Una traccia padovano-veneziana nella Cracovia degli inizi del XVI secolo

Three accounts in Polish whose fabula focuses on Paduan and Venetian realia were found by Stanisław Estreicher in the last part of a Latin juridical codex written in the 1520s. They are not translations and have no literary worth; however, they can be interesting from a sociological point of view. In this article, we point out, on the basis of what has already been established by Estreicher, the writing context in which these stories were written in the code. Estreicher hypothesised that the stories, on the basis of their spelling, had been written not by a Pole, but by a foreigner who knew the Polish language by ear. Estreicher also hypothesised, and not wrongly, that in the 1520s, the goldsmiths’ guild, which was at that time chaired by an Italian and an German, had come into possession of that code. A comparison with the spelling of other Polish-language texts written between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century, however, shows that many of the graphic solutions used were well attested at the time; amongst these was the singular spelling to mark the posterior nasal vowel. In any case, the writer who wrote those accounts made an effort to maintain some coherence in spelling. Despite such an effort, the general impression is that those short stories were written by a non–Polish speaker, rather than by a foreigner who resided and worked in Krakow. These accounts are certainly traces of the presence, in Krakow and Poland, of the numerous Venetians who had started thriving entrepreneurial activities in the Respublica Polono-Lituana.