The Poems of Geppe
I’d like to continue to speak about a tourist guide’s tools of the trade. The more you have filed away the better, therefore knowing something about literature and poetry can come in handy. Today, I’m going to talk about something a bit more particular, poetry written in the vernacular of Lucca. This is a difficult subject to broach with visitors, albeit Italian, because the regions of Italy have many different dialects, or perhaps it might be more appropriate to say, different languages. I was born in Milan, my mother’s surname was Bassetti, and when I was twelve, I had to change ‘language’ and become ‘Lucchese (1) ’ very quickly. I must admit that I haven’t been able to change the way I pronounce ‘s’ so when I say certain words, my northern Italian accent seeps through. However, my father,...
