Extemporaneous Oral Poetry in Central Italy

A TRADITION of improvized oral poetry is still relatively widespread in the rural areas of the Tyrrenic side of Central Italy.' This tradition, not very well documented in the specialized literature, is based on the metre of the classic Italian chivalric epic poems, an eight-line stanza called the ottava rima ('octave rhyme'), as a canvas for improvizing poetry, in what is usually referred to as canto a poeta or canto a braccio ('song by the poet' or 'by the arm').2 Extemporaneous poetic creation usually takes the form of a match between two poets set against each other, the contrasto a braccio ('contrast by the arm'), which might be performed in private, in rather rough wine inns called osterie, or in public, during the gara poetica, a true 'poetic contest,' where a dozen or so poets, convened from neighbouring villages, display their skills in front of a jury and an often numerous public. These contests are held in local halls or on a podium in the main square, as part of a feast or celebration of some kind, and they are very successful events, even if their complex and lengthy procedure would be at first quite impenetrable for an outsider. The octave used to be the dominant form of classical Italian epic poetry from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, and there is an immediate commonsense connection between the 'golden age' of the octave and what is observed today as little more than a relic. This connection is proudly underlined by contemporary poets, who seem to ignore almost all developments of Italian poetry posterior to the Late Renaissance or Early Baroque, but it is clearly contradicted by the changes which the octave underwent from the Renaissance courts to contemporary folk usage, that is a dramatic 'fall' in expressive potential as well as in sociological connotations. Today's practitioners of the octave tradition are usually peasant farmers, shepherds, bricklayers and labourers, craftsmen, artisans and peddlars, with little or no school education and a type of literacy rather in a class of its own. These poeti a braccio ('poets by the arm'), usually one per village, sometimes more, are generally considered to be minor local personalities, at once admired and mocked for their uncommon wits, their rhyming skills and their extraordinary mnemonic faculties, which allow most of them to retain by heart thousands of verses. For each of these poets, with a few exceptions, the performance in a public tournament is the goal of a lifetime's passion, which involves extensive study of the classical sources, contacts with other poets, oral exercise and written composition. Therefore, the poetry in octave produced in the contests can be considered as the tip of an iceberg of poetic tradition, both written and oral, so that extemporaneous oral poetry and classical written sources can be said to be the two ends

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