“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.”

Was there an indigenous Gothic in nineteenth-century Italy, a local reworking of English (and perhaps Continental) forms and models’? This chapter addresses this much-debated issue by making a case for the clear presence of Gothic motifs and structures in several Italian novels, from Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827) (particularly in its earliest version, Fermo e Lucia, c. 1821–3) to Carlo Lorenzini’s Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883). The chapter discusses the contribution of the so-called ‘Scapigliati’ authors to the Italian Gothic and offers a survey of later writers from the verista and naturalista literary schools. Later in the century, Italian realist writers seem to veer into the realm of the supernatural. The chapter thus closes with looking at the anti-rationalist discourses that flourished at the close of the century, and at such hermeneutical modalities as spiritualism, mesmerism and occultism that became increasingly fashionable in the popular press. Vampire literature and the Italian legacy of German and English Gothic are also addressed, with references to, among others, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi and the national novelists of the first half of the century.