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Looking at this scene, an expert on Latin and Greek
will remember immediately Teocrito’s and Virgilio’s famous
name; above all the he will remember, among school memories, the
first verse of Virgilio’s first bucolic “Tětyre, tů
patulač recubŕns sub tčgmine fŕgi”. He will remember
Virgilio lived in Naples and was buried there, near the entrance
of the cave which took to Pozzuoli ; then if he has read the
great philologist Domenico Comparetti’s book “Virgilio in
the Middle Age”, he will remember all the legends told in
Naples on this great poet who was also the most erudite among
learned people of his time and expert in magic arts. The expert
on Latin and Greek will link the famous fourth bucolic, which
speaks about the coming of a new area joined to the birth of a
child, to the other ones that speak about a pastoral world, in
which man will live in harmony with nature. If he is Neapolitan,
not only for birth, but also for deep sensibility, he will
surely remember Iacopo Sannazzaro, a Renaissance poet, who wrote
the Arcadia and
the De part Virginis (a poem on the Virgin Mary’s
childbirth), as if the Baby Jesus’s birth was inseparably
linked to the shepherds’world. Sannazzaro made a church build
on the rocky mountain, which overhung the sea of Margellina. He
wanted to dedicate it to the “Vergine Partoriente”. Sannazzaro
was buried behind the great altar of the church of “Santa
Maria del Parto”. In this church there is also an artistic
wooden crib that shows traveller what, together the Virgilian
poetry, charmed him mostly: Baby Jesus’s birth.
But
dear Reader, if you are patient, I will still speak to you about
it in the next numbers.
Maybe you will ask me: “Who doesn’t understand what you have
told?”
But I tell you, with a little regret, maybe Sannazaro’s joy in
front of Baby Jesus’s image is purer and truer; it is the same
joy that I felt at Christmas Eve when, unaware of
wisdom and poetry, the sparks that I made shine, under my
father’s gaze, in front of Baby Jesus’s image were enough to
make me happy. But the unawareness is a condition not a choice:
and now knowledge is a duty. We will continue our analysis,
aware that with the rational investigation there is the risk of
profanation.
(to be
continued)
Italo Sarcone Naples, 13th June 2002-06-24
In die festo Beati Antonii de Padua, Doctoris Ecclesiae
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