona would not be published until 1851, without the author’s name and with commentary by Filippo Tacconi.

No copies traced in the US or the UK; not on Library Hub. OPAC SBN (attributing authorship to Gaspare Randanini) finds a single copy, at the Biblioteca comunale Mozzi-Borgetti in Macerata. Ludovisi traces another, at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma.

See Biancini, ‘Didone o Didona: un successo nel tempo’, in Acquaro and Ferari eds, I Fenici: L’Oriente in Occidente (2004); Ludovisi, ‘L’Avviso strasordinario e il Bollettone: studio linguistico con un’ipotesi attributiva’, in Vox Romanica 82 (2023), pp. 75–101.

SKU: 2123996