Abstract

The paper first examines the strategies of parody in Andrea Calmo's Pozione (1552), a rewrite of the celebrated Niccolò Machiavelli's Mandragola. The most interesting feature of this parody is its multilingual approach to the model: Mandragola's characters speak only Italian (Florentin), whereas Pozione's characters use also three northern Italian dialects (from Bergamo, Padua and Venice). The paper goes on providing a linguistic analysis of Bergamo's dialect in Potione and in two other important Calmo comedies, Rodiana and Travaglia: the aim is to outline the differences between Bergamo's dialect as used by Calmo and as used in the Commedia dell'Arte texts (XVI and XVII centuries), where we don't always find real dialect, but a sort of theatrical «lingua franca».