“The linguistic history of Italian is an interesting case study for reflecting upon the concept of a standard language and its nature, diffusion and impact. Whereas in other European countries the process of linguistic standardization was predominantly related to political or religious factors, in Italy, in the absence of a unified country (until 1861) and of a commonly spoken language, the standardization of Italian was founded on literature. The elitist norm that prevailed was based on archaic literary models, notably on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, which raised long-lasting issues concerning the homogeneity/heterogeneity and rigidity/flexibility of the standard, as well as questions related to its share-ability and incisiveness. It is only from the twentieth century onwards, when the process of Italianization reached completion and Italian became the language of all Italians, that we can speak of the norm as an ‘average of individual realizations’; that is, as a norm that comes mainly from below. Certain phenomena previously considered ‘substandard’, many of which derive from a new relationship of give and take between written and spoken language, have finally been accepted, hence the configuration of a neo-standard which is at least partly different with respect to the ‘historical’ one.”

Though the practice of solo singing and improvising continued well past the 1530s, sea changes in the politics and poetics of the peninsula after the Sack of Rome make this a reasonable point at which to conclude the book. This section will briefly explain those changes and how they altered the status and nature of poetic performance. I will also pose questions and suggestions about the course of the practice in the sixteenth century in relation to the rise of the madrigal and opera, extraordinary developments that I believe cannot be fully understood without a more comprehensive view of vernacular poetic performance in Renaissance Italy. The epilogue is structured around the consideration of a number of dualities: elite and popular, oral and written, lyric and epic, poet and composer, nature and artifice.