Carlo Maria Maggi

Carlo Maria Maggi was an Italian scholar, writer and poet. Despite being an Accademia della Crusca affiliate, he gained his fame as an author of "dialectal" works in Milanese language, for which he is considered the father of Milanese literature. Maggi's work was a major inspiration source for later Milanese scholars such as Carlo Porta and Giuseppe Parini.

Biography

A native of Milan, Carlo Maria Maggi came from a prominent mercantile family, wealthy enough to move in the higher echelons of Milanese society. He studied with the Jesuits at their Brera school in Milan. In 1649 Maggi graduated in law at the University of Bologna.
From 1656, after his marriage, he concentrated on his literary studies and poetry writing, and became a member of several of the literary academies populating Italy at the time, including the Crusca in Florence, the Faticosi in Milan, the Arcadia in Rome, the Intronati in Siena and the Olimpici in Vicenza.
Notwithstanding, or possibly because of, his busy literary activities, he was able during these years to cultivate the friendship of some of Milan's outstanding social, political and literary figures, such as Vitaliano Borromeo and Count Bartolomeo Arese, President of the Senate. The latter would help Maggi obtain the office of Secretary to the Senate, a position he was to hold for 38 years until his death.
Maggi also accepted a professorship of classics at the Palatine Schools in 1664, the same position which Parini was to take over a century later, and capped his academic achievements by becoming superintendent of the University of Pavia. A fine classicist, Maggi displayed his skills in his translations of ancient plays, both Latin and Greek.
Maggi was a close friend of Ludovico Antonio Muratori, who edited his Rime Varie in 4 vols. at Milan in 1700. A larger edition was published in 1708 at Venice in 6 vols., entitled Poesie Varie. Maggi had already published a single volume with the title Rime Varie at Turin and Florence in 1688. Finally there appeared a volume entitled Rime e Prose at Venice in 1719. His comedies, written between 1694 and 1699, were published posthumously in 1701.

Works

Although Maggi first gained a reputation as a librettist, most of his librettos were never published, and some were later disowned by the author and destroyed. His prominent works belong to the commedia dell'arte theatrical genre. Some of Maggi's most famous plays in Milanese are Il manco male, Il Barone di Birbanza, I consigli di Meneghino, Il falso filosofo, and Concorso de' Meneghini. This last work may be considered as a sort of manifesto of dialectal poetry, as it explicitly celebrates the virtues of the Milanese language: che apposta la pär fä / par dì la veritä. This equation between the Milanese language and sincerity is clearly embodied in the commedia character of Meneghino, which is supposedly Maggi's creation, and was later developed by other authors to eventually become a prominent symbol of Milan and the Milanese for antonomasia. Another recurring theme of Milanese literature first established by Maggi's works is the celebration of the verzee as the place where the spirit of the city was most genuinely expressed. In Maggi's theatre the servant characters have a monopoly of sententious and proverb-laden wisdom, which, consistent with the author’s declared pessimistic moralism, compensates for and neutralizes the caricatured social, economic and cultural corruption of the ruling-class characters.

Legacy

Maggi's work is a landmark in Milanese poetic production. Maggi definitively codifies the writing of Milanese dialect introducing French oeu, so founding the classical Milanese orthography that will be retouched in the centuries till the present version of Circolo Filologico Milanese. Several Milanese authors paid homage to him. Veneration for Maggi as the forefather of Lombard literature and reworkings of the Meneghino character as the embodiment of the Milanese man of the people run throughout the poetry of Domenico Balestrieri and especially Carlo Porta. A selection of Maggi's poems, translated into English by Mariana Starke, was published in London in 1811.

Works

Carlo Maria Maggi, Il Teatro milanese, a cura di D. Isella, I. Testi, traduzioni e note; II. Apparati critici e glossario, Torino, 1964.