section_path: Culture/Literature
section_name: Literature
paragraph_text: Literature
  
  Formal Latin literature began in 240 BC, when the first stage play was performed in Rome. Latin literature was, and is, highly influential, with numerous writers, poets, philosophers, and historians, such as Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and Livy. The Romans were famous for their oral tradition, poetry, drama, and epigrams. In the early 13th century, Francis of Assisi was the first Italian poet, with his religious song Canticle of the Sun.
  
  At the court of Emperor Frederick II in Sicily, in the 13th century, lyrics modelled on Provençal forms and themes were written in a refined version of the local vernacular. One of these poets was Giacomo da Lentini, inventor of the sonnet form; the most famous early sonneteer was Petrarch.
  
  Guido Guinizelli is the founder of the Dolce Stil Novo, a school that added a philosophical dimension to love poetry. This new understanding of love, expressed in a smooth style, influenced the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, who established the basis of modern Italian. Dante's work, the Divine Comedy, is among the finest in literature. Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, sought and imitated the works of antiquity and cultivated their own artistic personalities. Petrarch achieved fame through his collection of poems, Il Canzoniere. Equally influential was Boccaccio's The Decameron, a very popular collection of short stories.
  
  Renaissance authors' works include: Niccolò Machiavelli 's The Prince, an essay on political science in which the "effectual truth" is taken to be more important than any abstract ideal. Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, who wrote The Facetious Nights of Straparola (1550–55) and the Pentamerone (1634), respectively, printed some of the first known versions of fairy tales in Europe. The Baroque period produced the clear scientific prose of Galileo. In the 17th century, the Arcadians began a movement to restore simplicity and classical restraint to poetry.
  
  Italian writers embraced Romanticism in the 19th century, it coincided with ideas of the Risorgimento, the movement that brought Italian unification. Unification was heralded by the poets Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, and Giacomo Leopardi. Works by Alessandro Manzoni, the leading Italian Romantic, are a symbol of Italian unification for their patriotic message and because of his efforts in the development of modern, unified Italian.
  
  In the late 19th century, a literary movement called Verismo, which extolled realism, played a major role in Italian literature. Emilio Salgari, a writer of action-adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction, published his Sandokan series. In 1883, Carlo Collodi published The Adventures of Pinocchio, which became the most celebrated children's classic by an Italian author and one of the world's most translated non-religious books. A movement called Futurism influenced literature in the early 20th century. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote Manifesto of Futurism and called for the use of language and metaphors that glorified the speed, dynamism, and violence of the machine age.
  
  Modern literary figures and Nobel laureates are Gabriele D'Annunzio, nationalist poet Giosuè Carducci 1906 Nobel laureate, realist writer Grazia Deledda 1926 laureate, modern theatre author Luigi Pirandello in 1936, short story writer Italo Calvino in 1960, poets Salvatore Quasimodo in 1959 and Eugenio Montale in 1975, Umberto Eco in 1980, and satirist and theatre author Dario Fo in 1997.