Italiano e italianismi nella formazione della lingua letteraria romena moderna: appunti di metodo e prospettive di ricerca

The relations between Romanian and Italian languages have had a long and sinuous history, which begins with the first imported Italian words, already present in the Slavic-Romanian documents of the fifteenth century, and continues, we could say uninterrupted, till today. Within this long history of linguistic and cultural contacts, one of the most important was the literary Italianism of some great Romanian writers and intellectuals of the nineteenth century who, at the dawn of modern Romanian literature, welcomed and assimilated within their own work an extraordinary quantity of lexical, stylistic, rhetorical and formal elements of Italian origin, all these being the result of an intense translation and emulation practices. This phenomena of adopting Italian words or expressions in the Romanian literature contributed to the formation of the modern literary language, representing a part of a larger and more complex movement of modernization and westernization of Romance, which led, in fact, to the birth of the modern Romanian nation.