Abstract

This paper investigates Francesco Corazzinis’s Saggio di restaurazione degli antichi poeti siciliani (1871), a linguistic reconstruction of three poems written by poets of the Sicilian School, and Una quistione su la storia della lingua (1875), the Author’s ample response to the main criticisms that were moved against the Saggio followed by a new “restitutionµ of the same texts. The Saggio was one of the earliest exemples of dialectological studies in Italy and Corazzini is the first scholar to suggest that the imperfect rhymes that are present in those poems are perfectible by applying the sicilian vowel system. The present study aims to illustrate the circumstances that led to the publication of the Saggio and to the following debate, as well as to present the text of the two “restitutionsµ provided with a linguistic analysis